The problem in Portland is that we decriminalized most drugs, so now potential third spaces are over-run with homeless tents and drug use.

From my house I have either a 1/4 mile uphill walk to a major busline, or a 3/4 mile downhill walk to one. Either way isn’t particularly safe, and the bus lines themselves aren’t particularly safe.

koin.com/…/passenger-violence-increasing-at-trime…

Crazy idea: if drugs are decriminalized, what if we had two versions of public spaces: one that disallows use of drugs, and one where drugs were allowed and handed out for free? Like if you were a drug addict, would you really want to go to that boring “sober” library where you might get hassled when you could get unlimited drugs at the library across the street?

Why would I want my tax money going to buy drugs for junkies?

Drugs are fucking cheap if you control the means of production. For less than $10 a day you can keep homeless drug addicts off your buses, out of your train stations, out of your libraries and playgrounds and out of tent cities in middle of town, simply by luring them to a no-strings-attached watering hole out of your line of sight.

$10/day adds up over time and area.

Cheaper than paying police and paying staff to clean up the buses and paying insurance and inconvenience for all the petty break-ins and smashed car windows.

It would be cheaper to just work all the criminals until they pay off their damages

We can’t get them to comply with relatively basic requests like “don’t block sidewalks”, what makes you think you’d be able to force them to do useful work? Overseers with whips cost money, how do you expect to do it cheaply enough to turn a profit and pay off damages?

A guy on a car walk with an m16 can oversee a lot of people at once.

And does this guy shoot them if they sit down and refuse to work?

If necessary

Do you support murdering people you don’t like in all contexts, or just if you can’t extract labor from them at gunpoint?

If you could be bothered to notice that this is a conversation about a specific topic, you wouldn’t need to ask disingenuous questions

I think it’s a sincere question. Your comments so far have suggested that you support the idea that execution is an acceptable punishment for people who abuse drugs and then disobey orders from authority. I believe it’s fair to question whether there are lower levels of nuisance that you also believe the death penalty should apply to.

As for the argument as a whole, taking into consideration the cost of training and wages for the prison guards/riflemen/executioners necessary to employ this scheme and the logistical cost of moving these incarcerated laborers to potential work sites, as well as the low quality of the labor they could provide while going through withdrawals, I still think the $10 per day would be cheaper.

Apologies for not spelling every single detail out to the letter. I forgot that everyone here takes the absolute least generous interpretation of everything they read.

So to be specific, this comment chain started under a top level comment (or at least a comment directly copied in multiple places, I don’t remember which copy we’re under) that talked about how a major problem with public transportation is that there’s a increasing risk to passengers of being assaulted or otherwise victimized by this crowd of druggies.

When I was referring to criminals, those people specifically were who I was talking about. That instead of spending taxpayer dollars to essentially bribe people not to commit crimes, effectively making polite society subsidize criminals, we put the criminals to work and wring them for every last penny they can produce such that they’re repaying not only their debt to specific victims, but also not living on taxpayer dollars.

And finally, generous interpretation or not, it seems entirely reasonable from my point of view to take offense at someone insinuating that my actual goal is to enslave and kill “certain” people, or whatever their specific wording was. I have him blocked for obvious reasons so I can’t just quote it directly. Because fucking obviously I consider that to be a pretty sizable attack on my honor and not the type of interaction I want to have here