Commuters are the ones paying the price for anarchy on the transit system in liberal Portland, Oregon. If you don’t have a car to get around the city with, you’re literally taking your life in your hands each and every time you board a bus or train. Fentanyl is much more deadly to innocent bystanders than careless users, who are already falling over in record numbers.
Death by transit overdose
Even if they aren’t sickened or killed, transit riders in Portland are subjected to frequent delays and disruptions in service. All because Democrat city leadership abdicated legal responsibility to their citizens, fully embracing Antifa® sponsored anarchy. Drugs have been “decriminalized” there, even the hard ones.
Instead of cracking down on sales and supply, they have “forced the city’s public transportation to take new precautions to protect passengers, reportedly leaving commuters battling mass delays and disruptions as a result.” Unless you are a homeless drug addict, any other city in America seems to be a better place to live. Local merchants have been learning that lesson the hard way.
The transit administrators seem powerless to do much for ensuring passenger safety. “With a surge in fentanyl, trains in the Oregon city are stopping to air out cars every time an operator or passenger reports suspected smoking of an illicit drug.” That’s pretty often.
Portland commuters battling mass transit delays as trains, buses forced to air out fentanyl smoke https://t.co/sJ3ORZEw54
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 22, 2023
“Fentanyl use on the trains is very common,” Portland drug counselor Kevin Dahlgren confirms to Fox. The most “terrifying” risk is “traces of the drug being touched by passengers.”
“The risk is after a person smokes it, they usually will nod out. When they nod out, they oftentimes drop what they were using.” That’s what makes things dangerous for anyone on the transit system, especially toddlers.
“Even a couple of milligrams of fentanyl can be fatal. They let go of the tinfoil, oftentimes it’ll just lie in the seat next to you. And so you could sit on it, you could touch your hands on it, and it’s a lethal dose.”
Passenger issues and disruption
The TriMet MAX transit system “logged 460 ‘passenger issues‘ and a minimum of 150 hours of disruption on trains and buses as of March 14.” During a two-week period in 2022, all of “30 passenger issues recorded except one involved smoking or suspected of smoking illicit drugs, including fentanyl.”
TriMet liaison Roberta Altstadt pins “the increase of drug use on trains and buses” on the riders. It’s “a reflection of wider use throughout the community, resulting in an air out policy that began in April 2022.”
Two of the incidents reviewed by investigators at a local news outlet revealed that at least two of the transit company’s train operators “declined to continue their shifts after the 15-minute air out window, reporting they weren’t feeling well.” Getting your train driver stoned for free isn’t a nice thing.
Following hundreds of violent attacks on @trimet public transport drivers in Portland, Ore., its union blasted leftist @DAMikeSchmidt for the lack of prosecutions. Last week a bus driver was stabbed & had to escape through the window. In December a toddler https://t.co/E8mS0FabiL…
— Andy Ngô
(@MrAndyNgo) March 22, 2023
In similarly progressive Seattle, “a city bus driver warned fentanyl exposure from passengers made him so sick that he had to take medical leave for months, and he was repeatedly sent back to work after doctors refused to treat him because his claim would not be accepted.”
Stevon Williams drives for the King County Metro transit company. “It’s a terrible feeling,” he relates. “I’m responsible for those passengers and, sometimes, there are kids on the bus. We have a school contract, so we have all children on these buses going back and forth to school during the daytime, but at nighttime it’s dangerous.”
The fentanyl smoke, he describes, “makes my vision blurred, and the smell is terrible, and I immediately get overwhelming migraine headaches that today I still have constantly.“
