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We’reTexas

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by We’reTexas

  1. 58 minutes ago, texasdago said:

    I also think CA wines tend to have higher alcohol content.  I'm always baffled by the frequency of 14.5 or 15% wines!?  

    Well, the climate is warmer, but it’s mostly a generational thing from the Robert Parker era. All the cool kids are much lower these days. 

  2. 51 minutes ago, BurntEyes said:

    I spent 20+ years in West Campus and SOC. I lived in River North Chicago for 11. The comparison of day to day living between River North and downtown Austin is really night and day. While I could make a cold hike in winter to a Whole Foods in 15 or a 5 minute bike ride I could hit 3 other full grocery stores of 2 different companies, 4 CVS/Walgreens, 2-3 Royal blues found in downtown Austin in less time. There was a barber and non-starbucks coffee shop in my building, a 7-11 and 2 different dry cleaners less than 50 yards away. If I drove more than 90 miles for work, my company allowed me to rent a car, I say that because despite driving to meeting in the burb frequently, I drove less than 10k miles in 11 years. In the city I NEVER drove. Going outside downtown, took the L, going to my buddies house in Wisconsin, train (sub $10). 

    As for food and bars...hah!! No man, not close. Even though Austin is a tourist town. Dive bar, Irish Bar, Club or pool hall, 10 minutes to walk to many options. 

    It really is foolish to compare downtown Austin to River North or the Financial district in NYC. Just foolish. For the record my brother lived in Jersey City, there was a water taxi into the Finacial district, which of the areas in Manhattan is among the least livable, IMO. 

    Cool? I, too, lived in other major American cities before living off west 6th in the early 2010s and had a blast all things considered, though it was a far cry from DC and NYC. My argument was that Austin’s downtown development was, and IMO still is, a good example of the downtown revitalization to diversify from commercial use that occurred in many cities beginning in the 2000s. Some cities failed to do this; San Francisco in particular, and I see the contrast every time I come back to Austin. 

  3. 5 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

    No, but I can see how you might mistakenly pull that out of what I wrote.   There are many things missing from downtown Austin to make it a place people might actually want to live.  Most of these things are commercial and not government-owned or funded: Grocery, retail, etc., not to mention housing that attracts actual residents and not investors alone.  Building more condos for absolutely no one to live in is fucking stupid and benefits no one locally at all.  I also have seen no noticeable reduction in my local taxes since the building of all of these condos, have you?  Or are you a suburbanite with no actual skin in the game?  The city loves all that extra revenue, I guess so they can build more bike lanes for all those folks who don't live downtown to never use, but they sure as fuck aren't using it to offset what they charge the rest of us.  I might actually get behind that scenario.

    Texas cities are some of the slowest in America to recover from white flight, in part because our state government ensures that white evangelicals in the burbs are made as comfortable as possible. Given how quickly our population is growing, we're going to have to get over it, and soon.

    I guess I still don’t understand what your argument is, besides some generalized aversion to condos. Downtown Austin has been a pretty impressive case of 2000’s mixed-use residential development, along the lines of River North in Chicago, Financial District in NYC, Little Italy in San Diego, etc, that relies on a demographic that seeks to be close to work, entertainment and public amenities such as parks and has a lesser reliance on cars: affluent singles/DINKs and downsizing empty nesters. Pied-à-terres can be annoying, I suppose, but they come with the territory. All of these neighborhood relied on luxury condos for residential development. You can of course argue Austin lags behind peer cities in some respects but it’s a little hyperbolic to suggest it’s a grocery and retail dead zone. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  4. 24 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

    Does anyone have evidence that a significant number of people live in those downtown condos?  I'm talking about human beings, not trust fund babies partying on daddy's dime, but actual functional working adults who contribute to our local economy and community and have a primary residence downtown?   We've got some friends who work downtown and have a condo for when they work late and don't want to drive home to the hill country, but I'm not counting that either.  I've lived in the downtown area of a number of major cities, within America and outside of it.  The downtown area is a genuine center of the city in these places, with jobs and the necessities of daily life (laundromats, grocery stores, hardware stores, etc.)   Like KaiserSoze, I used to live just across the river off Congress, but it was at a time when no one lived downtown at all (in the olden times before the birth of the highrises).    As far as residents go, it was a dead zone then, and it still feels like one now.  My wife worked downtown at the time and we liked that she could bike to work, but she seemed like the only one doing it.  We had to drive to actually run any basic errands at all.  Nothing about downtown Austin today seems attractive for a permanent residence unless you're a young person with disposable income, no responsibilities, and enjoy partying at nightclubs. South of the river is a slightly different story, of course. 

    Are these condos being built for anything more than vehicles for money laundering?   I appreciate the notion of a livable downtown and think it's a great thing. I just don't see any evidence that we have one in this city.   We have built many residences but have done little else to make downtown an attractive place to live.  The jobs aren't even there in significant numbers.  Building more condos doesn't seem like a solution to anything other than satisfying more developers, short-term rental investors, and foreign money launderers.  More investment in things like the library appeals to me much more.  Make downtown a place people actually want to live, then build the condos.  We've put the cart way before the horse, and I don't see a single benefit to Austin residents and taxpayers.

    What US downtown meets your vision of “livable”, out of curiosity?

  5. Bleak reading from the New Yorker

    Quote

    Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity began, according to legend, with a Facebook post. In the fall of 2013, after President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of a deal that would have deepened the country’s relationship with the European Union, the investigative journalist Mustafa Nayyem wrote a post calling on people to gather in Independence Square, in the center of Kyiv. After three months of continuous protests, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ten years later, Independence Square is desolate most days. Kyiv has imposed a midnight curfew. Martial law, in effect since February, 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, forbids mass gatherings. As for Nayyem, he is now the head of the federal agency for reconstruction, which is attempting to rebuild the country as quickly as the Russians are devastating it. On the tenth anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity, this past November, instead of speaking at a rally, Nayyem was scheduled to preside over a different sort of ceremony: the reopening of a bridge that connects Kyiv to the western suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, where, in the first weeks of the war, some of the worst atrocities committed by Russian forces took place.

    A few days before the unveiling, I talked with Nayyem in his office. The reconstruction agency occupies part of a stolid late-Soviet government building. Nayyem’s suite looks as though it was renovated ambitiously but on a budget, with vertical blinds, plastic panelling, and vinyl knockoffs of Le Corbusier couches in the waiting area. On the walls he had hung giant prints of the famous “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph and a panoramic view of Manhattan. “New York is my favorite city,” he explained. “And this is as close as I’m going to get to it in the foreseeable future.”


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    Nayyem was born in Kabul in 1981, the second year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His mother died three years later, after giving birth to his brother, Masi. When Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, in 1989, Nayyem’s father, a former government official, moved to Moscow. Two years later, after marrying a Ukrainian woman, he moved the family to Kyiv. Nayyem rose to prominence in his twenties as a crusading journalist, uncovering stories of top-level government graft in Ukraine. Following the Revolution of Dignity, he served in parliament and played a key role in reforming Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt and violent police force. Before accepting his current job, he was a deputy minister for infrastructure.

    The government launched the reconstruction agency last January, with the announcement that eighteen apartment buildings would be restored in Irpin, where an estimated seventy per cent of the civilian infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed. “We are all in a rush to give people hope,” Nayyem told me. “But that obscures the fact that we are a country at war. Our only real goal is to survive.” He was about to leave for a gruelling trip, travelling by car to the southern port city of Odesa to look at the damage sustained in recent attacks, and then to liberated territories in the southeast to begin a pilot project in which an entire village is being rebuilt. “You go to Kharkiv and realize that a bridge that’s been blown up means it takes three extra hours to get from one point to another,” Nayyem said. “That can mean the difference between life and death.”

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    Nayyem’s brother, Masi, was injured in combat early in the war, and brought to a hospital in critical condition. The car carrying him travelled over a stretch of highway that was later damaged. It has since been repaired by Nayyem’s agency. “We have to rebuild even if it’s going to be destroyed again,” he said. “We have no choice.” It’s building for the present, not for the future.

    A new saying had taken hold in Ukraine: “None of us is coming back from this war.” People may emigrate or relocate, but the war is here to stay. The saying has a literal meaning, too: of the hundreds of thousands of people who enlisted in the early days of the invasion, only the most severely injured have been granted a discharge. In October, about a hundred protesters defied martial law and gathered in Kyiv to demand a limit on the amount of time a person can be expected to serve. The exact number of people currently on military duty, like the number of casualties and target numbers for conscription, is secret. In August, President Volodymyr Zelensky had fired the heads of all the regional draft offices, so pervasive was corruption in the system—and so high, apparently, the desire to buy one’s way out of being conscripted. Nevertheless, officials continue to hand out draft notices. In December, it emerged that the ministry of defense was working on a plan to start drafting Ukrainians living abroad.

    Until a few months ago, everyone in Ukraine seemed to know how the war would end: Ukraine would liberate its territory, including Crimea, and this, it was assumed, would burst the Russian propaganda bubble and bring about the collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime. But then the long-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive, which began last spring, failed to achieve any meaningful breakthroughs. Russia still holds about twenty per cent of what was previously Ukrainian territory. Now, when I asked Nayyem about the end of the war, he said, “I’m afraid to think about it.” He went on, “I don’t know what it would mean for the war to be over. I think that in my lifetime there will not be a time when I won’t fear that war may start again any minute. Because Russia is not going anywhere.”

    I heard similar notes of weariness from countless others. “What are we fighting for—land?” Katerina Sergatskova, a prominent journalist who started a safety-training program for members of the media, told me. “We say that we’ll keep fighting until the Russian empire falls apart. But it’s not going to fall apart.” Denys Kobzin, a sociologist from Kharkiv who is on active military duty, told me that, before the war, he used to attend classes on how to live in the moment. “Now I’ve spent almost two years living entirely in the present,” he said. “It eats up all your energy. You can’t dream, you can’t immerse yourself in memories, you are always a little bit ‘on.’ This life of total uncertainty—it’s like you went out for a run but you don’t know how far you are running. Sometimes you have to speed up, but mostly you just need to keep breathing.”

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    In November, the former nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who had long tried to help bring about peace negotiations, suggested that nato might accept a Ukraine that didn’t include the territories currently occupied by Russia. Such an arrangement could effectively turn the front line into a border and end the fighting without opening negotiations with the Russians. Nayyem thought the suggestion was reasonable—after all, following the Second World War, West Germany became a nato member while the East was still occupied by the Soviet Union. “You know what was good about the Second World War?” Nayyem asked wistfully. “It ended!”

    Cartoon by Amy Kurzweil

    As it turned out, Nayyem’s unveiling ceremony was overshadowed by a different news story. Andriy Odarchenko, a parliament member from Zelensky’s party, was detained for allegedly attempting to bribe Nayyem. According to prosecutors, Odarchenko had offered Nayyem an incentive to channel reconstruction funds to a university in Kharkiv that Odarchenko had been selected to head. Nayyem had alerted anti-corruption authorities, who set up a sting. Once it appeared that Odarchenko had secured the funding, Nayyem received about ten thousand dollars in bitcoin as a kickback. Odarchenko was arrested minutes before a scheduled meeting of the parliament’s anti-corruption committee, of which he was a member. (He has pleaded innocent.)

    Such was the state of Ukraine as it entered its third consecutive winter at war: still battling the demon of corruption, still defiant, yet visibly reduced, palpably tired. Nayyem feared that, if the war went on long enough, Ukraine would become more like Russia: autocratic, corrupt, nihilistic. “Russia is Russia because Russia is ‘fighting Nazis,’ ” he said, referring to Putin’s false pretense for the war. “And we risk becoming Russia because we are actually fighting Nazis.”

    It is a commonplace to say that Ukraine is waging a war not only for its survival but for the future of democracy in Europe and beyond. In the meantime, in Ukraine, democracy is largely suspended. According to the regular order of things, Ukraine should have a Presidential election in March. Up until the end of November—a few weeks before the deadline for scheduling the election—Zelensky’s office seemed open to having one, but ultimately decided against it. “We shouldn’t have elections, because elections always create disunity,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defense minister who now advises the government, told me. “We need to be unified.”

    An estimated four to six million Ukrainians are living under Russian occupation. At least four million are living in E.U. countries, a million more are living in Russia, and at least half a million are living elsewhere outside of Ukraine. Another four million have been internally displaced. These figures include a significant number of people who became adults after the war began and aren’t registered to vote. “Elections are a public discussion,” Oleksandra Romantsova, the executive director of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, told me. “But a third of the population is connected with the military. Another third is displaced.” With so many people excluded from the public discussion, what would an election even mean? There is also a more practical problem, Romantsova said: “Elections cause people to congregate,” and, when Ukrainians congregate, Russia bombs them.

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    The current government was never meant to last. Zelensky, a former comedian who starred in a sitcom about a schoolteacher who guilelessly rides a wave of anti-establishment sentiment into the office of the President, was elected at a moment when Ukrainians wanted someone, perhaps anyone, who was not a career politician. He promised to serve for just one term. During the parliamentary election that followed Zelensky’s inauguration, in 2019, his Servant of the People Party allowed only first-time candidates to run on its ticket. “New faces only” was the slogan. The party secured two hundred and fifty-four seats out of four hundred and fifty. Now, with elections postponed indefinitely, Zelensky and the generation of people he brought into politics are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.

    At the start of the war, when Russia was bombing Kyiv daily, the parliament had to consider the risks of continuing to hold meetings in its building, which has a glass roof. It decided to do so, but to vote only on bills that a majority wanted to bring to the floor, and to limit discussion of amendments. This effectively shifted the center of legislative work to the President’s office. Among other bills, the parliament approved the declaration of martial law, introduced by Zelensky on the first day of the war, and has regularly renewed it. Martial law enables the cabinet of ministers to control who can enter and leave the country—since the start of the war, men under the age of sixty have been forbidden to leave—and to regulate the work of all media outlets, printing presses, and distribution companies.

    Zelensky’s office created the United News TV Marathon, a round-the-clock program of war-related news and talk shows, supplanting what had been a vibrant and varied television news market. The segments appear on six of Ukraine’s major channels and, at any given time, all of them are showing the same thing. Despite its name, United Marathon was clearly designed to be a sprint. In the early months of the war, the programming had a sense of urgency, of novelty and shock. Now even the worst days—when Russia fires a barrage of rockets that kill civilians across the country—are like all the other terrible days, when people are killed in the same way, in more or less the same places. There is little to analyze anymore. “The one thing all Ukrainians agree on is that we need an end to the Marathon,” Romantsova told me.

    Other government-controlled media target an international audience. Gleb Gusev, a forty-four-year-old with a shaved head and a trimmed beard, used to run Babel, a highbrow news site. After the invasion, he decided to join the war effort. As part of a forty-person team, he makes social-media videos for United24 Media, a Zelensky initiative aimed at popularizing the Ukrainian government’s messages for the English-speaking world. “Putting it harshly, it’s propaganda,” Gusev told me over coffee at a fashionably folksy café and gallery called Avangarden. “Putting it mildly, it’s advertising. Our job is to illustrate whatever message the government wants to convey.”

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    During the summer, Gusev’s team promoted Kyiv’s vision for a victorious postwar Ukraine. “But then the counter-offensive fizzled and we switched gears,” he told me in November. The focus shifted to the woes of importers and exporters, and then to human-interest stories about people affected by the war. United24’s YouTube channel has more than nine hundred thousand subscribers; another three hundred and forty thousand follow its Instagram account. “My journalistic instincts rebel,” Gusev told me. “But then I think, This work can make a difference.”

    Martial law has effectively stalled and even reversed some of the most important democratic reforms adopted after the Revolution of Dignity: decentralization and the creation of elected governments that control local budgets. In cities and villages where elected mayors have disappeared, resigned, or been driven out—or, as in the case of Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine, been accused of misusing funds and suspended by a court—military administrations have stepped in. (In Chernihiv, the national parliament ultimately intervened on behalf of the civilian government.) The result is a patchwork of governmental authority that varies from region to region and town to town. In November, after months of conflict between military authorities and community councils to control income taxes paid by military personnel, Zelensky signed a law diverting that money into the military budget.

    Oleksandr Solontay, a political organizer and a former elected official who has fought efforts to replace civilian rule with military administrations, has questioned whether he should continue his work. “If we are not fighting for democracy, then what are we fighting for?” Solontay told me. At the same time, he went on, Russia is “trying to erase us as a nation. So we have to ask whether we can keep talking about democracy when our very survival as a people is in question. Maybe we shouldn’t be wasting our time on issues like inclusion or the rights of minorities, on all the things that make us different from one another. Maybe we should just send everyone to the Army.”

    For Zelensky, the autumn began badly and ended worse. He and his people have spent most of the war barricaded in the building of the Presidential administration, on Bankova Street in Kyiv. The block is surrounded by military checkpoints. The building itself is mostly dark. Pleated drapes are drawn over stacks of sandbags that cover the windows. In October, a profile in Time portrayed Zelensky as exhausted and increasingly isolated, his administration demoralized by a dawning understanding that the war was unwinnable.

    Two days later, The Economist published a column by the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, outlining what it would take for Ukraine to break out of a prolonged war: advanced airpower, more sophisticated equipment, and a better system for drafting and training fighters. In an accompanying interview, Zaluzhny acknowledged that the expectations that he and the Ukrainian public—and, he implied, nato—had had for the Ukrainian counter-offensive had been inflated. The subhead read, “General Valery Zaluzhny admits the war is at a stalemate.”

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    Zelensky and Zaluzhny are the most popular men in Ukraine. Surveys show that more people trust the military, and Zaluzhny personally, than Zelensky. An open disagreement between them could destabilize the government and the country. So the administration closed ranks. When I met with Zagorodnyuk, the government adviser, in November, he told me that The Economist had misinterpreted Zaluzhny’s statements. “A stalemate is when no one can move,” he said. “We are always moving back and forth. What we have is equilibrium.” Zelensky, when asked about Zaluzhny’s grim assessment, had only halfheartedly contradicted his commander, saying that it wasn’t a stalemate. And, in any case, Ukraine had no choice but to keep fighting: “If we give away a third of our country, nothing will end.”

    In September, Zelensky had travelled to Washington, where, earlier in the war, he had received a hero’s welcome—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had compared him to Winston Churchill, and Congress had approved nearly forty-five billion dollars in aid. This time, Zelensky was not invited to speak before Congress, where additional funding for Ukraine had stalled. In November, Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, went to Washington, but he, too, returned empty-handed. Outside the administration, there was some annoyance. “What is he doing in Washington?” Oleh Rybachuk, a politician who once held Yermak’s job, asked. “Why are we sending some clerk instead of the foreign minister?”

    Meanwhile, even the aid that the United States and other Western countries had previously promised often arrived late or not at all. And some of the military equipment that had been delivered was proving to have a short shelf life. It was old, manufactured before Zelensky was born. When it did arrive in working condition, it would frequently prove unreliable. “It’s like if you take a fifty-year-old car, in pristine condition, out of the garage and start using it on your long daily commute,” Serhiy Leshchenko, an adviser to the administration, told me. “Something will crack.”

    Leshchenko had just returned from the front line in the Donbas, where he had delivered thirteen Mavic drones. Everyone in Kyiv seemed to talk about nothing but drones. The faith and hope that Ukrainians and their Western supporters once had in themselves, in their fighting spirit and their Army’s tactical acumen, they now put in drones. An acquaintance who joined the military on the second day of the war had been flying drones; a journalist friend who had recently enlisted was enrolled in drone-operator school. At the Kyiv train station, as I was about to leave Ukraine, I ran into a group of Americans who said they were visiting the country on behalf of an American billionaire who wants to launch a drone production line in Ukraine.

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    A five-hundred-dollar drone can destroy a million-dollar tank or armored personnel carrier and increase human casualties by forcing troops to revert to doing things, such as demining, without the aid of valuable equipment. “It’s a technological revolution,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “It’s, like, there used to be the circus, and then Cirque du Soleil came along and changed the nature of the circus forever.” Ukraine had been flying drones from the early days of the war. Most of them were small, and had been crowdfunded in the West and brought in by volunteers a few at a time. The Russians were late to the technology, but they appear to have set up production at scale while the Ukrainians were preparing, interminably, for their counter-offensive. Now the Ukrainians were scrambling to catch up.

    “When two people love each other very much, they start sending each other funny TikTok videos.”Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

    In early December, Ukraine stopped its former President Petro Poroshenko from leaving the country. Security forces suspected him of planning to meet with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, a longtime ally of Russia, saying that such a meeting “could be exploited.” Days earlier, Zelensky had said that Russia was trying to orchestrate a palace coup against him. Poroshenko, who had criticized Zelensky’s handling of Ukraine’s relationship with the West, claimed to be travelling abroad to help in the effort to secure aid from Europe, and denied planning to meet with Orbán. A couple of weeks later, Hungary blocked the E.U. from passing a fifty-billion-euro aid package to Ukraine. By then, Zelensky had flown back to Washington, in an eleventh-hour attempt to dislodge U.S. aid for Ukraine, but the mission failed.

    In the final days of 2023, Russia unleashed a barrage of rocket and drone attacks on residential neighborhoods in cities across the country, killing dozens of civilians and causing wide-scale destruction in ways that were reminiscent of the early weeks of the war. People inside the Zelensky administration, after almost two years of publicly proclaiming the impossibility of negotiations, had begun saying that Russia was refusing to come to the table. Unlike Ukraine, whose main objective remains the liberation of occupied territories, Russia is now invested in war itself—military advances are secondary to the goal of keeping its war economy and propaganda machine churning. “This war is not going to end with negotiations,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “Why would Putin want to negotiate?” With the Ukrainian counter-offensive failing and Western consensus cracking, time was on Putin’s side.

    In December, the Times reported that the Kremlin was putting out feelers for a possible ceasefire, but addressing only American and Western officials, without negotiating directly with Kyiv. A representative from Yermak’s office suggested that these overtures were “signals” designed for Western audiences. “They are either informational operations of Russian special services or unconfirmed rumors discredited by powerful missile strikes on Ukrainian cities,” the representative said. “Claims about Russia’s readiness for negotiations are an unfounded disregard for reality.” Ukrainian officials now see any negotiated settlement as an opportunity for Russia to regroup and resume the fighting, again and again. “Russia is not fighting for land,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, told me. “It is fighting for its right to live in the past.”

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    Five months before the Russian invasion, in September, 2021, I saw Zelensky speak at an annual political conference organized by the Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. The event, held at Kyiv’s national art museum, was a lavish, performatively progressive affair. Pinchuk brought in prominent Western journalists, including Fareed Zakaria, of CNN, and Rana Foroohar, of the Financial Times, to moderate panels. Attendees included the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who happens to be Pinchuk’s father-in-law. There were elaborate lunches and dinners, all vegetarian; cookies came in individual packaging, which noted that they were prepared by adolescents with special needs.

    Zelensky, who had then been in office for two and a half years, appeared onstage with Stephen Sackur, the combative host of the BBC’s “hardtalk.” Zelensky’s popularity rating was a fraction of what it had been at the start of his term. When Sackur asked him a question about the fight against corruption, Zelensky seemed to grow agitated. “I don’t like the spirit in which you ask your questions,” he said. Zelensky accused Sackur of perpetuating a “caricature view” of Ukraine that ignored its achievements, including recent judicial reforms and the creation of a high-tech industry that, he claimed, made Ukraine “the digital capital of Europe.” As Zelensky walked to his car, a journalist asked him whether he planned to seek reëlection. At the time, it was apparent that, for Zelensky to make good on his commitment to address Ukraine’s corruption problems, he would have to break his promise to be a one-term President. Zelensky told the journalist that he’d prefer to finish what he started and go on vacation.

    After the Soviet Union broke apart, between 1989 and 1991, more than a dozen states tried to reconstitute themselves out of a unique kind of rubble: vast bureaucracies, command economies, and corrupt networks that made the systems function in spite of themselves. The Hungarian political scientists Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics have written that the resulting regimes fall into three categories: liberal democracies, such as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; patronal autocracies, such as Russia and Belarus; and patronal democracies, such as Ukraine. A patronal democracy has a plurality of political actors—if an autocracy, in Magyar and Madlovics’s definition, is a “single-pyramid system,” then a democracy is “multi-pyramid”—but the competing political networks are each beholden to the money and power wielded by one person, generally a man, who has positioned himself as a successor to a part of the Soviet state’s bureaucracy. Magyar and Madlovics have termed these networks “stubborn structures.”

    Part of the problem with patronal democracies is that the patrons are also the pillars of the political system. “I call Ukrainian reforms ‘kick-ass reforms,’ ” Rybachuk, the longtime politician, told me. “You kick some ass, reforms move forward a little bit, you kick some more ass, they move forward some more.” But today, when the West demands such reforms of Ukraine—a country that has borne unspeakable losses in its fight for democracy—it can feel painfully unfair. “It’s difficult to build anti-corruption mechanisms in the middle of a war,” Mustafa Nayyem told me. “Corruption levels decrease when there is less money. There is a lot of money in war.” He pointed out that Western law-enforcement agencies still hadn’t devised a method for seizing Russian assets abroad and diverting them to Ukraine as real-time reparations. “So,” Nayyem said, “you are telling me that you don’t have the resources to seize assets on your territory, in London or New York? And we are supposed to have the resources to arrest people engaging in corruption?”

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    Before the war, Zelensky signed an ambitious law that aimed to shield Ukraine’s politics from the super-rich. The law created a registry of oligarchs who would be banned from financing the activities of political parties and from bidding for government assets at large-scale privatization auctions. Mikhail Minakov, a Ukrainian political philosopher, has written that the war helped accelerate what has been called de-oligarchization, both by strengthening the Presidency and by costing the oligarchs parts of their fortunes. Now that the oligarchs were weakened, Minakov wrote in early 2023, the question was what would replace the patronal-democracy system: a liberal-democratic framework or an autocracy. “With the centralization of power, full control over mass-media information flows, and the discipline of martial law, society may eagerly accept single-pyramid patronal rule in exchange for victory and fast economic recovery,” he cautioned. He then reassured his readers that, with a Ukrainian victory apparently imminent, support for such a centralized system would quickly evaporate.

    Zelensky, once an outsider, has something of his own patronal network. The office of the President is run by Andriy Yermak, a fifty-two-year-old former movie producer. People who have regular interactions with the administration talk about Yermak as though he had more power than the President. Yermak is said to have placed his associates in high-level, lucrative positions in state organizations and on oversight boards. One of Yermak’s deputies, Oleh Tatarov, has been plagued by bribery accusations. But, when Ukraine’s anti-corruption authorities opened an investigation, Yermak defended Tatarov publicly; the investigation was subsequently closed. More allegations have since come out, but Tatarov has kept his job. Yermak seemed unwilling to do anything that might distract from getting things done. (Yermak’s representative said that Yermak has never been involved in any investigation concerning Tatarov.)

    This stance—that war is a time for action and the details can be sorted out later—has gained traction in the administration. “The risk of authoritarianism that Zelensky presents is different from what we used to have,” Nataliya Gumenyuk, one of the country’s leading journalists, told me. “It’s not that he wants to get rich—it’s his desire for efficiency.” She paused, catching herself. “I’m not saying this is better.”

    Back in 2021, the conference at the museum ended with a farewell dinner in the main dining room. But about three dozen guests, including me and several other journalists, were invited to join Pinchuk in a separate room. A menu at each place setting promised steak and a selection of wines from the billionaire’s collection. “I am sick of this vegan shit,” Pinchuk announced, during a toast. (Pinchuk’s office contested my recollection of this.) He added that the wines would be introduced by Zakaria, the CNN host. Though the attendees weren’t sworn to secrecy, Pinchuk clearly assumed that no one would write about his casual disparagement of his own gathering’s proclaimed values. This is how patronal networks function: there are formal rules, and then there are the rules for the wealthy and the well connected, who assume, based on decades of experience, that people will do them favors and keep their secrets.

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    Ukrainians do arrest officials suspected of corruption, even as every arrest amplifies the sense that corruption is pervasive and intractable. In September, after journalists had uncovered evidence that the defense ministry was buying food and clothing, some of which was unsuitable for the fight, at inflated prices, Zelensky was forced to dismiss his defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov. (Reznikov has called some of the irregularities “technical mistakes,” and the government launched a series of investigations.) Ukraine has also found ways to seize business profits and use them to build new water mains in areas that once relied on the Kakhovka Dam, in the country’s south, which Russian forces blew up last June. The construction, carried out by Nayyem’s agency, was finished in a matter of months; in peacetime, he said, it would have taken years. His agency was able to simplify many parts of the process, including an environmental review. “Yes, many things can’t be transparent in wartime, and many people abuse this,” Nayyem said. “We’ll figure it out, but we are losing time.”

    In November, I crossed over the restored bridge to the western suburbs of Kyiv. When I last visited Bucha, in June, 2022, trains carrying modular houses donated by Poland had just arrived. The houses looked neat and modern, like white shipping containers with water and electrical connections, but Bucha residents were suspicious of them. Ukrainians keep their houses in families for generations. They think that a real house has a foundation and is built of brick. Nayyem calls this “the Naf Naf mentality,” for the most practical of the Three Little Pigs. When his agency has offered to replace destroyed homes with houses made of lighter, contemporary materials, many former homeowners have felt they were being offered a bum deal. There is also a general lack of documentation—a house may be registered in the name of a relative who is now abroad, or landownership may not be documented at all—which, in many cases, has made it difficult to begin construction.

    In Bucha, those who survived the occupation could afford to be picky. Countless foreign dignitaries had come to visit the ruins and the sites of Russian war crimes. Howard Buffett, the son of the billionaire Warren Buffett, had visited several times and committed five hundred million dollars to helping Ukraine rebuild. In November, I drove down Vokzalna Street, through what is now called Buffett Square, with Kateryna Ukraintseva, a lawyer and an activist who is a member of the Bucha city council. In the spring of 2022, this street was strewn with burned Russian tanks and the dead bodies of local residents, some of whom had been dragged out of their houses and executed. Back then, there seemed to be no intact structures on Vokzalna. Now the street is lined with pastel-colored stucco homes, behind shiny metal fences that match the roofs. But, Ukraintseva said, “some people don’t have money to buy furniture.”

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    Many residents of Bucha, which used to be a middle-class suburb, are struggling. This is partly because the more affluent residents have left the country, but Ukraintseva also sees unemployment all around her. She had recently advertised for an assistant at her law practice, which reopened in the summer of 2022, assuming she would hire someone young, with limited qualifications. She received a number of résumés from attorneys in good standing who could not find other work. Ukraintseva’s practice is oriented toward businesses, particularly condo associations. In addition, she has been helping women navigate the legal system to find the bodies of their loved ones and to get them properly interred. One case involves three misidentified bodies, each transferred to the wrong village or town under the wrong name.

    As a city councillor, Ukraintseva is in the opposition to the mayor, Anatolii Fedoruk. Like many people I met in Bucha, she holds him at least partially responsible for the town’s lack of preparedness at the start of the war. Territorial defense hadn’t been mounted, evacuation plans hadn’t been drawn up, and Fedoruk was, to the last, reassuring people that there would be no invasion. (Fedoruk has said that defense and evacuation efforts should have been organized by higher authorities and that he did everything he could.) Fedoruk has been mayor of Bucha for twenty-five years—“Like Putin!” Ukraintseva exclaimed. But he can’t be ousted now; municipal elections, too, are suspended under martial law.

    The container houses from Poland hadn’t moved far from the railroad station where I had last seen them. They now stood in a parking lot between a small outdoor market and a large apartment block. From a distance, they looked like rows of single-car garages. Most of the inhabitants were not Bucha residents whose houses had been destroyed but Ukrainians displaced from the east of the country. Permanent residents of Bucha passed these containers on their way to and from the market; the windows were at eye level. Every room contained two bunk beds—perhaps the designers had had in mind single people or families with children, but many of the rooms brought together two couples. A significant number of Ukraine’s internally displaced people are now living with a physical or a mental disability. Strangers sharing rooms are pulled into one another’s care willy-nilly.

    The war has created a new socioeconomic hierarchy. Even before the invasion, millions of Ukrainians were dependent on remittances—money sent back by family members working abroad—but, in 2022, total remittances decreased by some five per cent, and the amount seems to have fallen further in 2023. The shortfall is largely made up for by international aid. “You know who the biggest enemy of democracy is?” Solontay, the political organizer, asked me. “Poverty. You can have a rich country without democracy, but you can’t have a poor country with democracy. All the organizations that distribute humanitarian aid are working to save our democracy. They fix the pipes and install generators. So we don’t have millions of people who have nothing to lose.”

    “I could catch a bicyclist—well, maybe not a bicyclist, but I could catch a jogger, definitely.”Cartoon by Frank Cotham

    Still, internally displaced people form a new underclass. Most have no jobs. Their housing is often suitable only in an emergency—which is what this war was, before it started looking like it would never end.

    Ukraintseva’s own high-rise apartment building had been hit by a mortar shell and raided by Russian soldiers. It has since been repaired. These days, Ukraintseva runs a volunteer operation out of a small office on the ground floor. She is raising funds to buy equipment for the military, which helpers in the West purchase and send as unaccompanied luggage on passenger buses. On the day I visited her, we drove to the bus station in Kyiv to meet a shipment of Starlink terminals that had arrived from Germany. Ukraintseva showed me photos of soldiers whom her group has helped. Not all of them were still alive. Each photo came with a story. One group of guys had asked for a Wi-Fi booster that they could hang on a tree, allowing them to use their cell phones to get online. She pulled it out of a desk drawer and showed it to me.

    “But that’s not secure,” I blurted.

    “None of it is secure,” she said.

    I met Denys Kobzin, the sociologist, at a brewery and steak house on the outskirts of Kyiv. It was crowded with men who looked like they could be office workers, but, like Kobzin, many of them were active-duty soldiers living nearby, grabbing a beer between the end of the workday and curfew. The last time I’d seen Kobzin was a couple of weeks before the invasion, at his office in Kharkiv. Now he told me that, even though his first degree was in psychology, he had had no appreciation of P.T.S.D. until he faced the trauma of war. “Your prefrontal cortex gets overrun,” he said. “The amygdala gets stronger. You are always sensing a threat everywhere. It’s exhausting. You can’t focus. Add to that the death of a battle buddy, a conflict in the family, and you can’t cope.” He has offered counselling sessions to veterans and servicepeople. “I was able to talk down a couple of people who were about to take their own lives,” he said.

    Those who have stayed in the country often have little patience for Ukrainians abroad. “I am very angry at women who go and leave their husbands here,” Ukraintseva had said. “You are either a family or not a family. You should be going through things together.” Divorce rates have risen sharply, and it is conventional wisdom that many women who left for Western Europe have made new lives for themselves. “Every guy I know who sent his wife and kids abroad has now been divorced,” Kobzin told me. “The gap between those who’ve been fighting the war and those who haven’t is growing.” Leshchenko, the Zelensky adviser, agreed. “It’s time for people who see themselves as Ukrainians to come back,” he said. “Schools in Kyiv are open—they all have bomb shelters. My friends who keep coming up with excuses stop being friends.”

    The only person I interviewed who disagreed with this sentiment was Nayyem’s brother, Masi, a lawyer who became a soldier. He had lost his right eye when the vehicle he was riding in was blown up. “It’s been psychologically challenging, because they removed this part of my brain,” he told me, rubbing his forehead, above his missing eye. “It’s hard for me to control my emotions. I get very anxious. I’ve had fits of paranoia.” Masi still runs a law firm, which employs some thirty attorneys. Recently, when a dishonest client exposed the firm to a wave of public criticism, Masi cried for three hours, an outburst he attributed to his trauma. “I am grateful to the people who left Ukraine and took their kids,” he said. “As I am grateful to my father, who brought me here at the age of five so that I didn’t see as much war as I could have.”

    While the war creates new social and economic divisions, the Army itself erases them. “I’ve spent much of the war among people I couldn’t have imagined being in a room together in peacetime,” Kobzin told me. “An Azeri man, an Armenian, a Jew, an antisemite, a small-time criminal, and a major entrepreneur—all of them managed to avoid conflict, at first because we all had a common higher goal and then because we’d formed connections and were now invested in accepting one another as we are. A guy might be going on about some antisemitic conspiracy theories. But he is a member of the family. Tomorrow you go into battle and you have no one but each other.” Out of the hundred-person company Kobzin started out with in February, 2022, he figured that some thirty-five have been severely wounded and more than a dozen have been killed. The rest remain on active duty.

    When I was in Ukraine, the parliament, which resumed at near full capacity a year into the war, was considering bills that would legalize same-sex partnerships and the use of medical marijuana. The first measure would help the country comply with European Union requirements for entry and, parliament sponsors have argued, is only fair to L.G.B.T.Q. people who are serving in the military. The other measure was advertised as helpful for veterans suffering from P.T.S.D. (The parliament voted to legalize medical marijuana in December; the fate of the same-sex-partnership bill remains uncertain.) “These are all signs of society moving in the direction of European practices,” Leshchenko told me.

    In mid-December, the European Union began formal negotiations with Ukraine on its accession. Ukraine will have to live up to legal and social standards of democracy—including functioning political institutions, protections from discrimination, and lack of corruption—that even some standing members, such as Hungary, don’t meet. A National Democratic Institute report on Ukraine’s compliance with the European Union requirements identified the lack of media pluralism as a key issue. But the institute’s survey also found increased support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights: seventy-two per cent, compared with twenty-eight per cent in 2019. Unlike many other societies at war, Ukraine seems to have become more, rather than less, tolerant during the past two years. “Europe itself is the ideology,” Solontay, the political organizer, said. “It’s a beacon, and we are swimming toward it.”

    Solontay also told me that, in his efforts to help elected administrations retain power despite martial law, he has found that “there is more and more war and less and less democracy. Where democracy still exists, it’s an accident.”

    All of the people I spoke with this fall and winter in Ukraine—politicians, government officials, civil activists, journalists, a book publisher, a movie producer, and several soldiers—said that they no longer thought about the end of the war. They could not imagine it. This was by far the most worrisome sign, not only for the fight but also for the thing they’d fought so hard for. Democracy is, after all, the belief that the world can be better. Ukrainians are not surrendering. But, as Kobzin told me, “I’ve given up my freedom so I can fight for my freedom. And this is true of most everyone I know.” ♦︎

     

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  6. 27 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    I don't disagree with this.  The problem we have across the board is that for any complex problem the solution is usually "provide housing.....AND....do X, Y, and Z," or "decriminalize drug possession....AND, do X, Y, and Z."  We love the idea of one-step "solutions."  We don't do the "AND" part very well.  Or at all.

    Decriminalization AND mandatory treatment.  Or even keep drug crimes within the justice system AND provide mandatory treatment (just criminalization has obviously totally failed).  Housing AND mandatory assistance/treatment.  Etc. etc.  Taking half measures gets incomplete results, and an incomplete result is often no result at all, when all is said and done.  It's maddening.  But, yes, it goes back to something 956 has pointed out that seems to irritate a lot of y'all, and I don't know why.  We are so fucking hung up on some rigid morality (that's not even genuinely moral - it's a cloak for our worst impulses) that we steadfastly refuse to take measures to actually solve the problems we claim are so huge that they are tearing us apart (immigration, anyone?)

    Well, Housing First is a pretty good example of the moral hang up in our politics. It’s not a radical concept - W.’s administration adopted it as HUD’s housing policy, for chrissakes. It has shown success, but its successful implementations have shown that it requires substantial and sustained federal and state alignment and investment. But for some reason, conservatives have for years opposed it on some fundamental discomfort with what they perceive to be a handout to enable drug use. Progressives, on the other hand, have pushed initiatives in localities totally unequipped to handle the enormity of the task on the grounds that, despite its practical unfeasibility, it’s the right thing to do (see: basically every major West Coast city). There’s not really a pragmatic conversation going on. 

    • Like 1
  7. Anyways, back to decriminalization - I found this piece from the latest New Yorker insightful on the Oregon situation. In San Francisco, I’m frequently irritated at our tiny city’s effort to take on economic inequality and drug addiction for the rest of the Northern California, if not the country, so I was interested when Oregon adopted a comprehensive harm reduction approach as an entire state instead of relying on Portland. The article suggests that while there may have been mistakes with Measure 110’s rollback on carceral measures, a huge problem was that the pandemic delayed the rollout of most of its funding until late 2022. Did Measure 110 even have a chance? 

    “A Drug De-Criminalization Fight Erupts in Oregon”

    Quote

    In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.


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    One September evening in Medford, a white cargo van belonging to a nonprofit called Stabbin Wagon parked near the Greenway, between an auto-repair shop and a Wendy’s. For unhoused people across Oregon, cargo vans have become a symbol of help. Some contain primary-care clinics and food pantries. Others, like Stabbin Wagon’s, distribute a more controversial kind of aid: safe supplies for drug users.

    Stabbin Wagon’s director, Melissa Jones, pulsed with nervous energy, and wore flip-flops and a T-shirt that read “Nothing ends homelessness like housing.” With her was Samantha Strong, a young activist with a green buzz cut and piercings. The two women—Stabbin Wagon’s only employees—opened the van’s doors to reveal plastic bins and hanging compartments of inventory, neatly arranged and all free. There were boxes of naloxone, needles of various gauges, cookers, pipes, fentanyl test strips, soap, and hand sanitizer.

    People arrived on foot, by bike, and by car. Jones and Strong greeted them fondly, mostly by name. A young woman with a distant expression brought her little dog; they’d been living on the Greenway for years. A middle-aged guy who looked dressed for a hike called out his desired items like a food order. Strong assured a skittish first-time visitor, “You don’t have to sign in. No, I don’t need to see your I.D.”

    Harm reduction of this kind—providing drug users with supplies to prevent death and disease—has been practiced for decades. In this part of the country, though, it is newly prominent. In November, 2020, Oregon launched a historic experiment: the Drug Decriminalization and Addiction Treatment Initiative, known as Measure 110. Approved by fifty-eight per cent of voters, it made Oregon the first state to decriminalize possessing small amounts of illicit drugs. It also funnelled hundreds of millions of cannabis-tax dollars toward addiction treatment, housing, peer support, and harm reduction. A citizen panel that included people with “lived experience”—histories of substance use—would decide how the money was spent. Programs in Black, Native, and other “historically underserved” communities would be prioritized. The law’s overarching goal, according to Tera Hurst, the director of the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, was to force “a shift in attitude toward people who use drugs and how we treat them.”

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    Measure 110 was inspired by a sense of desperation: the drug war had failed, and policing wasn’t curing people. In 2020, Oregon had the second-highest rate of drug addiction in the country, yet it ranked nearly last in access to treatment. Fentanyl was flooding in and being used alongside methamphetamine—becoming so prevalent that people expressed nostalgia for black-tar heroin, which seemed “bougie” by contrast. From 2019 to 2020, opioid-overdose deaths in Oregon increased nearly seventy per cent, and they have continued to rise.

    Stabbin Wagon formed a few months before Measure 110 was passed. At the time, Jones was raising a teen-age son, running a resale business, and volunteering with a mutual-aid effort that served free lunches in Medford’s Hawthorne Park. Many of the people she met there were using alcohol and drugs, and those who wanted to enter rehab faced long waits and bureaucratic hassles. Jones, who is in long-term recovery from alcohol use, reasoned that she could at least help them stay alive. “I dove into serious self-education about harm reduction,” she said. “The more I learned, I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, this is the opposite of what we’re taught in recovery.’ ” Rather than trying to force abstinence, harm reduction works to “meet people where they are.” Its proponents advocate a basic rule—never use alone—and provide access to safe supplies. With the growing popularity of highly potent opioids, harm reductionists have focussed on distributing naloxone, the “Lazarus drug,” to reverse overdoses.

    The approach took off early in the aidscrisis, when activists shared the disinfection slogan “bleach and teach” and risked jail time to hand out clean needles. A large body of evidence now supports the idea that it saves lives. Syringe programs halve the spread of H.I.V. and hepatitis C; naloxone, when distributed to users and their peers, can cut overdose deaths by more than forty per cent.

    But practitioners in small towns and rural areas tend to keep their work quiet, to avoid being accused of enabling drug use. Jones decided to be loud about it. In Hawthorne Park, she went tent to tent with a blue ikea bag laden with naloxone and syringes. That was how her organization got its name, she said: “They were, like, ‘Oh, it’s the stabbin’ wagon.’ I thought it was funny and cute.”

    After Measure 110 passed, a friend suggested to Jones that it might fund an upstart organization like hers. She applied, and Stabbin Wagon was eventually granted nearly six hundred thousand dollars—enough to buy the cargo van and to fill it with supplies. “I thought, after I got the 110 money, it would solve all my problems,” she said. Instead, Stabbin Wagon became a local flash point in the statewide debate over Measure 110. People blamed the law for an uptick in public drug use. Billionaire donors helped launch a repeal effort. Southern Oregon First, a “patriot” media group known for supporting the Three Percenters militia, made Jones and Stabbin Wagon a frequent target, saying that their work “creates all these piles of needles in our parks” and “keeps people addicted.”

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    As the sun began to set over the Greenway, an orange Camaro with tinted windows drove up to where Jones and Strong were working and lingered awhile before zooming off. Strong guessed that it was one of the right-wing activists who’d been harassing them online. “I’m not scared of them,” she told me afterward. “Complaining about people using drugs or being homeless—they’re upset about stuff that’s happening anyway. It just wasn’t in their face.”

    Portland—Oregon’s largest city, and one of its most liberal and diverse—voted overwhelmingly in favor of Measure 110, but in Medford the politics were more complicated. The city has about eighty-six thousand residents, most of them white; it is the seat of Jackson County, which is split politically, tilting Republican. During the national protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, hundreds of people wound through Medford, yelling, “Black lives matter.” Jones was among them, and said that white supremacists came out to heckle the protesters. The scene was even more fraught in Grants Pass, one county over, where armed counter-protesters assembled under a giant American flag.

    People working in recovery were used to navigating these political divides. Everybody in Jackson County seemed to know someone who’d lost a job, a home, child custody, or a loved one to drugs. Sommer Wolcott, the executive director of OnTrack, a treatment-and-housing nonprofit in southern Oregon, told me, “We’re all in this work for a reason.” Wolcott is an equable type with cropped dark hair and a preference for business-casual attire, which in the Pacific Northwest qualifies as formal wear. After studying psychology in college, she managed a locked institution for minors, many of whom had endured traumatic childhoods with severely addicted parents. “I saw kids who didn’t have somebody who was safe,” Wolcott said. Later, she worked with adults, and realized that she was treating the people her young clients might have become.

    Addiction is a disease with no single cure. Those seeking relief must navigate a twisty, spotty “continuum of care.” There’s detox and transitional housing; residential and outpatient rehabilitation; peer support, meetings, and sponsors; counselling of all kinds; and medications such as methadone and buprenorphine. To coördinate services, Measure 110 required grantees to form a behavioral-health resource network, or bhrn (pronounced “burn”), in each county.

    “The guy has three sesame seeds and six poppy seeds and he thinks he can call himself an everything bagel.”Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair

    In Jackson County, a consortium of seventeen providers, including the public-health department, requested funding, and Wolcott helped guide the application. In her view, the biggest gaps in the system were medical: detox and inpatient rehabilitation. Measure 110, however, prioritized services that Medicaid didn’t cover, such as harm reduction, housing, employment assistance, and peer support. As she worked on the application, she tuned in to meetings of the citizen panel that made funding decisions, the Oversight and Accountability Council. “The way they talked about treatment agencies was very disrespectful,” she said. “We know harm reduction’s effective, but it’s an effective part of the continuum. You need to have the whole thing.”

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    One former member of the O.A.C. described traditional treatment providers to me as “shame-based”; a current member said that inpatient treatment “has very shaky outcome metrics.” Still, a great deal of money went to detox facilities and to groups that provide inpatient treatment. Wolcott’s consortium was granted nearly seventeen million dollars. But the Oregon Health Authority announced that the county bhrn would have to accommodate another member: Stabbin Wagon. Reactions ranged from annoyance to disbelief. Even some harm reductionists told me that Jones was giving the approach a bad name. Her voice-mail greeting started with a sweetly intoned “Hey, fuckers.” On TikTok, she posted videos that trolled conservatives. One showed Stabbin Wagon giving out naloxone at a drag show, set to a techno track with the lyric “The drugs are working.”

    Jones had her own feelings about joining the bhrn. The local providers were run by professionals who collaborated with city hall and used terms like “pathways to desirable solutions.” Jones dismissed them as the “nonprofit industrial complex” and questioned their methods, including mandatory urine tests, which she considered inaccurate and degrading. “Twelve-step, abstinence-based programs didn’t work for me,” she said. “I didn’t find stability that way or healthiness and happiness.”

    As a matter of style, Stabbin Wagon seemed more of a piece with Portland, New York, San Francisco, or Vancouver, where harm reduction is embedded in public policy. Last summer, I visited Vancouver, whose Downtown Eastside neighborhood is both a model of harm reduction and a public bogeyman. At the office of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, I met with an Indigenous harm-reduction leader and watched people inject opioids under the supervision of a peer. Since 2016, British Columbia’s Ministry of Health has permitted safe-consumption sites, funded alerts for dangerous batches of street drugs, and empowered doctors to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl and meth. This has not put an end to overdoses—2023 was particularly deadly—but it has likely saved lives. On a Sunday evening, I followed a team of firefighters as they responded to opioid-related calls, hauling oxygen tanks up the stairs of dim S.R.O.s. A few times, they prepared to administer naloxone, but found that a friend of the person overdosing had already done it.

    Vancouver’s program was backed by extensive research, but it was too radical for just about anywhere in the U.S. “I do not believe the state of Oregon is ready for safe-consumption centers,” Floyd Prozanski, a state senator who represents Eugene, told me. In Jackson County, many politicians and traditional providers feared that Stabbin Wagon was a forerunner of such methods. They were willing to tolerate harm reduction—the county itself operated a limited syringe exchange—but only to a point. Before Stabbin Wagon came along, a supporter of the group told me, “people were apologizing for having to do harm reduction—they were maintaining the status quo.”

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    Outside Stabbin Wagon’s van near the Greenway, a lanky woman in jean shorts pulled Jones aside. In a whisper, she explained that the Medford police had come to her tent and taken her belongings. She’d lost prescription medication, among other things. “I’m so sorry,” Jones said. “The police used to send notice of sweeps, but now they’re immediate.” She told the woman that she’d look into locating her stuff.

    In the spring of 2021, Medford passed a strict anti-camping ordinance, meant to remove homeless people from view. Officers started giving people seventy-two hours’ notice to evacuate, under threat of arrest. The city’s shelters were full, though, and Jones was furious. During a city-council discussion about the homeless, she said, “None of you give a shit,” before her microphone was muted. The police soon mounted a sweep of a large tent community on the Greenway, and in the coming months hundreds more people were forced out. With tents forbidden, some resorted to sleeping in the open, and on one frigid morning that December a young man named Manuel Barboza-Valerio was found dead, apparently of hypothermia. “We’re responsible for this,” a city-council member said afterward. “Manny’s death is on us.” Still, the sweeps continued.

    Jones is a self-described police abolitionist, who argues that law enforcement should be barred from responding to substance use. Her view is informed by the recent history of police in southern Oregon. A decade ago, the former sheriff of Josephine County was reportedly involved with the Oath Keepers and local militias. In 2019, Medford police and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office were accused of mistreating a paraplegic man during his arrest: county-jail employees had stripped and slapped him. (Lawsuits stemming from the incident are pending; neither Medford nor Jackson County would comment.)

    At events, Stabbin Wagon hands out stickers reading “acab” (“All cops are bastards”); online, it shares footage of police using backhoes to clear homeless people’s belongings. Other videos have shown outreach workers from fellow bhrnproviders, which has stoked resentment. “A lot of people don’t know these organizations work with the police,” Strong explained. “When we post about that, people can be, like, ‘O.K., now I can make a decision about whether to access their services.’ ”

    Strong told me that Jones’s assertiveness had attracted both allies and enemies: “While it’s a blessing for people who are, like, ‘Fuck the cops,’ it also isolates you.” In Medford, law enforcement is tightly linked to city hall. The mayor is a former police chief, and one of the council members is a corrections officer. Local officials rely heavily on Rogue Retreat, a charity that receives public funds to run an indoor shelter, a sanctioned tent site, and a tract of tiny houses—some of the only facilities for homeless people in the area. When Jones heard allegations that the director, a pastor, advocated for gay conversion therapy, she joined an effort to expose him, and he was subsequently fired. (He denies pushing the therapy.) Then, last August, Stabbin Wagon hosted an “H.I.V. testing party” and the police came looking for one of the participants, who they said was a teen-age runaway. Jones and Strong yelled in protest, and were arrested for harassment and interfering with an officer. (Strong later resigned from Stabbin Wagon, in part because of that experience; Strong and Jones have ongoing criminal cases.)

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    While Stabbin Wagon and its allies praised Measure 110 for limiting the role of law enforcement in fighting addiction, the Medford police felt unfairly constrained. At headquarters, I met Richard Josephson, an officer of twenty-three years, who wore jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that revealed a mosaic of tattoos. From his desk, he reviewed surveillance video of a footbridge downtown, which appeared to show a man selling drugs and others taking them. “Users don’t care anymore,” he said. “I’ll drive a police car up to them, and they don’t even care.” Josephson took a personal interest in drug enforcement and treatment. “I grew up in a drug house,” he said. “My mom still uses meth. I thought we were camping one summer, but we were just homeless.”

    In September, 2019, the police department established a Livability Team to patrol downtown and the Greenway, addressing “concerns such as homelessness and chronic nuisance houses.” Josephson, who helps lead the team, told me he liked that it had “this whole social-services side.” Officers sometimes patrol the parks along with outreach workers, who hand out phone numbers for treatment centers and emergency shelters. But police also arrest unhoused people for trespassing and evict them from tents.

    What they don’t do much is apprehend people for drugs. Measure 110 forbade police to arrest someone for carrying small amounts of fentanyl, meth, or crack, or for consuming those drugs in public. Instead, they were supposed to issue a ticket that requires the person to either pay a hundred-dollar fine or call a statewide hotline to discuss treatment options.

    In the three years before Measure 110 took effect, the Medford police made more than forty-seven hundred arrests on drug charges. In a similar period afterward, they issued approximately fifteen hundred citations for minor possession and made some two thousand arrests for higher-level possession and dealing. The lower total was caused partly by less intensive policing during the pandemic and partly by a lack of interest in ticketing drug users. “There’s no consequences to the hundred-dollar ticket,” Josephson complained. “They can’t pay the fine. What’s the point?”

    One goal of decriminalization was to replace police with peer-support workers. Wolcott considered this misguided and naïve. Drug users need “external motivators” in order to change their lives, she said. Josephson, too, argued that people who might have detoxed in jail and opted for treatment were instead languishing on the streets. At a taco truck downtown, he pointed out a woman he’d arrested on possession charges who was now clean and working for a charity.

    There are certainly many Oregonians who attribute their recovery to the criminal-justice system. In Grants Pass, I visited tent encampments with a peer-outreach worker who had been arrested multiple times during her addiction; a decal on her car read “#drugcourtssavelives.” But just as many people told me that their drug use got worse in jail. “I was incarcerated because of my substance use,” Brendon Kinzel, who until recently worked at Medford’s Family Nurturing Center, said. “Jail didn’t change me.” The county jail, in any case, was overcrowded, and there was a statewide shortage of public defenders.

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    A criminal record entails its own obstacles to recovery: debt, stigma, exclusion from work and housing. In Portland, I visited the Miracles Club, a nonprofit that primarily serves African Americans. It was hosting a clinic on an Oregon law that allows certain convictions to be expunged. At one table, a lawyer named Emilie Junge sat with a client, helping him fill out paperwork. “I deal with people every day who have long criminal records, and they want to talk about their drug arrests—they’re clearly traumatized,” Junge told me. “If Measure 110 has done anything, it’s to stop that.”

    To mark International Overdose Awareness Day, late last summer, a resource fair and vigil was held in Hawthorne Park. Amid a ring of informational tables was a homespun memorial: a bulletin board marked “We Remember,” covered with handwritten notes. A video of dead family members played on a loop. The host of the event was Max’s Mission, a nonprofit run by Julia Pinsky, a former publicist. A decade ago, Pinsky’s son Max started taking oxycodone after a car accident. Less than two years later, he died of a heroin overdose.

    On an elevated stage, Pinsky’s husband and daughter demonstrated how to administer naloxone: spray into nose, breathe into mouth, wait. Many people gave testimonies of mourning and recovery. “I lived on the Greenway for three years,” a woman named Crystal said. “Fentanyl is a pandemic.” An employee talked about naloxone kits funded by Measure 110, which Max’s Mission had used to reverse more than a thousand overdoses. Yet when Pinsky’s husband told the crowd to call local legislators to support the law, only a few people clapped.

    Many Oregonians saw Measure 110 as responsible for an increase in public disorder, drug use, and overdose deaths—which leaped from seven hundred and thirty-seven in 2021 to nine hundred and fifty-five in 2022. In fact, a recent study by N.Y.U. found “no evidence of an association” between decriminalization and fatal-overdose rates in Oregon and Washington. The drugs in circulation were unusually lethal—and given that being arrested can actually increase the risk of overdose, the authors wrote, Measure 110 might help to alleviate the problem. But if users couldn’t be picked up off the street, their activities became far more visible. “People’s patience is wearing thin,” Haven Wheelock, who manages the harm-reduction program at Outside In, in Portland, said. “I don’t want to downplay the moral injury of seeing such poverty and despair.”

    In Medford, complaints about drug use overlapped with complaints about homelessness. “I don’t feel safe walking around at night—and I’m from Baltimore,” Alyssa Bartholomew, a public defender, told me. “Hawthorne Park used to be my kids’ playground. Now there are needles and people who are homeless.” During the spring and summer, residents asked officials at town halls how they planned to handle people “who don’t want help” and called for more aggressive prosecution of “homeless who vandalize and destroy property.” Eventually, the city council passed a resolution condemning Measure 110. Harm reduction, it said, had done “nothing to help individuals overcome their addictions,” and had caused drug paraphernalia to proliferate in public places.

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    The backlash reflected broader anxieties about Measure 110. In many places, the law had funded fledgling groups and encouraged existing providers to do work that they’d never done before; about half the grantees were either brand new or very small. To incumbents, this looked like folly. Andy Mendenhall, a physician and the head of Central City Concern, a large nonprofit in Portland, criticized the rollout of the law for “prioritizing the voices of individuals who did not have operational experience.”

    In Medford, it didn’t help that the Oregon Health Authority awarded Stabbin Wagon $1.5 million, on top of the Measure 110 money, to build a peer-respite center—a facility that offers people in acute mental distress a quiet place to sleep, bathe, eat, and talk to someone understanding. When O.H.A. announced the grant, last year, other nonprofits expressed dismay. According to e-mails published by Sam Becker, an independent reporter, Medford’s city manager wrote to a lobbyist, “All of the legitimate non-profits in our area are outraged that [Jones] is getting any funding.”

    Lori Paris, the director of a large treatment agency called Addictions Recovery Center, told the Medford police chief, “Everyone is in shock over this.” She accused Stabbin Wagon of planning to “create a safe injection site” at the respite center. (Jones denied this.) The police chief asked what he could do to stop Stabbin Wagon from getting funded, and Paris gave him contacts at O.H.A.

    Wolcott seemed almost pleased by the controversy. When the deputy police chief asked if she had heard about the grant, she responded, “Yep, O.H.A. did get an earful.” She implied that news of the respite center would embarrass O.H.A. for funding a group that was out of its depth. “This could blow up into an interesting media sh*t show,” she wrote. “If anything, giving her 1.5 million might help blow things up faster.”

    Throughout 2022 and 2023, there seemed to be a new op-ed or county resolution each week calling for Measure 110 to be repealed. “Did Measure 110 take away ‘rock bottom’? Oregon cops seem to think so,” KGW News proclaimed. It did not escape notice that almost no one used the hotline number that police were supposed to give drug users. In its first fifteen months, there were only a hundred and nineteen callers, at a cost that worked out to more than seven thousand dollars per conversation. A report by Oregon’s secretary of state dryly noted, “It is unclear if the M110-specific hotline provides the best value.”

    “Damn it, doesn’t anybody on this ship have depth perception?”Cartoon by Robert Leighton

    Legislators came under pressure to either reform the law or dismantle it. A group bankrolled by Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder, and by Tim Boyle, the C.E.O. of Columbia Sportswear, filed paperwork to gather signatures for a partial repeal. Max Williams, a former Republican legislator and corrections official who helps lead the effort, told me, “I don’t think it should ever be the policy of a state to accept that people have a legitimate choice to use lethal drugs.” In Portland, he said, “we’ve got an exodus of capital, a cratering out of the central city.” Last June, the state recriminalized minor possession of fentanyl. Governor Tina Kotek, who had remained largely silent on Measure 110, recommended recriminalizing most drug possession and public use.

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    In December, a legislative committee on addiction and community safety held a hearing at the state capitol. Measure 110 was not intended to be the sole topic, but people were stirred up, and the hearing drew a crowd. Had everyone who signed up been allowed to speak, the session would have stretched into the night; as it was, it lasted four hours.

    The critics of Measure 110 were polite but sharp-tongued. The mayor of Tigard, a Portland suburb, said that drug users had been locking themselves in public bathrooms and overdosing, which required the city to break open doors and then pay for costly repairs. Business groups said that people who were homeless, addicted, and mentally ill were ruining commerce. A woman named Juanita Swartwood complained about an irresistible flood of street drugs in her community. (Though the connection to Measure 110 was murky, Swartwood was one of the petitioners behind the repeal effort, and the committee gave her extra time to speak.) In the most affecting moment of her testimony, she held up a photo of her granddaughter Emily, a young woman with long blond hair. Measure 110, she said, had stopped the police from intervening when Emily was caught with drugs. It had taken months to persuade her to get counselling.

    Supporters of the measure were clearly on the defensive. Julia Pinsky, of Max’s Mission, drove in from Medford and explained that her son had overdosed after an “entanglement with law enforcement” prevented him from getting help. “Going back to punishing people for their addiction will cost lives, not save them,” she said. Larry Turner, a founder of Fresh Out, a nonprofit that aids Black people with criminal records, said that the funding had helped increase his organization’s capacity sixfold. He pleaded for patience: the war on drugs had been given fifty years. “It took us time to get here, it’s going to take us time to get out,” he said.

    In fact, timing was one of the crucial problems with Measure 110. Decriminalization had gone into effect as soon as the law was enacted, in February, 2021—but, amid the pandemic, most of the grants weren’t rolled out until late in 2022. There were long waiting lists for detox, inpatient rehabilitation, and transitional housing, which could take years to address. Harm reduction and peer outreach, on the other hand, were easy to ramp up quickly. What most Oregonians thus saw of Measure 110 were naloxone kits and syringes and volunteers handing out sandwiches in parks—which they linked, in their minds, to tent encampments and the acrid smell of fentanyl smoke.

    The expansion of traditional services was harder to perceive. In the first year of funding, according to O.H.A., county bhrns reported more than a hundred and fifty thousand interactions with people seeking treatment for substance use, and another hundred and fifty thousand with those accessing harm reduction. Billie Cartwright, a physician assistant with BestCare in the ski town of Bend, told me that she had voted against Measure 110 but now saw positive effects. “One of the things we changed is, anyone who walks in the door, we’ll see that day,” she said. A peer-support worker in her office had recently picked up a client from jail and brought him straight in for treatment.

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    Southeast of Portland, I visited a new men’s home, on a tree-lined residential block, not far from a nature trail. Gabriel, one of the first residents, was a twentysomething sheet-metal worker recovering from a fentanyl relapse. Before he got a spot in the house, he said, “I was living in downtown Portland, in not a great place. I was seeing people using. I saw an overdose, a shooting. Two people died in my building during a three-month period. Here, I’m away from all that chaos.”

    In Jackson County, Stabbin Wagon was serving about a hundred and twenty people a month, with help from two new peer-support workers. O.H.A. agreed to extend Jones’s funding, and finalized the contract for the respite center. Max’s Mission expanded its naloxone distribution and dispensed aid in rural areas. The H.I.V. Alliance treated people for hepatitis C, provided addiction telemedicine, and covered rent payments to prevent evictions.

    OnTrack spent its grant money on a row of bungalow-style apartments for pregnant women waiting to get into treatment, an emergency-lodging complex for single adults, and Spanish-speaking staff. “It’s been a steep learning curve, because people are in such difficult circumstances—coming off the street, actively using, and trying to get a treatment bed,” Wolcott said. Before Measure 110, the agency had served around three thousand clients a year, and that number had not budged, as people waited months for residential treatment. “What is increasing is low-barrier housing, the accessibility of outpatient, and the amount of support services,” Wolcott said. “But it’s not nearly as neat and tidy to report on.”

    The money distributed through Measure 110 was both a lot and not very much. A single round of residential addiction treatment runs to tens of thousands of dollars. A small sober-living house can cost hundreds of thousands to get up to code. Even setting aside Measure 110, Oregon is poised to spend some $1.5 billion on behavioral-health care between 2021 and 2025.

    As Kate Lieber, the majority leader in the Oregon Senate and a former prosecutor, told me, Measure 110 was designed to be “like water, to fill the gaps around what Medicaid doesn’t cover.” But decriminalization turned out to be more unsettling than many imagined, and fentanyl continued to blast through the state. Still, as more services came online, I noticed calls for repeal being blunted by calls for reform; people wanted to restore aspects of the old enforcement model while keeping the focus on treatment. In Oregon and around the U.S., there was a grim sense that our systems were insufficient to cope with the threat of fentanyl. New York City opened two safe-consumption sites, and Vermont is considering a bill to decriminalize possession. Illinois eliminated cash bail and limited pretrial detention for people charged with low-level crimes. Seattle, though, went the other way: drug possession, which had been effectively decriminalized, was reclassified as a gross misdemeanor. Vancouver is also seeing a backlash.

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    In Medford, I visited Recovery Café, which offers support groups, counselling, and hot meals in an industrial-chic dining hall. At a chow line, volunteers served roast chicken with corn and potatoes. Some sixty attendees sat at tables, and a host with the vibe of a youth pastor invited them to share their accomplishments. People announced the number of days they had been sober, and thanked their higher power. Some spoke of new jobs, or of resuming contact with kids lost to child welfare.

    Across the room, I noticed a tall, bearded guy who’d been at the vigil in Hawthorne Park. He introduced himself as Rocky, a roofer from the area. He had just finished an inpatient program at OnTrack, and was living in transitional housing with a few other men. His wife, Kerissa, with whom he’d long used fentanyl and meth, was also in treatment. In the worst of their addiction, they’d squatted in an abandoned house and signed over custody of two young sons. Rocky’s parents died while he was in prison for drug trafficking. “That was a wakeup call,” he said.

    Many of their friends had died from overdoses; others had been revived with naloxone, which Rocky once used on Kerissa. This was their eighth collective attempt to get sober. When I caught up with them in mid-December, he told me that they’d found a new place to rent and were “working through stepwork with our sponsors.” They saw a doctor affiliated with OnTrack for injections of buprenorphine, which helped them stay off opioids. Rocky had a job with a distributor of roofing materials. Kerissa was preparing for an interview at a sporting-goods store, and hoped that her criminal record wouldn’t get in the way.

    Recovery Café emphasizes the end goal of abstinence, and the staff I interviewed didn’t have much to say about harm reduction. When I went, every visitor was required to have been free of all drugs and alcohol for at least twenty-four hours. But Recovery Café got funding from Measure 110, as did the other providers that helped Rocky and Kerissa. Recovery was messy, and the couple had needed different things at different times: medication to reverse an overdose, support from peers, a rehab center, a place to live and a way to pay for it. “You need to give these addicts a way to get clean, to get housing. You need stability,” Rocky said. “We’re in survival mode.” ♦︎

     

     

     

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  8. Pretty good article in NYT today comparing San Francisco’s approach to that of Portugal, the model for many progressives of a harm reduction approach.

    Quote

    San Francisco is in the middle of a drug crisis. Overdose deaths reached a record high last year, topping 800. Public drug use is widespread in some neighborhoods.

    How did San Francisco get to this point? In part, it follows the national story: The rise of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and a destabilizing pandemic caused a spike in addiction and overdose deaths.

    But San Francisco’s drug crisis has outpaced the country’s. In 2014, the city’s overdose death rate was roughly in line with the national average. As of last year, its rate was more than double the national average, and San Francisco was No. 4 for overdose deaths among U.S. counties with more than 500,000 people. The country’s overdose crisis worsened over the past decade as fentanyl spread, but San Francisco’s worsened much more quickly.

    Drug overdose deaths per 100,000 residents

    12-month rolling averages. Drug death numbers for 2023 are provisional.

    Source: CDC WONDER

    By The New York Times

    Local policy changes are partly to blame, some experts say. In 2014, California voters passed Prop 47, reducing drug possession to a misdemeanor from a felony. Different parts of the state have interpreted the change differently. In San Francisco, law enforcement has responded by scaling back efforts against drugs, de-emphasizing incarceration and effectively allowing public drug use.

     

    Those who support at least partial decriminalization often cite the experience of Portugal, which decriminalized all drugs more than two decades ago and then saw a decline in drug-related problems. In 2019, the San Francisco district attorney at the time, George Gascón, even visited Portugalto learn more. But while San Francisco and other liberal cities have embraced some aspects of Portugal’s decriminalization laws, they have struggled to replicate Portugal’s success.

    The comparison with Portugal is not perfect. For one, fentanyl has not taken over Portuguese drug markets, and has a relatively small presence in Europe as a whole. Still, the comparison gives a way to think about the challenges that San Francisco and other cities have faced. Those challenges can be broken down into five parts, each touching on a different aspect of drug policy.

    Decriminalization

    What Portugal did: Decriminalization is widely misunderstood; it’s not full legalization, but removes criminal penalties for small amounts of drug possession. In 2000, Portugal passed a law that decriminalized all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. But it kept some penalties, like fines and license suspensions, to incentivize people to get addiction treatment and deter outdoor public drug use. If police officers catch someone using drugs, they can, and often do, still cite them.

    Along with decriminalization, Portugal also invested in addiction treatment and created a system that tries to push people to seek help for addiction. “Decriminalization by itself means nothing if you have nothing else to offer,” João Goulão, the architect of Portugal’s system, told me.

     

    What San Francisco did: California’s Prop 47 did not technically decriminalize drugs, leaving possession as a misdemeanor. But the police do not stop or otherwise intervene with drug users, even as they use in public view, and prosecutors rarely file charges for drug possession or use.

    With a new district attorney as of mid-2022, the city started arresting more drug dealersand some users. But drug users still do not worry about arrests, and public use remains common. Residents often feel as if they have to check on drug users on sidewalks. “That’s how I found my first dead body,” said Adam Mesnick, owner of a deli in the South of Market neighborhood.

    Mayor London Breed has tried to straddle the line between a focus on public health and law enforcement, while acknowledging the deteriorating situation. “While we want to get people the help they need, we can’t continue to allow drug dealing and public drug use to continue,” her office said in a statement.

    Addiction treatment

    What Portugal did: In Portugal, the government provides much of the treatment. It is largely voluntary, mostly free and readily includes medications (like methadone) that studies show are the most effective approach for opioid addiction. The system has faced some problems in recent years, particularly staff shortages and waiting lists. Dr. Goulão says those difficulties are a result of national disinvestment, as the country has dealt with debt crises.

    Portugal also has a system to encourage drug users to get treatment, since refusing care is a common feature of addiction.

     

    When people are cited for drugs, they are sent to so-called dissuasion commissions. The commissions talk with people — using techniques like motivational interviewing — to persuade them to stop using drugs and seek help. But the commissions also have the threat of penalties, including community service and the revocation of a professional license, to more forcefully push someone into treatment if persuasion fails. “There’s a little bit of muscle involved,” Dr. Goulão said.

    What San Francisco did: San Francisco, California and the federal government fund addiction treatment. But the system is fragmented. Some providers offer medications for opioid addiction, while others reject medications as replacing one drug with another. Some treatment is effectively free or paid for by insurance, but other services can charge patients thousands of dollars or more. As a result, patients frequently struggle to find a treatment option that both works for them and that they can afford.

    San Francisco also has trouble nudging people into treatment. In some cases, the city offers drug users the option of treatment as an alternative to jail or prison. But this is available only when an addict is charged with more serious crimes, like robbery, that carry jail or prison time. Drug use alone is not enough.

    One program started by the city last year offers people treatment after they are charged with drug use or sales. But if the users refuse treatment, they are typically released anyway. From May 30 to Jan. 4, just 25 people accepted treatment after an arrest, in a city where tens of thousands of people use drugs regularly.

    Harm reduction

    What Portugal did: Harm reduction prioritizes keeping people alive over getting them to stop using, an idea that gained prominence during the H.I.V. and AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. Portugal has widely adopted some harm reduction measures, such as needle exchanges. But the government made getting people into treatment its top priority, particularly through dissuasion commissions. (Local activists have criticized the government for not further embracing harm reduction approaches.)

     

    Across the country, harm reduction services often act as a gateway to addiction treatment. Staffers at these services work with the treatment system to link clients to more help. “What we want is to provide citizens a way to change their life, if they so wish,” Dr. Goulão said.

    What San Francisco did: San Francisco has become one of the biggest supporters of harm reduction, which has proliferated in the U.S. during the opioid crisis. The city has not just adopted traditional harm reduction strategies. It has also led the way on new ones, such as passing out straws and foil to reduce the chance of infection among people who use fentanyl.

    San Francisco’s harm reduction programs don’t require staff to guide clients toward treatment. The programs argue that such pushiness could scare away clients who are not interested in quitting drugs.

    Michael Discepola, director of health access at the harm reduction program GLIDE, said his organization was fine with clients continuing to use drugs as long as they did so in a way that the group saw as safe. Abstinence is not always the correct goal, he argued.

    Can an approach focused so much on harm reduction work? Maybe, but its track record is not promising. British Columbia, in Canada, is a global leader in harm reduction. People can use drugs at supervised sites. Some programs prescribe and distribute opioids, including heroin, with the aim of providing a safer supply than what’s on the streets. Yet in 2023, British Columbia set a record for overdose deaths. Harm reduction policies probably reduce deaths, but they have not turned the crisis around.

     

    Personal attitudes toward drugs

    What Portugal did: Portugal is a predominantly Catholic, somewhat socially conservative country that still by and large discourages and stigmatizes drug use. Though culture is a slippery and broad concept, experts say it is important (often pointing to the public health campaign against smoking as an example). The social attitudes in Portugal probably helped to deter drug use and encourage treatment even as the legal system eased up. “That certainly played a role,” Dr. Goulão said.

    The country has taken steps to show compassion for addicts, including decriminalization, to make it easier for them to get help. But it continues to see drug use as socially damaging — a “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy.

    What San Francisco did: San Francisco takes a more libertarian approach. Local activists often talk about drug use as a right— that people should be able to put what they want into their own bodies. They have also worked to destigmatize drug use, to make it easier for people to open up about it and seek help.

    In early 2020, a downtown billboard showed happy young people seemingly enjoying a high together. “Know overdose,” the billboard said. “Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns. Try not to use alone, or have someone check on you.”

    The billboard is no longer there, but to critics, it represented a school of thought that came close to loving the sin, or at least accepting it. San Francisco “is on the extreme of a pro-drug culture,” Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford, told me.

     

    A comprehensive strategy

    What Portugal did: The biggest challenge to addressing a drug crisis is making everything work together. In the 1990s, Lisbon was called the “heroin capital of Europe.” About 1 percent of Portugal’s population used hard drugs. Hundreds died each year, a large toll in a small nation.

    Portugal’s now-famous response — decriminalizing drugs and funding new addiction treatment programs, harm reduction services and dissuasion commissions — came from changes in national laws that reflected a unified top-down plan.

    In recent years, some drug problems have ticked up, as The Washington Post reported. But for the most part, the system remains. Portugal’s drug-related deaths are still a fraction of what they were in the 1990s. The country also has fewer such deaths, after accounting for population, than most of its European peers.

    Drug-induced deaths per 100,000 residents in European nations, 2020

    * Country does not have 2020 data, so earlier periods were used

    Sources: The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction; World Bank

    By The New York Times

    What San Francisco did: What one American city does, with limited resources and jurisdiction, is hard to compare with what an entire country does. On a federal level, the U.S. has yet to agree on a successor to what has come to be seen as its draconian war on drugs. But to the extent San Francisco’s leaders could have come together to create a comprehensive drug policy plan, they never did.

     

    Instead, city officials mostly break down into two factions. One side, represented by the San Francisco Department of Public Health and locally funded nonprofits, has focused on harm reduction efforts. The other side, led by law enforcement agencies, wants to increase the role of the police and punishment to stop drug use and dealing.

    The two sides are often at odds. For example, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins argues that the straw-and-foil distribution program isn’t supported by research and could be enabling drug use without a public health benefit. “No one has shown me the evidence,” she said. The Department of Public Health defended its work in a statement: “We want to make sure people do not die of an overdose before they have a chance to seek treatment.”

    It’s a debate happening everywhere, with particular intensity in San Francisco. “To get a strategy, you need an objective,” said Nils Behnke, former chief executive of St. Anthony’s Foundation, which provides housing and treatment to drug users in the city. “That does not exist here.”

     

  9. When we talk about the drug addiction crisis, in my view we are talking about two interrelated but distinct issues: there’s drug addiction as a public health issue and there is drug addiction as a crime and safety issue. The former takes a structural view, while the latter focuses more on agency.  For along time the US addressed the problem as a crime and safety issue, and we good urban liberals now wholeheartedly reject the War on Drugs and embrace a structural view of the problem.

    However, drug addiction does raise crime and safety issues, and efforts to treat them as such cause bitter fights in places like Portland about “returning to the war on drugs.” Meanwhile, states and municipalities lack the resources to adopt harm reduction policies at scale, and federal law prohibits one of the most  important measure - safe injection sites. So what I see in Oregon and other coastal cities/states are half-assed approaches that lack clear direction and need federal alignment and funding. 

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  10. 8 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

     

    Two questions: 

    1) haven't overdose deaths been rising everywhere, including in states that have draconian drug enforcement? 

    2) isn't the point of decriminalization less crowded prisons, not lower rates of drug deaths?

     

     

     

    1) Yes 2) No, proponents argue for both. 

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  11. 2 hours ago, closetojumping said:

    I know there is a scantily posted Monterey/Carmel thread, but I’m trolling for expert opinions that might not go there. 

    I visit SF every 4-6 months to visit my adult daughter, her husband and growing family. They come in from the central region when we visit but this time she wanted us all to go to the Carmel area. I’ve never been. 

    It will be 4 adults and a toddler. Any screaming recs on places to eat or see/do? Anything to avoid?

    Not a big fan of Monterrey proper, but there’s the whole Aquarium/ Cannery Row thing for kids. Pacific Grove is great - I believe @Hefeweizenwould be your local guide, but I like Passionfish a lot for their wine list. We’ve stayed at the Gosby and liked it.

    We stay in Carmel, no favorite place in particular but we seem to end up at Vagabond and La Paya frequently. You’ve got Ocean Avenue and the beach for kids, but Carmel is quite literally an old money enclave. Lots of tasting rooms, boutiques and art galleries. We like Stationaery for brunch, Casanova for dinner (epic wine cellar) and Vesuvio for late night drinks (Barmel for late late night drinks). La Playa bar has a great sunset view. Chez Noir is the hot new spot with the James Beard nomination; have not been but have heard good things  

    If you want to hit up a winery, Folktale is a great all-around experience just 15 or so minutes down Carmel Valley Road. 

    Obviously, there’s tons of outdoors stuff. Point Lobos is just a few minutes south and, of course, there’s Big Sur. That can be a whole trip or a 1/2 day from Carmel if you just want to head down for some views and lunch. 

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  12. 11 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

    Yes. I honestly don't see how you can arrive at 60% taxation. 

    I'm self-employed and pay around 20-25% in income taxes, which includes a double dip for social security. Say we spent $100K each year (we spend less) and all that was subject to sales tax -- that's $8,250. In reality, it's much lower. Property taxes, which are high in Texas, are about $7,000 for our home.

    So if I made $100,000, then I'm hitting a max of 40% (25% + 8.25% + 7%) of my income in taxes. Fortunately, we're doing better and our total tax rate is lower.

    I guess if you owned an expensive home and made a modest amount of income, that could do it, but I think that's a rare case for most.

     

     

     

    You forgot the “whatever they stick to us” tax. 

    • Haha 2
  13. 45 minutes ago, royiv said:

    Any insight into why they haven't reopened? It's been almost a year since the fire. Are there signs of activity in terms of repairing the damage?

    I know they were planning on doing a full renovation and plans weren’t approved until a few months ago. I saw in the paper they were aiming for spring. Also, the family opened an outpost in LA in 2022. No clue what the arrangement is there, but presumably it’s helping keeping them afloat. 

  14. 18 minutes ago, hornian said:

    Was going to try to get my 70+ year old mom to agree to go to Willie Mae's - but they are closed "temporarily". That's concerning. 

    Damaged by a bad fire last spring. You can go to Lil Dizzy’s if you want something up that alley. 

  15. 1 hour ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

    to get a handle on the anecdotal nature of this thread, austin violent crime rate is 430-450 / 100k people.  oakland is 480-500.  so there you go -- about 10-20% more crime there.

     

    https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend

    . . . if I tell them I read books . . . 

    Oakland was 1500/100k last year, triple Austin.  East and West Oakland are wild, all this outrage is sort of stupid because that area is worse than that around Hobby Airport. Awesome tacos tho. 

  16. 5 minutes ago, Upgrayedd said:

    IMG_0139.thumb.jpeg.adb548a51921c7596911293d56c18c06.jpeg

    Just swung by here because I was flying out of Oakland.  Did not get crimed (although everyone knows to put your shit in the trunk if leaving vehicle).

    I will say that for an In and Out, the access is terrible.

     

    lol, from Chronicle:

     

    Quote

    The In-N-Out, a convenient pit stop for travelers headed to Oakland International Airport and a buzzy hangout after A’s games at the Coliseum, has become the epicenter for crime in a city grappling with a surge in violence and theft. Since 2019, police have logged 1,335 incidents in the vicinity of the diner on 8300 Oakport St. — more than any other location in Oakland.

    That number includes nine robberies, two commercial burglaries, four domestic violence incidents and 1,174 car break-ins, according to Oakland police data. Chaotic scenes unfold daily. Sean Crawford, who works in a building around the corner from the diner, said he’s watched robbery crews bust doors of work vans and heard In-N-Out customers loudly confronting burglars.

    In one instance last year, Crawford and some co-workers were driving by the diner when they saw a car pull up to the drive-thru line. Two people jumped out and methodically went from vehicle to vehicle, robbing people at gunpoint, Crawford said. Representatives of In-N-Out did not respond to an email seeking comment about the incident.

     

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