What if?
Picture this: A far-right lobbying group funded by the Koch brothers takes several dozen Oregon Republican politicians and county sheriffs on an all-expenses-paid four-day trip to Singapore, so that they can see first-hand what law and order looks like. With plenty of time for sightseeing.
Can you imagine the howls of outrage that we'd all be hearing? The state would probably be threatening to indict people.
But when it's the way-out left, and the cause is normalizing addiction to street drugs, they get away with it just fine. "Sure, it's graft, but it's perfectly legal." Here's the itinerary, just in case your blood pressure was getting too low.
Portland is such a dirty little place. It always has been, to one degree or another, but it's really bad at the moment. And in your face about it, no less.
Sen. Floyd Prozanski (D-Eugene) has lived in the same house on College Hill in Eugene since he moved here from Texas to work as an associate at Perrin, Gartland, et. al in 1984. Portland may well be a "dirty little place", but Oregon has, and will, consist of more than ImPortantLand. Please don't, as so many Portlandlanders do, confabulate the two.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the correction of something I didn't say.
Delete110 needs to be fully repealed, as it’s the only solution at this point. Oregon can’t continue to be the destination of choice for every loser junkie in America.
ReplyDeleteWe are out of time and tolerance with the shallow thinking behind Oregon Drug laws. The “good intentions” are biting us in the ass and destroying the culture that made the community livable.
ReplyDeleteThe most ironic part about all of this is that the Koch brothers DID make this happen. You see the entire idea of borrowing Portugal's drug program came from Glenn Greenwald, who did a report for the Cato Institute almost 15 years ago. Greenwald spoke Portuguese and was therefore able to do the first real round of English reporting on why Portugal had a lower rate of drug use than other European societies. Of course the Cato Institute is funded by the Koch brothers. Spoilers: Greenwald himself made it perfectly clear that using the Portugal model here in the United States would never work, because what made it work in Portugal was that their country was unilaterally Catholic, and having a Priest tell you to get off drugs carried more weight than your own parents telling you to do so. The US has no centralized moral compass - in fact we have the opposite tradition, a libertine acceptance of risk/danger/drugs like fast cars, gambling, and drugs.
ReplyDeleteAnd how did the Koch brothers make this happen?
DeleteThey didn't. They may have funded a group that published a favorable report about Portugal's policies fifteen years ago.
DeleteAnything to try to deflect Soros funding of M110.
A junket about junkies with a boatload of flunkies.
ReplyDeleteHell, Sam had a pretty good time in Scandinavia one junket. Locals just nudged one another and said, oh that Sammy, always a card.
ReplyDeleteOh, the future is soo bright with ranked choice and other innovations set to remedy . . .