Tyler and Kevin's Big Portland Adventure

 

My Australian bestie Warny found the above video on YouTube, and posted it on his Facebook page, with a comment saying that I, his Yank bestie, live in this city, and he worries about me. It's about 18 minutes long, and well worth a look. If clicking on the image above doesn't open the link, here is the URL.

It elicited a lot of feelings in me, and I wanted to respond with my thoughts, but it would have been too long for a Facebook comment or post, so I'm bringing it here, to my sadly neglected Blogger blog.

I suggest you watch the video first, or the following won't make a lot of sense. I've included the (approximate) times in the video to correspond to my comments.

The YouTuber who posted the video, Tyler Oliveira, is not a professional journalist, but I thought he did a good job with this video. I don't think there are many professional journalists who would interview homeless drug addicts right on the streets. And I don't think there are very many homeless junkies who would talk to a mainstream media journalist. He was respectful with the people he spoke with and did a decent job of explaining the reasons why things have gotten so bad in Portland. Tyler was aided in his investigation by a local life-long Portlander named Kevin Dahlgren, who is a licensed drug and alcohol counselor and homeless advocate with nearly 30 years of experience (I checked). More on Kevin later.

For now, let’s get to my comments on the video itself.

0:04 – The first line of narration from Tyler, and indeed the title of the video, says Portland is the city where “every drug is legal”. At points throughout the video he seems to use the terms “decriminalization” and “legalization” and their variants interchangeably. They are not synonymous. Here’s my take on it. Under decriminalization, a substance is still illegal, but the penalties for personal possession of it are reduced, thus not punishing people who have substance abuse issues with fines and jail time beyond a reasonable amount, if at all. Usually the worst that will happen is the police will confiscate your drugs. Legalization means that a formerly illegal substance is made legal. A good example is marijuana. It is legal in Oregon. Its sale is carefully regulated by the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission. It is also taxed.

0:06 – While Tyler lists some of the ills of the city (“homelessness, drug addiction, crime”) accompanied by a scary klaxon sound, there are some quick cuts showing a purportedly homeless man sitting on a sidewalk handrail, a probable fentanyl addict doing “the nod” (when users become unresponsive and seemingly asleep on their feet while bent forward at the waist), and what appears to be a bonfire at night in the dry pool surrounding a statue, while some people move about in the foreground. I’m pretty sure that the fire scene took place during the protests after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but I can’t be positive. As noted later, there are a few instances of Tyler using footage found elsewhere, no doubt to add some dramatic visuals to his video.

0:16 – There is a quick shot of a man with a monk’s tonsure sleeping sitting on the sidewalk with his back against a building. I see that guy all the time. I don’t know if he has a substance abuse problem, but he’s almost certainly homeless. A quick aside about this man. That forward angle of his head isn’t just because he’s sleeping. It’s always like that. He seems to have some sort of deformity or injury to his spine. He is always looking at the ground. If you see him walking away from you, you might think he was an actual headless man, because his entire head is out of sight. The front view isn’t much better. Seeing that big bald circle of flesh ringed with hair coming at you can be a little unsettling.

0:55 – The first mention of Measure 110, which is discussed at length. I didn’t remember what Measure 110 was, so I looked it up. It was passed in November 2020, and went into effect January 2021. I voted for it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. In short, it decriminalized pretty much all narcotics and hallucinogens. It was supposed to use tax revenue generated by the legal sale of marijuana to fund addiction treatment programs. And indeed, many addiction treatment programs began getting much more money. But soon other state agencies, complaining that their budgets were decreasing, got a bill passed which clawed away some of that money from Measure 110.

At the same time as Measure 110, there was also Measure 109, which legalized the therapeutic use of psylocibin. I also voted for it. It was supposed to be available on a limited basis in centers where trained technicians would administer it and observe you while you got high. This was a state measure, but in the next election cycle, 27 of Oregon’s 36 counties voted to opt out of Measure 109, which the text of Measure 109 allowed them to do. My county, Multnomah, of which Portland is the seat, was one of the nine that upheld the measure. So far, I have not heard of any psylocibin centers opening in the county. There was a mushroom store which opened a block from my house. It wasn’t based upon the proposed model of on-site use only, which surprised me, but I figured they wouldn’t be allowed to sell it if it wasn’t legal. You could just walk in and buy magic mushrooms and take them home. How do I know this? I ain’t saying. However, a couple of months later the police raided it and shut it down. Seems they weren’t operating in accordance with the new law.

But back to Measure 110. So suddenly people were free to use illegal drugs without fear of consequences. Oh, there are still consequences. The wording of the measure reduced fines and sentences, but there was no limit on how much of a substance could be considered as being more than for “personal use”. For example, possession of less than one gram of heroin was reduced from a Class A misdemeanor to the newly created Class E “violation”. Possession of more than a gram of heroin was reduced from a Class B felony to a Class A misdemeanor. The penalties for conviction of these various charges range from a 250 dollar fine to up to a year in jail and a 2,500 dollar fine. It’s curious to me that the law didn’t establish a minimum amount that could be considered “not for personal use”. Seems like most decriminalization or laws I’ve heard of usually do. The law did establish higher penalties for the manufacture or “delivery” (read: “selling”) of various substances.

Interestingly, fentanyl was not included in Measure 110. That’s because it wasn’t really a “thing” yet. Now it’s all the rage. It’s cheap and powerful. The Oregon Legislature addressed the new problem with the passage of Senate Bill 988, which made possession of a gram or more of Fenty a Class A misdemeanor, with higher penalties for manufacture and delivery.

1:03 – There are couple of scenes of people breaking car windows. I don’t think Tyler had the good luck to be able to film either of those incidents. The first one looks like it was captured on a security camera. I can see an Oregon license plate in the first shot. I don’t recognize the location of the second one, so I’ll just have to trust that Tyler found footage of Portland-based “smash and grabs”.

1:14 – Okay. I knew things were bad here in Portland. I live here, after all – right downtown – plus my job is to drive around picking up people like we see in the video. However, I didn’t know things were quite S0 bad before I saw this video. For one thing, I didn’t know homeless camps had “mayors”. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it still blew my mind.

2:22 – It creeped me out to hear Kevin say that there was a homeless camp somewhere in the city that’s rigged up with tripwires attached to shotguns.

I don’t know if a single tent on a sidewalk can be considered a “camp”. I tend to think of camps as several tents in one area. Larger camps are usually tucked under bridges and in other out-of-way places. It’s impossible to avoid the random tents on sidewalks, but you’d have to be crazy (like Kevin) to walk into a major camp. In my experience, the people living on the sidewalks tend to keep to themselves. Maybe they don’t feel safe in the camps. They also may be aware that if they frighten the taxpayers and tourists, they’re more likely to get rousted by the cops. Several weeks ago I went on a ghost tour that visited some of the reportedly most haunted locations in downtown Portland. Our guide, Victoria, does the tours every night, and was talking about how she’s on good terms with local homeless folks. She and her husband did take precautions, however. They had a big dog, and I noticed that Victoria had pepper spray in her fanny pack. Even so, as we passed one tent, Victoria said, “How you doing, Larry?”, and from inside the tent a male voice replied, “Good, Victoria, how are you?”

But the camps still worry me. I recently bought a bicycle, but now I’m afraid to ride on some of the many bike paths in the area, because they’re often lined with homeless tents. Same with hiking trails. Who knows what’s lurking in those woods?

2:37 – When Kevin was listing his many and varied assaults, I thought that if I were him, after the third one I would have gotten a different job. Like, “Fuck all you all homeless motherfuckers. I’m done with you!”

2:43 – Kevin’s brush with near decapitation by machete. Holy crap! I have had a crazy man pointing a machete at me as I walked the mean streets of downtown Portland in the wee hours of the morning on my way to work. It wasn’t fun. You may wonder why I walk around here. Answer: I don’t own a car. I always carry pepper spray and a quick-opening knife, but I’m thinking of adding a taser and a spring-loaded baton to my arsenal.

4:19 – This video answered a question which has been bothering me for some time. That is, why is the open use of drugs so rampant in Portland? It wasn’t like that when I moved here. Of course, used syringes were and still are everywhere. As I mentioned earlier, I had forgotten about Measure 110, which went into effect about the same time Fenty became all the rage. Before 110, I only saw one heroin addict openly shooting up, but he looked so out of it he probably had no idea where he was. Now everywhere you look you see people huddled over their squares of aluminum foil and lighters, with their smoke catching straws or tubes in their mouths. Often I see two people smoking together, since it’s a three-handed job: one to hold the aluminum, one for the lighter, and another to hold the straw. They like to do it on public transportation, especially on the light rail. There are usually no authorities on the train other than the operator locked away safely in his cab. There is no breeze on the train, so it’s an ideal place to control the smoke, especially if you put your coat or blanket over your head. This can be a real problem for the trains’ schedules (not to mention the risk of someone having an open flame onboard), because if it is discovered that someone is smoking fenty on a train, the driver must stop at the next station, open all the doors, usher all the passengers outside, and let the car air out for 15 minutes. I think it’s a bit of an overreaction. I’ve been reading about the possible dangers of second-hand exposure to fenty, and there basically are none. It’s the sort of ignorant hysteria that accompanies every new drug “threat”.  People used to think that marijuana turned users into murderers and rapists.

 

I used to wonder if the sudden increase in people openly using Fenty had something to do with the drug itself, and its effects upon users. No, it was because of Measure 110, which hit the scene at about the same time fenty did.

6:51 – A homeless man mentions “Rapid Response”. I thought this might need a little explanation. Its full name is Rapid Response Bio-Clean. They specialize in things like pathogen abatement, cleaning up hoarding and drug residue, post-mortem and crime scenes. They are contracted with law enforcement to clean up homeless camps when those camps are “swept”. I guess when someone complains enough about a particular camp, the police move everyone out, and Rapid Response cleans up the mess. The whole process can be hard on the homeless people. They are given 72 hours to clear out, and if they haven’t, their stuff is disposed of. It’s not exactly Rapid Response’s fault, although they probably could have chosen not to bid for the contract. There are plenty of such companies around. If it weren’t RR, somebody else would be doing it, and attracting the ire of the homeless and some leftists. More on that later as well.

8:09 – Kevin mentions that the homeless get stolen from more in the shelters than on the streets. I don’t know if that’s true, although it happened to me. I arrived in Portland in August 2019 with only a duffel bag of clothing and a backpack of assorted toiletries and important papers. I was fleeing an unsafe living situation. I didn’t have a job, and no place to stay other than a shelter. I got one of those 91 bunks that Kevin mentioned. We were allowed to keep our belongings in a single crate which was kept locked up in the office of the dormitory area. When we needed to shower or change our clothes, we could get stuff out of our crate. It wasn’t a bad system, but I had too many clothes to fit in the crate, so I had to try to hide the excess in my bunk. It wasn’t long before all those clothes were stolen. Oh, well.

8:59 – When Kevin and Tyler are talking to the young man at the train platform, and Kevin directs him to the shelter right behind him, that shelter is the Portland Rescue Mission, which is where I stayed. It’s a great program, despite the loss of some of my wardrobe. You are expected to be clean and sober to stay there (except in the dormitory area). I didn’t have any substance abuse problems. After about a week in the den of thieves in the basement, when I had passed my background check and drug test, I got a bed in a room upstairs. I still had roommates, but not 90 of them. Soon I got my current job and was able to start saving money to get a place of my own, which I did 5 months later.

10:22 – When Tyler asks Kevin about the chances of accidentally getting dosed with fenty, and Kevin says there’s a “60 percent chance that won’t happen”. I think that’s bullshit, as I alluded to earlier. Kevin is scaremongering. He has a video on his YouTube in which he filmed a woman smoking fenty, and he accidentally inhaled some of the smoke, and all he did was cough and say, “Wow. That’s strong.”

10:30 – When Tyler asks Kevin to tell him about decriminalization of drugs in Portland, for some weird reason this is accompanied by footage of a fire in a street surrounded by police vehicles and people in riot gear holding cameras. I know for a fact that this is from the literal 100 nights of protests in Portland after George Floyd’s murder by the police. I have seen that footage before. What it’s doing here is a mystery. It has nothing to do with the decriminalization of drugs. I think Tyler was looking for juicy footage of mayhem in Portland to punch up his video. This was a poor choice. Not cool, Tyler.

11:00 – Kevin mentions the missing components of Oregon’s drug decriminalization policy: “recovery, detox, treatment”. I think he’s right about this. I’ve already discussed how Measure 110 was supposed to provide for those things, but it hasn’t happened. As the video says, Oregon based its decriminalization on the models of countries like Portugal and the Netherlands, but without already having enough programs in place to offer help to people with substance abuse issues.

11:25 – When they visit what they called “Fentanyl Fountain”, its real name is “Skidmore Fountain”, which is tragically funny, because it sounds so much like “Skid Row”, which is what it is. I call it “Skidmark Fountain”. It’s about a block from the Portland Rescue Mission. In fact, except for the part where they visit the incredible driftwood dwelling on the Willamette River north of downtown, most of the locations in the video are in an area of about 3 blocks wide by 6 blocks long. And just to clarify what Kevin was saying, on weekdays Skidmore Fountain, in Ankeny Square, has probably the highest concentration of homelessness and drug use, but on Friday nights the police and other city workers clear out the unwanted denizens so that vendors can set up their stalls for the Portland Saturday/Sunday Market, which is popular with tourists and yuppies from ritzier neighborhoods. That is where Tyler talked to the merchants in food carts and booths.

11:53 – A man talks about how the drug dealers are “cutting the meth with fentanyl”. This confused me. I am aware that drug dealers will “cut” a drug with a filler to stretch the amount in a unit to increase their profit, but I didn’t understand why they would want to mix two drugs that they could sell separately, and which have very different effects. So I did a little searching and found that it’s the other way around. They cut the fentanyl with meth. It helps to get the meth users more addicted, so they must keep buying more. Horrible. It’s too bad that Measure 110 didn’t also include a plan to have the government regulate the sale of these drugs, like with marijuana, and as was proposed for psylocibin. Regulation would control quality, dosage, and price, while also cutting out an addict’s need to go to unlicensed dealers. It would also help fund the badly needed treatment programs. But then that would be true legalization, and I guess we can’t have that.

12:25 – When Tyler asks the plump dumpling monger about her views on decriminalization’s impact on downtown, she just pauses and then says, “I hope you guys have an awesome day.” What a strange response. Did she vote for 110 and now regrets it but is unwilling to admit she might have made a mistake? Is she afraid of offending someone? If so, who? Odd.

12:34 – Right after his brusque dismissal by the dumpling woman, Tyler says to Kevin that there seems to be some “general resilience". At least that’s what it sounded like to me. If he did say “resilience”, I can’t help but think that he must have meant “resistance”, or maybe “reluctance”.

12:49 – One interviewee says that he thinks decriminalization is a good thing, because the jails aren’t filling up with junkies, and I think that’s a valid point. The people who should be in jail for controlled substances are the manufacturers and dealers, not the people who use them. Obviously, not everyone shares this view. There appears to be a recall effort being mounted against the Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt. There is a large billboard downtown showing Schmidt’s smiling face, with the words “Portland is a Schmidt Show”. It then lists some of the perceived problems in the city that whoever paid for the billboard is blaming on Schmidt, which include “low prosecution of crimes”, and “empty jail beds”. The “empty jail beds” got to me. Just because you have a jail, you don’t have to fill it up.  And you don’t need to fill it up with people who have only committed self-harming crimes, like drug use.

13:30 – The woman, Katherine, who says her parent’s threw her out because she’s queer. I feel bad for her, but she also seems like a bit of whiner. She talks about it being impossible to get identification when you’re homeless. When I was in the rescue mission, there were agencies – both governmental and private – which helped people get identification. This usually started with accessing your birth certificate. I hope those programs are still in place, and if so, that someone tells Katherine about them. As an aside, I think birth certificates are sort of a silly basis for identifying anyone. They may be “official”, but there’s really no way to prove that the person requesting the birth certificate is the person on the certificate. It's not like they have your picture or fingerprints on them.

14:38 – The explosion in the tent fire. Homeless tents and camps burn frequently. I can’t blame folks for wanting fire for heat or cooking, but they often do it right inside their nylon tents or shelters made of pallets and plastic tarp, or maybe they’re started by smoking fenty. Bad idea. One day I was driving a bus route which serviced a stop on an overpass above a light rail line. As I approached, there was black smoke billowing out from both sides of the bridge abutment. I radioed it in, and then stuck around for a bit to see if anyone needed help. The fire was in a homeless encampment under the overpass. Stuff was exploding, probably propane tanks.

I didn’t think it was likely that Tyler just happened to catch an exploding tent fire, and I wondered if it was faked, or footage found somewhere else. As it turns out, the footage of the explosion is real. It’s from Kevin’s YouTube channel, and he did indeed happen to be there with a camera when it happened. It scared the bejesus out of him and his crew.

15:00 – When they’re talking to the woman sitting outside a tent, she mentions a drug she called “blues”. I had to look that up. Blues refers to fentanyl pills, which are usually blue. I wondered if that is why her hands and forearms were stained blue. From handling this substance?

15:44 – “The Viper”. This was a horrible section of the video. The thought that there is a serial rapist and possible murderer freely stalking the homeless camps filled me with despair and disgust. It made me think that Portland needs a Batman. However, I have heard that not all the fires in homeless camps are started by the denizens themselves, but by vigilantes. If someone takes it into their head(s) to do something about the unhoused population and the drug addicts, where will it end? With a “kill ‘em all…let god sort ‘em out” mentality?

15:59 – The scene of the “hundred RV’s” is no exaggeration. I know exactly where that spot is. I’ve driven through it frequently on one of the bus routes. It’s located in an area sandwiched between the western end of the Portland International Airport, a golf course, a National Guard depot, and the Columbia River Correctional Facility – a state prison. It’s not a happy place, and for that reason it’s one of my least favorite routes to drive.

Sometimes the residents of this street have extension cords crossing the road, from someone with a generator to those less fortunate. In the video you can catch a glimpse of a person walking or standing in the useless left-turn lane down the middle of the street. This is a frequent occurrence. Sometimes visitors (probably people buying or selling drugs) park in that middle lane. The speed limit there is 45 MPH (72 km/h for my foreign friends) but I’m reluctant to drive that fast for fear of a pedestrian stumbling into my path.

17:37 – Small nitpick. When Kevin and Tyler are viewing the homeless structures on the river, Tyler says “ocean view”. As I mentioned earlier, it’s the Willamette River.

That’s it for the color commentary. Now, a bit about Kevin, and “the left”.

I was having a hard time getting a fix on Kevin. In this video, I thought a lot of what he said made sense. I did, however, think it was a little strange that he kept exhorting the addicts he spoke with to try to get into a shelter, but then he also said disparaging things about the shelters, like the theft and lack of air-conditioning. I don’t know about the other shelters, but PRM was air-conditioned. Perhaps he was just being pragmatic because he knows there aren’t any better options currently.

I also watched some videos of Kevin being interviewed on television news programs, and again most of what he said seemed rational and logical. In addition to his views on Measure 110, which we’ve already heard, he also thinks that Portland’s “housing first” model of dealing with homelessness is not going to work. They touched on this a bit in Tyler’s video. I don’t think Kevin is opposed to housing the homeless, but he says that if you just put someone with behavioral health and substance abuse issues into housing, but don’t provide for addressing their issues, it won’t work. Some people are so sick and unable to care for themselves that they are probably likely to trash or destroy the housing. A person who is used to having a fire inside their tent might burn down an entire building, risking lives and making people homeless again.

The reason I was initially confused by Kevin’s conflicting actions and words is because I made the mistake of thinking that because he wants to help the homeless, he must be liberal. It is now apparent to me that he is not.

It was when I visited Kevin’s own website and his YouTube channel that I felt like I was entering a rabbit hole. He has about 34 videos, 5 of which have “Antifa” in the titles. I wondered what his beef with Antifa was. The videos themselves don’t offer much explanation, and the descriptions only a little more.

When the George Floyd protests started, it was at heart a Black Lives Matter movement, as it should be. Then anarchists and Antifa got involved, which made sense because they share similar goals, like defunding/reforming/abolishing the police. Many people feel that the predominantly white leftists co-opted the movement, and I think that may be true. 100 nights of protests changed nothing and left the city a mess from which it hasn’t fully recovered. In-fighting amongst the many factions of the leftists’, and conflicting goals and tactics with BLM caused the movement to fizzle out. Of course, the pandemic, fenty, and Measure 110 also played their parts in the current sad state of the city.

The left wants to help the homeless, but it tends to be a “hands off” type of help, in the form of hand-outs and “harm reduction”, such as needle exchanges and clean crack pipes. The more extreme leftists seem to feel that anyone telling someone what they should do is bad, such as Kevin encouraging people to seek out a shelter. Kevin isn’t entirely blameless, either. He was president of a homeless advocacy group called We Heart Seattle, which also opened a We Heart Portland branch. They would clean up garbage at homeless camps, but not the way Rapid Response does. They were, however, accused of being rather heavy-handed at times. One volunteer was seen entering a tent without permission. The founder of the organization, Andrea Suarez, was overheard comparing the homeless to “rats and dogs”. In another interview she likened herself to Mother Theresa. This may be why “Antifa” hates her, Kevin, and We Heart Seattle/Portland. His videos never present any clear evidence that the people who confront him or do things he doesn’t like are Antifa. We just must take his word for it.

I’ve watched his videos, his interviews, and read the articles he’s written about homelessness and addiction, two for The Spectator, and one for the New York Post. According to the Media Bias/Fact Check website, those are both “center-right” publications. He criticizes what he calls liberal and Democratic ideas such as Measure 110 and Housing First for the current state of emergency. He has the conservative mindset of thinking that anyone left of center (or who disagrees with him) is “Antifa”.

The thing that struck me most about his videos is that he allowed the homeless and addicts he interviewed to do his speaking for him. One woman even says that she has been denied housing because she’s white. Kevin doesn’t challenge that in any way. He even made it the title of the video. And he doesn’t have any disclaimer on his videos saying something like “the views of the interviewees do not necessarily represent…”. I can’t help but think that he chose to post those interviews because he agreed with them, without having to come out and say it himself.

I can only conclude that Kevin’s advocacy for the homeless and addicts are popular with conservatives because he challenges the current approach to the problems in liberal cities like Portland and Seattle. I admit the left isn’t always correct, even though I’m a well-educated godless liberal. Decriminalization and Housing First are good starts, but they must be coupled with treatment, support, and some expectation of responsibility from those being helped to succeed. I agree with Kevin on those points, but my overall impression of him is that I don’t trust him.