To give a sense of what an outlier Washington is becoming in this crisis, 25 states saw reductions in overdose deaths in this same 12-month period. For the nation, drug deaths were flat year-over-year — up 0.7 percent.
Washington does not have the highest overall drug mortality rate — that mark belongs to West Virginia. But West Virginia also saw its drug deaths fall last year. Washington now leads the pack for the problem getting worse. Across the West, most states are reporting either reductions in drug deaths or single-digit increases.
The CDC is projecting that Washington saw 2,850 people died from drug overdoses during this period. That’s equivalent to the number of people who died of COVID-19 here in the first nine months of the coronavirus pandemic — an outbreak that caused rolling statewide shutdowns and an all-hands-on-deck government response.
Here’s the part where I’m a broken record: Has government mobilized against the rising drug epidemic with anywhere near the same focus it brought to COVID?
You wouldn’t expect the details to be the same, as one is an infectious disease. But with drugs, the various levels of government have done very little not very fast.
Overdose deaths were already rising rapidly when the state Supreme Court threw out Washington’s drug-possession law in 2021. We spent the next two years talking about what to do.
A 26-member advisory committee met 65 times over the course of 2022 before submitting ideas to state lawmakers this January. After misfiring and passing nothing, lawmakers reconvened in a special session in May. To their credit, they finally took a wide-ranging stab at action, passing a 48-page drug reform policy.
In Seattle, though, they can’t decide whether they want to go along with that law, and have formed another advisory committee to do more talking.
The state law makes drug possession a gross misdemeanor, a move that was rejected 5-4 by the Seattle City Council. But 40 of the 48 pages are devoted to creating numerous pretrial diversion programs, treatment options and drug recovery centers to provide a host of paths away from both prosecution and the fentanyl life.
Two things that Seattle critics of the state bill have been calling for most loudly — more Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion to intervene with drug users before they ever get arrested, and the creation of health hubs for medication-assisted treatment — are already both in the state bill. There’s money to fund them, too. It just needs to be implemented.
There’s something about drug policy that puts liberals into a state of analysis paralysis. Too hard, too soft, what should we do? We end up doing next to nothing.
I’m not used to Washington being ranked as the worst in anything. That this one is a escalating tragedy playing out on the streets is hard to take.
So I would urge Seattle leaders in particular to reread the state drug bill. Anything you’re going to come up with in the city’s new advisory panel was probably already conceived of by the last advisory panel, and is likely in that state bill.
The news that we now have the fastest-escalating drug crisis in the country ought to spark some urgency, at least for standing up more treatment in an emergency fashion. Will it?
When University of Washington researchers asked fentanyl users what they think we should do, one said, about the crying need for available treatment: “Don’t say come back tomorrow. That’s a million miles away, OK? Do something. Help them get well and tell them that’s it.”
Do something. Fentanyl users can’t believe how stuck we are, either.
