I am sick and tired of people excusing execrable decisions by claiming that the intentions behind the choices were good.
In many cases, the excuse is pure bunkum.
First, let’s get the obvious out of the way: sometimes people do make bad decisions that are excusable. In situations where the information is scarce or contradictory or there is no good way to predict the outcomes you just have to do your best, and sometimes it doesn’t work out.
But geez, man. How many policies are made these days where the results are utterly predictable, yet bad choices are made under the guise of “good intentions?” Sincerely believing that this time an obviously bad policy will finally work is no excuse for ignoring the obvious.
One such example is the decline of Portland, OR, about which I have written several times. I’m writing about it once again because I stumbled upon an outstanding example of reporting in which Nancy Rommelmann does a deep dive into Portland’s decline since the de facto legalization of hard drugs.
When I moved to Portland in 2004, the junkies in downtown’s Pearl District, romanticized in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 “Drugstore Cowboy,” had been replaced by farm-to-table restaurants and a flagship REI store. Portland was on the up, a media darling poised to become the next great… pic.twitter.com/wyxXMEVLQF
— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) February 29, 2024
You simply must read the piece. She does the work, and in many cases, it is dirty work indeed. I bow to her commitment and quality reporting.
Portland has become, in just a few short years, a complete s**thole. Once one of the most beautiful cities in America, it blended a quirky sensibility with a laid-back, attractive vibe that was simultaneously amusing and enviable.
Sure, it was liberal as hell, but it was a liberal utopia plastered on top of a solid economy with enough sensible people that it seemed to work–at least to those of us who know that we couldn’t live like that but were kinda glad some people could.
My wife and I used to joke that we “lived like a liberal and voted like a conservative,” which, while an exaggeration, did capture our bid to live as sane people in an urban environment.
Yeah, well, that didn’t work out. A couple of years back, our block was filled with a couple dozen cops armed with assault rifles looking for a perp who shot at a cop. Twice that summer. It’s surreal.
At least they came out for that crime; usually, if bullets are flying, the cops don’t show up until blood is flowing. And, of course, you already know about the collapse of our police department after the George Floyd riots.
Portland, though, is a special case of urban decline, along with San Francisco.
Portland’s decline has many causes, such as the Defund the Police movement, but perhaps the worst was the decriminalization of drug use with the passage of Measure 110.
Promoted as a “harm reduction” measure, it promised to replace the criminal justice approach to drugs with a new health-care focused method of dealing with the problem.
It was a mistake, and a predictable one. And, as with all predicable mistakes, it was predicted by many and they were ignored. With the best of intentions, of course.
Dozens of organizations supported Measure 110, from the editorial board of The Oregonian to the Oregon ACLU. Harm reduction advocates saw Measure 110 as a “humane, effective approach that will save lives” and a positive step toward granting bodily autonomy to those who chose to do drugs. Portland’s newly elected progressive district attorney Mike Schmidt said Measure 110 “sends a clear message of strong public support that drug use should be treated as a public health matter rather than a criminal justice matter.”
Measure 110 passed with 59 percent of the vote.
“For us, it’s like this dream happened,” said the executive director of the New York-based nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, which had pumped an estimated $5 million into getting Measure 110 passed.
Meanwhile those living the dream saw an effort meant to help addicts act instead as an accelerant. Fatal opioid overdoses skyrocketed, especially from fentanyl. The number of homeless in Portland swelled to 6300. Violent crime spiked before dipping in 2023. People stopped going downtown, both because of the perception of danger and because it was too sad, seeing hundreds of people dope-sick, smoking fentanyl under blankets, shooting up in the park, stepping over used syringes and the foil and straws distributed free by advocates of harm reduction. Oregonians started having second thoughts, started wondering if their impetus to help was making things worse.
Screw the “impetus to help.” Sorry, but ignorance of the likely consequences is no excuse because people were ignorant only because they didn’t want to know. I knew. Others knew. It was as predictable as a sunrise in the East.
If somebody says, “Maybe tomorrow the sun will rise in the West,” you slap them upside the head instead of patting them on the back. They aren’t some happy-go-lucky innocent; they are an idiot who needs some knowledge slapped into them.
The defenestration of law enforcement, when it came to making drug arrests, was baked into Measure 110. While Portland only partially succeeded in its effort to defund police in 2020, staffing levels remain low, with officers’ time frequently spent interacting with street-level drug users the only way they legally can: administering Narcan, sometimes to the same person multiple times a day.
Proponents of Measure 110 argue that correlation does not equal causation; that you can recriminalize drugs tomorrow and still have people choose to use and overdose on hard drugs. Sure. But does that mean Measure 110 cannot be improved upon? Last October, eight people in their late teens and early 20s overdosed in one incident in Portland’s Pearl District, where I not long ago watched a tableaux that included a man picking at his infected feet, another shaking his penis at me, and a woman who lifted her dress and shat. Portland has seen historic outmigration, in part due to high crime and the homelessness crisis. REI closed its flagship store on February 1, citing the highest number of break-ins in two decades.
Of course when the idiot who hopes the sunrise will happen in the West gets it wrong, nobody is hurt. When you defund the police, legalize shoplifting, and decriminalize hard drugs the world goes to hell, and you aren’t the only one hurt.
Everybody is.
Over the past few years the number of “well-intentioned” but damaging policies has overwhelmed our society. COVID-19 policies were one big clusterfark, and every disaster was predicted by people with a brain.
The damage caused by those “good intentions” is literally incalculable, but our Elite shrug.
“We meant well.”
Who cares? Not me. Quit emoting and start thinking.