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Oregon declares state of emergency over fentanyl crisis

Facts:

* Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, alongside the Mayor of Portland Ted Wheeler
and Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, declared a
90-day state of emergency in downtown Portland on Tuesday over
concerns about the drug fentanyl. The declaration will see all
three levels of government allocate resources and establish a "command center" to address the issue.
* The command center will connect drug addicts with first responders and give them access to resources, including drug treatment
centers, behavioral health doctors, and food benefits. The Portland police will also partner with the state police in patrolling
the city's downtown for sales of fentanyl.
* Over the 90 days, the Multnomah County Health Department will promote public education campaigns, including on public transit and
billboards, as well as in digital and audio media, among others. Portland, for its part, will coordinate with the county in
"conducting outreach on the streets" and "distribut[ing] and
train[ing] partners on the use of Narcan."
* Oregon has seen a growing number of overdose deaths since
decriminalizing small amounts of most drugs in 2020, and now has the
most synthetic opioid overdoses in the country and the third-highest amount of all overdose deaths, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
* As opioid drug overdoses in the state increased from 738 in 2021 to
956 a year later, Gov. Kotek has also proposed
recriminalizing public drug use and giving police more resources to combat drug dealing. She also wants to expand services to
help the homeless.
* Fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times as potent as heroin and roughly
100 times as strong as morphine, reportedly killed over
107K people in the US between January 2019 and June 2022 — two-thirds of which were linked to synthetic opioids. According to the
CDC, there are more than 150 daily deaths due to synthetic opioids.

Spin:

Democratic narrative: The health and safety factors at play have never
been lost on the government, but the rate at which this drug
has infected the streets has been difficult for everyone to catch up with.
The danger of fentanyl is unlike any other drug, which is
why each level of government in the state has been developing coordinated programs to combat the issue. This emergency declaration is
Oregon's strongest anti-fentanyl effort yet, and it will also be the most impactful.

Republican narrative: All of the Democrats' favorite policies have come together to create this tragedy. After the city defunded the
police in 2020, drug use and homelessness skyrocketed, prompting them to increase the police budget by over $5M a year later. And
after they decriminalized drugs, both drug addiction and overdose deaths soared through the roof. This is a manmade crisis that
could've been avoided if the state, county, and city governments had
chosen common sense over politics.

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On Thu, 1 Feb 2024 14:30:53 +0100, D <[email protected]> wrote:

Fentanyl... reportedly killed over 107K people in the US
between January 2019 and June 2022....

Not sure how to view this for those who knew what they were taking.

Spin:

Spin changes to suit current perceptions, etc.

In early days of Republican party, for instance, they were
anti-slavery, but these days, they would support Jim Crowism

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On Thu, 1 Feb 2024, JAB wrote:

On Thu, 1 Feb 2024 14:30:53 +0100, D <[email protected]> wrote:

Fentanyl... reportedly killed over 107K people in the US
between January 2019 and June 2022....

Not sure how to view this for those who knew what they were taking.

Spin:

Spin changes to suit current perceptions, etc.

In early days of Republican party, for instance, they were
anti-slavery, but these days, they would support Jim Crowism

Thank you for your opinion. I enjoy improvethenews.org due to it's spins
on current events. Hope someone else might enjoy it too.

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On Fri, 2 Feb 2024 10:34:03 +0100, D <[email protected]> wrote:

I enjoy improvethenews.org due to it's spins
on current events.

Yes....for those not aware, go to this site,
https://www.improvethenews.org/
and select an article. When at an article, the Spin analysis will be
given, along with cites to news articles.


About this site:

Verity is a free news site created by the Improve the News Foundation
(ITN), an apolitical American non-profit. It aims to counter misuses
of artificial intelligence that have resulted in a distorted online
news environment, where alternative facts often overshadow scientific
truths, and fractured narratives contribute to social discord.
...
...
The Improve the News Foundation was founded in October 2020 as a
501c(3) non-profit organization in the United States by MIT Prof. Max
Tegmark. Its team initially consisted of MIT researchers, but has
since grown to include a broad group of international collaborators.
The Foundation's mission is to empower people to rise above
controversies and understand the world in a nuanced way. Its vision is
a world with less hate and more understanding, where society has
reasoned compassion, constructive discourse, and well-informed
decision-making
...
...
The free information sources on our site are powered by
machine-learning (ML) and crowdsourcing. We use ML to classify all
articles by topics for the news aggregator topics. We also use ML to
group together articles about the same story, so that you can compare
and contrast their perspectives using our sliders. To produce a story
page (example here), our editorial team then extracts both the key
facts (that all articles agree on) and the key narratives (where the
articles differ). We also do academic research on media bias - here is
a paper on how media bias can be objectively measured from raw data
without human input.

https://www.improvethenews.org/about

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