The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
When state lawmakers finally agreed about a month ago on a strategy for the drug crisis, it signaled, for most of Washington, the end of two years of uncertainty and intense debate on this impossible issue.
Somehow they reached wide-ranging consensus, forging a path of moderate enforcement combined with offramps to treatment that got 86 percent of Washington’s 147 lawmakers to vote yes.
“People can fight that, or try to make this work instead — that’s the debate now,” I suggested at the time.
So which door has Seattle taken?
Of course we are fighting it.
It was inevitable. No matter what combination of carrots and sticks the Democrat-controlled Legislature opted to try on drugs, Seattle wasn’t going to just go along. It’s not in our civic nature. We would hesitate to enforce it, or we’d demand more process, or we’d be openly hostile — and now we are doing all of those things.
“Bottom line: Expect pushback against this law in Seattle,” I wrote May 17, the day after legislators voted to make public use or possession of hard drugs a gross misdemeanor (down from the old felony standard). “Hopefully there are new treatment resources that can quickly rush in while Seattle continues to dither, because in the last week alone there were 50 opioid overdoses recorded in downtown Seattle.”
Well the Seattle City Council has voted to formally continue dithering. It rejected adding the new state drug-use law to city code, which means the city won’t be able to use it in municipal court.
Are street drugs now legal in Seattle? Technically, no. But with no enforcement, for practical purposes it leaves Seattle right where we’ve been for some time: With a drug-use free-for-all continuing to play out on the streets.
It isn’t surprising that Seattle is conflicted on what to do. Remember that the Legislature struggled for two years to find a drug policy, and then had to be called back to Olympia for a special session. The travesty is: What has Seattle been doing all this time?
Other cities have been hashing this out for months — because it’s an emergency.
It’s a crisis that our city has become this dysfunctional — and also this purist, where a plan crafted by liberal Democrats in Olympia gets portrayed as setting up a police state. In the week leading up to the council’s vote, there was a record set for drug overdoses, 55, in downtown Seattle. That’s eight per day. It’s why it’s routine now to walk downtown and witness someone overdosing.
Two years ago, downtown Seattle was seeing about 10 overdoses a week — so it’s increased fivefold. The only good news I can report is the death rate from all this has been dipping of late — maybe because lifesaving Narcan has become so ubiquitous.
But the people in the throes aren’t the only ones that need help. The public does, too. There’s no reason a city can’t also set a standard for public behavior that says you can’t smoke fentanyl while lying on the sidewalk on Pine Street. Help and rules aren’t always mutually exclusive, but Seattle’s politics is too ideological for that.
The war on drugs was indeed a failure. But the peace on drugs isn’t working out either. What state lawmakers did, led by Democrats, was propose a cease-fire.
Will that work? Seattle isn’t even going to find out because it’s more interested in fighting.
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