Did you know that progressive Portland has a marijuana free zone? SR didn’t either until a city official dropped by the office with neighborhood maps that outlined the new Drug Impact Area, formerly known as the drug-free zones.
We were shocked to learn that Portland tax-payer money may be used by law enforcement to potentially target and arrest marijuana users in the downtown core for possible exclusion on repeat offenses. The marijuana drug impact area is one of three areas targeting both repeat users, and dealers in downtown. The other two areas are for cocaine and heroin.
As many readers know — SR isn’t crazy about drug-free zones, or drug impact areas. Simply put, we think they have the potential to create systematic profiling, and target people experiencing poverty.
The system can pat itself on the back around these issues all they want, saying they’re getting individuals help through recovery programs, and people are moving on. For the people that have moved on through recovery programs, that’s fantastic. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for many.
We know that there is a direct correlation between the lack of education and employment opportunities for minorities and poor folk in Portland, and the uptick in gang violence and open-air drug dealing. Giving law-enforcement more tools to put people in jail, or to exclude them from certain parts of the city isn’t the answer. In fact, it’s a product of horrible policies that have been played out time and again for decades in urban cores.
Instead of innovative economic measures and harm reduction approaches on the ground — we are left with an ancient broken window philosophy that says you have to target the street level users and dealers. We can think of a million reasons, literally, sitting in jail cells in the United States that says that philosophy is wrong. Not to mention it’s costly, and overwhelmingly slanted towards punishing minorities.
After seeing the maps for the drug impact area, SR made a public records request for a number of documents, guidelines, and protocols related to the new drug policy downtown. The problem is there’s not a lot on paper that exists, in fact, other than an ordinance passed by the city to fund more police on the ground, and to pay for a special District Attorney to oversee the program — there’s hardly anything. It’s one thing for community organizations to respectively disagree with a policy, which we do. It’s another to be left in the dark long after people are starting to be excluded before any kind of guidelines, public process, or education has taken place in our community. It feels yucky, because it is yucky. It’s business as usual.
SR isn’t just blowing hot air. We have outlined on several occasions how to target street corners through a variety of harm reduction models. The current policy will most likely become another embarrassment for the city. A judge (not the one signing the exclusions) will declare this unconstitutional, and/or we’ll see that it targets almost exclusively minorities and poor people.
If we’re wrong, we’ll eat our words on these pages, and be glad to write an apology for taking such a harsh tone. If not, we hope Portland has the leadership to do the same, and change this policy.
Read Portland's "War on Drugs" Impact Area.
