Fentanyl might be invincible

Jason Motlagh for Rolling Stone on “What Happened When Portland Legalized Fentanyl”:

The timing could not have been worse. Months into decriminalization, Mexican drug cartels ratcheted up the flow of fentanyl across the border and up the Interstate 5 corridor, where it flooded onto city streets, plunging prices to less than a dollar a pill. As lockdown despair from the Covid-19 pandemic deepened, the killing of George Floyd sparked monthslong racial justice protests that turned violent and engulfed parts of downtown. With police turning a blind eye, Portland became a honeypot for local and out-of-state addicts to score cheap dope and use it freely.…

Overdose deaths, retail theft, and homicides surged to record levels, running law enforcement and first responders ragged. “We’d revive the same people, and revive them again and again,” says Dave Friedericks, a veteran paramedic and firefighter whose downtown station responded to 36 overdose calls in a 48-hour period in the summer of 2023.

A nuclear bomb might not have been as devastating.

Clichés like “war zone” or “apocalyptic” or “a cancer” have slowly gone from evocative hyperbole to actually descriptive to possibly inadequate. Communities aren’t just in trouble, they are dying, losing great bleeding chunks of themselves. The scale of the death and suffering is inconceivable.

And it’s disturbing and disappointing that Portland’s progressive approach backfired the way it did.

Closer to home: in the early 1990s, when I was going to school in Victoria, it was already clear that there was a serious problem with homelessness and poverty in that sleepy, quaint downtown, but it was isolated stain on what was otherwise one of the nicest-seeming places in the world … and I naively assumed that it would get solved. Nope! It has progressed to a gangrenous limb that touches anyone who lives, works, or visits there. It is much worse than anything I feared, even in my cynical and pessimistic youth.