Substances

[Jennifer Myrle manages a wine and coffee bar downtown. “At four in the afternoon the streets can feel like dealer central”, she said. “There’s no point calling the cops”]

I read this morning that Portland, Oregon is into its third year of more or less decriminalising possession of various recreational substances, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, as a better way of dealing with a very real problem with addiction and addicts than criminal justice.

One result is a great deal of unsightly drug related activity on the streets of Portland. I dare say the city has become something of a magnet for both users and addicts. And while there are detox and rehabilitation facilities, there don't seem to be anywhere like enough of them. Perhaps not all the money saved on police, courts and prisons is getting through.

It will be interesting to see how they get on over the next few years.

In the margins I get to read about a coffee-wine bar called Forte Portland, snapped above and to be found at reference 2. Not the sort of place we have in London - not least because we don't have that sort of space to spare. But also because we don't tend to do places doing coffee, booze and snacks in comfortable surroundings. And in this particular place you get a lot of wine-babble about their local wines too. Which is not going to work here in the UK: our wine just wouldn't stand the heat.

There was talk of addicts sprawling on Forte couches, and, jumping to conclusions, I decided that Forte was the name of a brand of furniture, rather than a brand of coffee shop. Investigating, I find that Forte is indeed a big brand of Polish furniture, as at reference 3, specialising in chipboard and flatpack, although they do also do what we call sofas. I dare say there are plenty of softwood forests in Poland, which makes chipboard a good option. But whether or not these first Forte couches are made by this second Forte remains an open question.

PS 1: like the heroin which it has, to some extent, replaced on the streets, fentanyl is a very useful analgesic, widely used for the management of severe pain. But it is also responsible for a great deal of death by overdose in north America and elsewhere. See reference 4.

PS 2: the usage in the US seems to be to put any punctuation mark following a phrase in quotes inside the closing quote. Very irritating. Amended in the caption above.

References

Reference 1: Scenes From a City That Only Hands Out Tickets for Using Fentanyl: Oregon’s experiment to curb overdoses by decriminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs is in its third year, and life has changed for most everyone in the city of Portland - Jordan Gale, Jan Hoffman, New York Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.forteportland.com/.

Reference 3: https://company.forte.com.pl/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl.