One guidepost I've had over the years has been to write about a variety of topics, to avoid the urge to use this space to bang the drum. I'm about to break that rule again.
The reason is that Washington state now has the fastest rising drug deaths in the nation.
You could argue that everything that could be said about this state's struggle to respond to the drug epidemic has been said already — especially by me. But it just keeps getting worse. Government leaders must act with dramatically more urgency.
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Washington had the biggest increase in drug overdose deaths of any state in the latest 12-month reporting period, ending Jan. 31. Our overdose deaths soared 24% — by far the worst increase in the nation.
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 whole U.S., drug deaths were flat year-over-year — up 0.7%.
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 only single-digit increases.
The CDC is projecting that Washington saw 2,850 people die 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 civic 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 so 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 in January. After misfiring and passing nothing, the 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 by a 5-4 vote of 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, or LEAD, 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 us liberals into a state of analysis paralysis. Too hard, too soft, what should we do? We end up doing next to nothing. We weren't stuck like this with COVID. We also handled COVID among the best in the nation.
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 — or read for the first time — 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.
Example: The bill not only calls for medication-assisted treatment vans, but it classifies them as "essential public facilities," making it tough for people to block them with appeals. So why not ramp up mobile clinics immediately?
Also: Seattle could finally flood the zone with a nonpolice 911 responder team — something city leaders pledged long ago. There's money in the bill for those, too.
The news that we now have the fastest-escalating drug crisis in the country (or did through January) ought to spark some urgency, at least for standing up more treatment in an emergency fashion. Will it?
When University of Washington researchers recently 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. Okay? Do something. Help them get well and tell them that's it."
Do something. Fentanyl users can't believe how stuck we are, either.
