Westneat: Seattle’s measures hardly restarting war on drugs

“It’s working as promised,” she told me.

Recently, police began handing out warning flyers in the well-known drug zones of downtown and Little Saigon, in the Chinatown International District. Then they began making arrests.

Nobody who was just using drugs got booked into jail. Through noon Tuesday, police had arrested 29 people. Of those, 12 were booked into jail because they had outstanding felony warrants, for such crimes as rape and domestic violence, or had been found carrying a stolen gun.

The other 17 were taken to a police precinct and referred to the program Daugaard started called LEAD. Back in time, before anything police-adjacent became politically radioactive in Seattle, this stood for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion. After the George Floyd protests in 2020, LEAD shifted its name to Let Everyone Advance with Dignity.

Whatever you call it, the 17 arrested were offered a chance to avoid charges by meeting with a LEAD counselor. They also must undergo a two-hour “psychosocial” screening — basically a deep-dive session into what’s ailing them. All but two accepted this voluntary program.

Daugaard said about 80 percent of LEAD enrollees qualify for Medicaid, which pays for drug treatment. LEAD counselors help them sign up. This seems to counter the argument that Seattle can’t do this because there’s no money for drug treatment.

“In large numbers, will they get treatment? Yes,” she told me.

Does this sound like the war on drugs? You get arrested and you don’t get jail, you get a counselor? You get an opportunity to dig your way out, with assistance? You also get released. But the main takeaway here is: Finally the city is holding an intervention.

Why did Seattle squander so much time and energy fighting over this mild proposal? It was passed, remember, by the Democrats in Olympia. That state bill refers to “law enforcement assisted diversion” twenty-seven times. So this formula of cops handing drug arrestees off to social workers was not some tangent — it was a key feature of the original legislation.

LEAD was also invented here in Seattle. Yet city leaders dithered and dickered over this issue for months anyway, in service of some other ideological struggle (mainly, I think, dislike of the police).

We’ll have to see how it goes in the long run. Four days in, though, it has at least given 15 people a shot at addressing the root causes of their addictions.

“It definitely works better than abandoning people out on the streets with no response,” Daugaard said. “We could have been doing this all along.”

Man, what a dysfunctional couple of years Seattle has had. So much pursuit of ideological purity, so few pragmatic results. And now here we are, coming back around full circle, about to the same spot where we left off.