Extra! Extra!

In making you’re holiday weekend plans, don’t forget to pick up your new edition of Street Roots. Vendors will be out there rain or shine Friday morning and throughout the weekend with the new issues. Here’s what’s headed your way:

Home again: Amanda Waldroupe follows up on a rare exception in the affordable housing world – the return of displaced residents after a massive rehabilitation of Section 8 housing units. It’s a look at the effort put into preserving affordable housing, but also about what makes a home for one man who just recently returned to The Admiral Park Apartments.

A world shared: Representatives of street papers from around the globe gather in Melbourne, Australia to share skills, aspirations. Joanne Zuhl reports.

Sex and assisted living: New research uncovers a surprising sexual twist on nursing home life, and the complicated issues it stirs up.

Drug War policies need a stint in harm reduction: A new comprehensive review of 20 years of scientific literature reveals just how dismal our war on drugs has been.

Conspiring to change history: A book review of “Voodoo Histories, The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History” by David Aaronovitch.

Plus, columnist Art Garcia offers up his final look back at prison life, while columnist Ruth Kovacs looks forward with those only days away from release. It’s all in the new edition of Street Roots, lovingly displayed by your local neighborhood vendor. Thank you!

Storm Large talks mental illness, drugs, the streets and why it’s all fit to print in her upcoming book

By Joanne Zuhl, Staff Writer

When Storm Large was 9 years old, a doctor told her that she would go crazy in her 20s.

And in a way, she did — crazy as a young teenager, tearing off from home and hitting the streets, experiencing everything New England parents don’t want their teen-age daughters experiencing. She crafted her own curriculum of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll and graduated with a degree in human nature that has served her well in the world of popular entertainment.

She has not, however, succumbed to the mental illness that plagued her mother throughout Large’s life. She became its student, looking for reassurance she would not develop the schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or any of the afflictions applied to her mom. She got on with her life, went to school, crafted a popular career on stage and screen. Her mother is dead now, and Large is just shy of her 41st birthday, so perhaps it’s time for all those memories of mental institutions, suicide attempts and the occasional poisoning to be boxed up and shelved for good.

Or — they could be turned into a wildly successful theatrical production for the world to see, which is what Large did in “Crazy Enough.” Her unrestrained, autobiographical performance played to sold-out crowds in Portland, including many in the audience with their own stories of living with mental illness. A version of the play will be performed at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, later this year, and it’s also being refined for a possible staging in New York for the fall of 2011.

She’s now writing a book about growing up with a mentally ill parent and its effect on her and her family. And like her performances and her life, you can expect that Large will pull no punches. Her youth was a mix of abusive living and opportunity, and — with hard work and talent — opportunity won out. It took her all the way to the 2006 reality TV show “Rock Star Supernova,” and Storm, the Portland Icon, became Storm, the superstar getting chased in airports for autographs with fans literally crying for her attention.

Back in Portland, her performances continue to pack houses, often as benefits for local causes. And she’s fiercely front and center when it comes to gay rights and the promotion of the arts — not always to everyone’s applause. In between, she keeps working on her book, which is what she was focused on in a Southeast Portland Café recently when we sat down to talk.

Joanne Zuhl: What are people going to take away after reading your book?

Storm Large: I want the readers to take away from it that everybody has their shit. We all have our shit. And it really is how you react and respond to your own emotional and psychology thing. Nobody is the same as everyone else. We grow up in a pack mentality, and we want to be strong, we want to be beautiful and we want to be loved, first and foremost. And that’s why people want to be popular — it makes them feel powerful, it makes them loved. And of course not everyone is beautiful and not everyone is popular. And that’s when we run into issues like loneliness, alienation, ostracizing the losers and dorks.

Harm reduction, anyone?

For the past two years Street Roots has covered what some are calling an opiate/heroin epidemic in the region. SR is in no place to determine if the region is dealing with what we can call an epidemic — but it’s not pretty.

Last week, as reported by SR, the State of Oregon Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission gave an overview of Oregon’s drug treatment system. The report calls for a complete overhaul of the system, which is “fragmented” with “significant gaps in coverage.”

Dr. Dennis McCarty, a member of the commission, told SR that Oregon’s treatment system continues to reflect what the need was 20 or 30 years ago, when treatment programs were developed to serve a population of “public inebriates.” Now, he says, there is growing demand to provide treatment for women, youth, and other groups who are addicted to drugs other than alcohol, such as heroin. “This is about catching up to the year 2010,” he says.
Yes, finally someone who is thinking in the 21st century. Wait, maybe not.

Opiate overdoses spike to alarming levels

By Amanda Waldroupe, Staff Writer

Oregon’s Medical Examiner office released its annual report of drug overdoses deaths in early April, showing that 127 people died from heroin overdoses in 2009, 63 of which were in Multnomah County. There were a total of 213 drug related deaths in Oregon, 2009, 94 of which were in Multnomah County.

Last year, heroin killed more people than meth and cocaine combined. This is the third year in a row heroin overdose deaths have increased. Since 2001, heroin fatalities have increased by 34 percent.

“It appears that the problem may be increasing,” says Mary Ellen Glynn, the executive director of the state’s Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission.

School of slow paper cuts

by Michael Vance

Don’t hate
Sedate
and berate yourself
Believe and trust
For this you must
Not
Doubt yourself
Kick yourself
Believe a lie
and trick yourself
The story is
Yours to write
Sometimes you rest
Sometimes you fight
Comeback
From the fields
of flames
and drop the shame
From all your names.

Remembrance

by Kareem Ali

Each love
Leaves a bruise
A canker sore of hurt.

Each heartbreak
A disease,
Metastasizing into
Water and oak

Each tear
Oozes through lungs
Into an unwashed
Reservoir of kisses

Each back step
A flame and flutter of discontent
That leads
To a nectar of blood.

SR receives three first place awards from Society of Professional Journalists

Street Roots received three first place, and one, second place award this weekend from Oregon/Southwest Washington Society of Professional Journalists.

Amanda Waldroupe took first place for “Social Issues” reporting for her story, “Return of the Dragon.” The story details the increase of heroin use in Portland. During the reporting of the story, Waldroupe met with a heroin addict named “Joe,” who told her and photographer Ken Hawkins his story, and also allowed them to observe and document him during a disturbing time of day in any drug addict’s life–the moments when he shoots up.

Esteemed photographer Leah Nash took first place in the “Photo Essay” category with “Look at me. I am not invisible.” Nash documented the lives of two Street Roots vendors (Sean and Melissa Walsh) for nearly three months— highlighting the trials and tribulations of experiencing poverty and mental health in the Portland region.

Managing Editor Joanne Zuhl took first place for her story on City Commissioner Nick Fish for the “Personalities” category with “Man of the Hour.”  Zuhl highlighted Fish’s turbulent appearance into Portland politics, and what’s behind the man leading Portland’s Housing Bureau during one of the worst recessions in our history.

Rebecca Robinson took second place in “Social Issues” with “Motel limbo.” This story profiles one family’s struggle to exit motel life and secure permanent housing, and places their story in the larger framework of Oregon’s ever-growing homeless population.

Congrats to everyone who took awards, and many thanks to our vendors and readers!

Posted by Israel Bayer

Paul Loeb: The power of one lies in the many

by Rosette Royale, Street News Service

Sometimes unknown people do big things. Take Virginia Ramirez. Virginia lived near an elderly widow in a dilapidated house in San Antonio, TX. and, for years on end, Virginia saw the woman get sick each winter. The widow couldn’t afford to fix her home, so Virginia sought the aid of city agencies. The agencies provided little help and ultimately, the widow died of pneumonia. Enraged at the senseless death, Virginia went to a community organizing group, saying she wanted someone to do something. “What are you going to do about it?” a group member asked her in turn.
A 45-year-old mother with an eighth-grade education, Virginia felt there was little she could do. But after a little prodding, Virginia held a house meeting to discuss the issue. Nine neighbors showed up. Together, they researched why the widow had gotten little help and discovered that money earmarked to repair homes in their barrio – funds that could have helped the widow – had been diverted to a more affluent neighborhood. Virginia led a force of 60 neighbors to a city council meeting, to protest how they had been denied the funds. There, she spoke her truth. The city council gave them back the money. And, without even knowing it, Virginia had become a community activist.
Virginia said, “I never knew I had it in me.” She may not be alone. All over – in small towns, in crumbling cities, in the boonies – people who don’t think they have anything special inside may have some little spark that, given the right conditions, can grow into a roaring, steady flame. And if you need more examples of empowered people, Paul Rogat Loeb’s your man.

In books such as “Hope in Hard Times: America’s Peace Movement and the Reagan Era” and “The Impossible will Take a Little Time,” Loeb has sought ways to help ordinary people dust off their cynicism and disbelief in society – not to mention themselves – to see how they can become agents of change. Don’t think of it as a self-help strategy: It’s a call to social activism. And he calls to readers with stories of people like Virginia.

A wealth of these stories appear in “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” (St. Martin’s, $16.99), a reissue of a 1999 book that uses compassion to invoke the need for a return to social activism. As guides, Loeb mixes the tales of people like Nelson Mandela with Virginia Ramirez, to show how little steps have changed people’s lives.

The book’s reissue means that Loeb, whose writings also appear on The Huffington Post, has to hit the road to do a publicity tour. But before he took off for the East Coast, the Seattleite had a little chat about ordinary people and extraordinary change, touching on the lives of Rosa Parks, local fisherman Pete Knutson, Nelson Mandela and his own next-door neighbor.

Rosette Royale: In the intro to this book you start off by recounting an appearance you had on CNN with Rosa Parks. You mention how she’s often portrayed as this lone pioneer, but that’s actually not the case.

Paul Loeb: She’s coming in from remote, I’m sitting in a studio in Atlanta, so I don’t actually meet her, but how can you not be totally excited? They say, basically, one day Rosa Parks started the Civil Rights movement, and I’m just kinda groaning. What they’re stripping away to me are three really key elements for change. The image is here’s this lone activist (who) acts completely on her own, acts in isolation — you know, she was tired and her feet hurt — and if you look, there’s a whole community around her: She was the secretary of the local NAACP chapter and the mentor to the youth section. The portrayal of Parks in isolation strips away this community who made it possible, after that day on the bus, for that whole boycott to occur.

Vendor profile: Working toward stability — his and hers

The first place Ramon ever lived was in a car, around the San Francisco Bay area with his parents.  He stayed with his parents until he was about two years old, and was taken to live with his aunt after his parents’ drugs and alcohol use escalated. By the time he was five, he was sent to live with his grandmother, and at the age of 11, he was shuffled to his father’s home in Portland.  By age 15, he was put into foster care.

Foster care for Ramon was really hard.  Growing up without his brothers and sisters, who had been placed in different foster homes, he says he felt surrounded by strangers and did not feel connected as a family member. Rules were broken, expectations went unmet, and he ran away often, he says. He would stay with friends or gang members until he was picked up by police and placed into another foster home and the cycle began again.

Shelters the fool’s gold in the pursuit to end homelessness

By Heather Lyons, Contributing Columnist

I just read that the city is providing 100 new shelter beds for individuals as part of “a campaign to strategically reduce the number of homeless people in Portland.” That’s like opening two new emergency departments because cancer is on the rise.  Like emergency departments, shelters serve a very important purpose, but they do not end homelessness for very many people, unless they are connected to various types of housing and services.

I guarantee that opening new shelter beds will not reduce homelessness.

Those beds will fill up, eventually. And, some people will be helped – though, likely not the people that the community cares about because of their vulnerability or their aesthetics. The most vulnerable, most expensive, most chronically homeless individuals most often do not go to shelter, especially if the weather is temperate.  If you are mentally and/or physically ill, active in your addictions, or just plain old prefer the autonomy you get by living on your own instead of under the rules that are required for a safe, clean, operational shelter, you are not going to want to live in a congregate setting.  I wouldn’t.  

Finding lost friends: A guide for connecting off the grid

By Jenny Westberg, Contributing Columnist

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, each year around 25 percent of adults suffer from a diagnosable mental illness — more than 57 million of our friends and family members. For severe and persistent mental illness, the figure is still high: about 1 in 19, or 5 percent of everyone.

What do you do when a friend or loved one seems to drop off the grid?

What matters to our vendors word cloud

Last week Street Roots published the very popular photo project: Meet our vendors and what matters to them. The project was highlighted on several local and national blogs.

Nate Gulley, a political organizer at Common Cause Oregon put together a word cloud created from the photo project.  Check it out below the photo. It’s very cool.

Thank you Nate Gulley!

Posted by Israel Bayer

Street poets partner to celebrate the 20th Anniversay of the Historic Japanese Plaza in PDX

Street Root Poetry Editor Brian Feist (who is responsible for bringing more street poetry back into the paper)  along with vendor Leo Rhodes are taking part in a collaborative  poetry project with the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, Sisters Of The Road, and Transition Project Inc.

The poetry project is being facilitated by local poet and professor Kaia Sand and will support the 20th Anniversary of the Historical Japanese Plaza on the Waterfront.

In June, the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center will bring together the poetry along with other published works and publish a book and create posters with the poetry and hang them around the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood.

Today marked the first day of the project. SR will be updating readers on the project as it moves forward.

Oregon groups call for $1 billion for housing trust fund

Forty-two organizations in Oregon, including Street Roots have  joined a nationwide call to Congress to give $1 Billion for the National Housing Trust Fund.

Oregon Opportunity Network (Oregon ON) is the latest to  join thousands of housing supporters nationwide asking Congress to allocate $1.065 Billion for the National Housing Trust Fund.

From Oregon ON: Oregon is facing a severe shortage of housing options affordable to seniors, people with disabilities, and people working low wage jobs.  According to the 2010 Out of Reach report, the wage needed to afford a 2-bedroom apartment in Oregon is $14.93 (National Low Income Housing Coalition).  The minimum wage in Oregon is $8.40.  The result of high housing prices and low incomes means people are choosing between paying rent and putting food on the table.

Oregon ON believes that we can do better to provide safe, decent housing options for the most vulnerable people in our communities.  But to do better, we need a functioning National Housing Trust Fund.

“Our members are struggling mightily with a very limited number of dollars to build and preserve the affordable housing that Oregon’s communities need,” said Cathey Briggs, Oregon ON’s Executive Director. “But even so, Oregon’s unemployed and under-employed workers continue to be priced out of the market. The National Housing Trust Fund will help us answer that need, and the housing projects it finances will generate desperately needed family-wage jobs across Oregon.”

INSP Conference brings the street paper world together

It’s the fist day of the 15th Annual Conference of the International Network of Street Papers – actually the preliminary first day, with papers from developing countries gathering for a pre-conference set of discussions and round tables on the basics of running and managing a street paper. Delegates from Africa, Europe, South America and Asia gathered around tables to talk about editorial planning, vendor management, business development and all the issues stree papers, no matter what size or shape, share.

Alan Atwood, the editor of The Big Issue Australia – a continent-wide newspaper – facilitated a great discussion on editorial planning. Between larger papers, smaller papers, new and old, the challenges are similar and everyone goes through learning experiences – failures and success. It was a great discussion and we hope newer partners will be able to return with more confidence and ideas on how they develop their editorial message.I’ve been to several INSP conferences, and as a member of the board of directors, I interface with every delegate over the course of the three or four days we’re together. Whether you’re from Paris, Nairobi, Sao Paulo or Portland, it’s always striking how similar our work and efforts are in making a difference in our hometowns and across the world.

Our vendors are part of that movement, just like you. Millions of readers worldwide will be picking up their local street paper this week from a vendor just like your friend outside Powell’s or at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and beyond. We really are in this together.

Posted by Joanne Zuhl