I’m in despair over this, both your tragic photos of a woman apparently exhausted, taking a nap, but really soon dead, as well as “John’s” email. It’s been 40 years since I worked at the detox and chemical dependency treatment center that my dad worked at in the fifties. Minneapolis was an early adoptee of Alcoholics Anonymous and the “disease concept, an approach that didn’t require Christianity, but required full abstinence and sponsors. But I’ve never known how 12 Steps could touch fentanyl or opioids. So when we arrived at people dropping like birds in full view of pedestrians that don’t even scare us or move us to action, we are in serious trouble as a society. Now I accidentally wiped this comment clear off the iPad, but I’ll just hit send before it happens again because I don’t know, don’t have an endpoint. Thanks Nancy. Hang in there. Theo.
"But I’ve never known how 12 Steps could touch fentanyl or opioids." Bingo!
Having been through a rehab program at the Minnesota-based Hazelden, I am of the view that AA's ideology does require the belief in an entity outside one's self with the ability to direct one's will. That's what the Big Book and 12 steps boil down to. Otherwise, when an AA member makes the Step 3 decision to turn their will and their life over to the care of God as they understand him, all they're doing dealing with themselves.
How many people who adhere to the 12 steps understand this? Who knows? It's likely that some or all of the benefit from AA comes not from the Christian ideology behind the program but from the support they receive from a group of people in a similar predicament to theirs. Since I don't believe in the existence of a power outside myself that can take charge of my will, and I tend to remain a stranger in any group I join, AA is not for me. To me, AA is like burning sage to cure a broken arm.
Be that as it may, the mental health profession and the medical sciences have failed to produce a form of therapy or a type of medication that is universally recognized as "curing" addiction. Doctors, therapists and pharmaceutical companies have to do a better job of developing a treatment for addiction.
Of course, until the so-called "harm reduction" approach to dealing with addiction is discredited and abandoned, there will still be those who treat addiction as a culture and addicts as a community who must be respected and never, ever made to do anything they do not want to do.
I hear you. Burning sage for a broken arm is a great analogy. Hazelden has been big business in Minnesota for so long I can’t even remember its scandals. Anyway, a lot of recovering folks in AA credit its accountability with friends, sponsorship, etc., but you know all that, I’m sure. The atheists who swear by it, yadda yadda. I’m the farthest thing from a spokesperson, not even an addict myself. I just wonder what do people in recovery believe in. Seems nowadays all my young friends becoming therapists in both mental health and chemical dependency .. what do they prescribe?
"The city is dead and decaying and evidence of the emptiness of the radical leftist ideology of the black bloc and those who excuse them . . ."
This is one of the few times I've encountered a piece that correctly places the blame for the nihilist war on property and law and order in Portland in 2020-21. Anarchist groupings operating under names such as the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front used Twitter like a virtual guerilla camp to incite one another and launch a wave of direct actions that caused millions of dollars of property damage.
By day anonymous anarchists would post the date, time and place of their staging areas on Twitter, and at night they'd show up, always clad in black bloc attire, to rampage through the streets, setting dumpsters on fire to create road blocks, breaking windows, tagging buildings and intimidating or even assaulting members of the public who dared try to capture their crimes on video. They left behind inarticulate scrawls to signal their maximalist, nonnegotiable demands such as the abolition of prisons and police. This went on from June 2020 until at least January 2021.
The best Portland's somnolent and diminished media could do was report the next day that "demonstrators," "protesters" or perhaps even "groups" had turned violent, causing the police to declare a riot and detain a handful of people. Portland's hapless mayor, Ted Wheeler, likewise failed to assign responsibility for the violence where it belonged for far too long. To this day Andy Ngô stubbornly refuses to call leftist rioters anything other than "Antifa." At least one civic organization promoted the notion that most people who took to the streets were peaceful citizens exercising their first amendment rights.
Who knows how long the direct actions would have continued if law enforcement hadn't finally started planting informants amongst the anarchist criminals and if the progressive Multnomah County DA, a criminal justice reformer, hadn't given in to pressure from the establishment and started charging some rioters who'd skated weeks or months earlier under his reckless catch-and-release policy. The latter move provoked howls of outrage and charges of unfairness from anarchists or their allies in media. When Ted Wheeler finally came to terms with reality and asked the public to report people to law enforcement who were out and about dressed in the unmistakable black bloc uniform, enablers on social media promptly denounced the Mayor for inciting vigilantism. Activist reporters in the local media parroted them.
It beggars belief that Portland's elected leaders, reporters, and members of law enforcement did not know at the time that anarchists were responsible for planning, inciting and carrying out the massive violence against real estate. However, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no feature pieces about the anarchists and their direct actions along the lines of The Oregonian’s unusually detailed reporting on the Red House debacle of 2020. Didn’t anyone at Willamette Week or the ultra-left Portland Mercury know someone who knew someone who was in the thick of things and would have gladly sat for an anonymous interview? The public still has no idea who the principal players were, much less where and how they operated. Likewise, while the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation front still has a website that provides some insights into their thinking ( https://youthliberation.noblogs.org/post/category/commentaries/ ), no outsider has explained the ideologies and objectives of the true believers among the planners and perpetrators of the direct actions. Who knows whether the history of that key chapter in Portland’s decline to its current sorry state will ever be written.
Yes, many questions, few answers, the latter by design. There's no plan for building (that's for other people), but destroying? Yes. On the menu. I've published, oh, probably 100 pieces about the issues your talking about; here's a link to 30, after the post the feature reposted in full, "The Dream of the 90s Died in Portland." We out here reporting! https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/dispatch-from-portland-2022
At the moment I have two burning Oregon-related questions. I'm not expecting answers in reply.
1.The FDA has not approved psilocybin as a safe and effective therapy for anything, including anxiety, depression, PTSD and trauma.
In that case, why isn’t the FDA or some other agency of the federal government intervening to ban the so-called "therapeutic use" of shrooms or prohibiting the ubiquitous health claims by those involved in the psilocybin program that it is a therapy for various mental health conditions?
Oregon voters didn't nullify the laws and regulations the FDA administers and enforces. As far as I know, the slipshod program the voters approved didn't even make it possible to use data about trippers and their experiences in clinical trials. As a result, Oregonians are being used as guinea pigs, only not the kind who contribute to science.
If such claims were being made for any other chemical or supplement that not been approved by the FDA, the promoters would be inviting an enforcement action.
When I spoke to a representative of the FDA in its Seattle office, she suggested I contact the Oregon Health Authority. LOL, since the OHA oversees the psilocybin program.
2. Several women who have resigned from positions as assistant DAs at Multnomah County prosecutor Michael Schmidt's office have alleged that he has engaged in sex-based employment discrimination against them and other women in his organization.
In a related vein, in 2021 Schmidt brought in Ernie Warren, a leading black criminal defense attorney, to take a big job leading a team to examine wrongful convictions and review prison sentences as part of Schmidt's criminal justice reform agenda.
Within less than two months Schmidt announced Warren’s departure. No reason was given, but Schmidt implied that the problem was bad chemistry between the two.
Not long afterwards, it was reported that the new hire had made disparaging remarks at a meeting about a female lawyer's professional attire. The implication was he'd been fired for creating a hostile work environment for the attorney. One of the assistant DAs who resigned noisily said that Schmidt should have known before hiring Warren that he had a reputation in the legal community for being a problem around women.
The question is: Why hasn't it been announced that Schmidt and/or Warren are being investigated over the allegations? Wouldn't such claims ordinarily result in an internal investigation?
I’m in despair over this, both your tragic photos of a woman apparently exhausted, taking a nap, but really soon dead, as well as “John’s” email. It’s been 40 years since I worked at the detox and chemical dependency treatment center that my dad worked at in the fifties. Minneapolis was an early adoptee of Alcoholics Anonymous and the “disease concept, an approach that didn’t require Christianity, but required full abstinence and sponsors. But I’ve never known how 12 Steps could touch fentanyl or opioids. So when we arrived at people dropping like birds in full view of pedestrians that don’t even scare us or move us to action, we are in serious trouble as a society. Now I accidentally wiped this comment clear off the iPad, but I’ll just hit send before it happens again because I don’t know, don’t have an endpoint. Thanks Nancy. Hang in there. Theo.
Thank you for reading, and it affecting you so is very much why I wanted to publish John's note. We all need to look, to not become inured x
"But I’ve never known how 12 Steps could touch fentanyl or opioids." Bingo!
Having been through a rehab program at the Minnesota-based Hazelden, I am of the view that AA's ideology does require the belief in an entity outside one's self with the ability to direct one's will. That's what the Big Book and 12 steps boil down to. Otherwise, when an AA member makes the Step 3 decision to turn their will and their life over to the care of God as they understand him, all they're doing dealing with themselves.
How many people who adhere to the 12 steps understand this? Who knows? It's likely that some or all of the benefit from AA comes not from the Christian ideology behind the program but from the support they receive from a group of people in a similar predicament to theirs. Since I don't believe in the existence of a power outside myself that can take charge of my will, and I tend to remain a stranger in any group I join, AA is not for me. To me, AA is like burning sage to cure a broken arm.
Be that as it may, the mental health profession and the medical sciences have failed to produce a form of therapy or a type of medication that is universally recognized as "curing" addiction. Doctors, therapists and pharmaceutical companies have to do a better job of developing a treatment for addiction.
Of course, until the so-called "harm reduction" approach to dealing with addiction is discredited and abandoned, there will still be those who treat addiction as a culture and addicts as a community who must be respected and never, ever made to do anything they do not want to do.
I hear you. Burning sage for a broken arm is a great analogy. Hazelden has been big business in Minnesota for so long I can’t even remember its scandals. Anyway, a lot of recovering folks in AA credit its accountability with friends, sponsorship, etc., but you know all that, I’m sure. The atheists who swear by it, yadda yadda. I’m the farthest thing from a spokesperson, not even an addict myself. I just wonder what do people in recovery believe in. Seems nowadays all my young friends becoming therapists in both mental health and chemical dependency .. what do they prescribe?
Absolutely devastating
Damn.
"The city is dead and decaying and evidence of the emptiness of the radical leftist ideology of the black bloc and those who excuse them . . ."
This is one of the few times I've encountered a piece that correctly places the blame for the nihilist war on property and law and order in Portland in 2020-21. Anarchist groupings operating under names such as the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front used Twitter like a virtual guerilla camp to incite one another and launch a wave of direct actions that caused millions of dollars of property damage.
By day anonymous anarchists would post the date, time and place of their staging areas on Twitter, and at night they'd show up, always clad in black bloc attire, to rampage through the streets, setting dumpsters on fire to create road blocks, breaking windows, tagging buildings and intimidating or even assaulting members of the public who dared try to capture their crimes on video. They left behind inarticulate scrawls to signal their maximalist, nonnegotiable demands such as the abolition of prisons and police. This went on from June 2020 until at least January 2021.
The best Portland's somnolent and diminished media could do was report the next day that "demonstrators," "protesters" or perhaps even "groups" had turned violent, causing the police to declare a riot and detain a handful of people. Portland's hapless mayor, Ted Wheeler, likewise failed to assign responsibility for the violence where it belonged for far too long. To this day Andy Ngô stubbornly refuses to call leftist rioters anything other than "Antifa." At least one civic organization promoted the notion that most people who took to the streets were peaceful citizens exercising their first amendment rights.
Who knows how long the direct actions would have continued if law enforcement hadn't finally started planting informants amongst the anarchist criminals and if the progressive Multnomah County DA, a criminal justice reformer, hadn't given in to pressure from the establishment and started charging some rioters who'd skated weeks or months earlier under his reckless catch-and-release policy. The latter move provoked howls of outrage and charges of unfairness from anarchists or their allies in media. When Ted Wheeler finally came to terms with reality and asked the public to report people to law enforcement who were out and about dressed in the unmistakable black bloc uniform, enablers on social media promptly denounced the Mayor for inciting vigilantism. Activist reporters in the local media parroted them.
It beggars belief that Portland's elected leaders, reporters, and members of law enforcement did not know at the time that anarchists were responsible for planning, inciting and carrying out the massive violence against real estate. However, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no feature pieces about the anarchists and their direct actions along the lines of The Oregonian’s unusually detailed reporting on the Red House debacle of 2020. Didn’t anyone at Willamette Week or the ultra-left Portland Mercury know someone who knew someone who was in the thick of things and would have gladly sat for an anonymous interview? The public still has no idea who the principal players were, much less where and how they operated. Likewise, while the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation front still has a website that provides some insights into their thinking ( https://youthliberation.noblogs.org/post/category/commentaries/ ), no outsider has explained the ideologies and objectives of the true believers among the planners and perpetrators of the direct actions. Who knows whether the history of that key chapter in Portland’s decline to its current sorry state will ever be written.
Yes, many questions, few answers, the latter by design. There's no plan for building (that's for other people), but destroying? Yes. On the menu. I've published, oh, probably 100 pieces about the issues your talking about; here's a link to 30, after the post the feature reposted in full, "The Dream of the 90s Died in Portland." We out here reporting! https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/dispatch-from-portland-2022
Great work. I'm really glad you're on the beat!
At the moment I have two burning Oregon-related questions. I'm not expecting answers in reply.
1.The FDA has not approved psilocybin as a safe and effective therapy for anything, including anxiety, depression, PTSD and trauma.
In that case, why isn’t the FDA or some other agency of the federal government intervening to ban the so-called "therapeutic use" of shrooms or prohibiting the ubiquitous health claims by those involved in the psilocybin program that it is a therapy for various mental health conditions?
Oregon voters didn't nullify the laws and regulations the FDA administers and enforces. As far as I know, the slipshod program the voters approved didn't even make it possible to use data about trippers and their experiences in clinical trials. As a result, Oregonians are being used as guinea pigs, only not the kind who contribute to science.
If such claims were being made for any other chemical or supplement that not been approved by the FDA, the promoters would be inviting an enforcement action.
When I spoke to a representative of the FDA in its Seattle office, she suggested I contact the Oregon Health Authority. LOL, since the OHA oversees the psilocybin program.
2. Several women who have resigned from positions as assistant DAs at Multnomah County prosecutor Michael Schmidt's office have alleged that he has engaged in sex-based employment discrimination against them and other women in his organization.
In a related vein, in 2021 Schmidt brought in Ernie Warren, a leading black criminal defense attorney, to take a big job leading a team to examine wrongful convictions and review prison sentences as part of Schmidt's criminal justice reform agenda.
Within less than two months Schmidt announced Warren’s departure. No reason was given, but Schmidt implied that the problem was bad chemistry between the two.
Not long afterwards, it was reported that the new hire had made disparaging remarks at a meeting about a female lawyer's professional attire. The implication was he'd been fired for creating a hostile work environment for the attorney. One of the assistant DAs who resigned noisily said that Schmidt should have known before hiring Warren that he had a reputation in the legal community for being a problem around women.
The question is: Why hasn't it been announced that Schmidt and/or Warren are being investigated over the allegations? Wouldn't such claims ordinarily result in an internal investigation?