Of course Seattle is fighting the state’s new drug law

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, too, forging a path of moderate enforcement combined with offramps to treatment that got a surprising 86% 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 state 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 on May 17, the day after state 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 this past week the Seattle City Council voted to formally continue dithering. They 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 state 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?

The escalating fentanyl scourge topped COVID-19 as an epidemic in Seattle a year ago. The state Supreme Court threw out the former drug possession law in the Blake decision more than two years ago.

Yet here was City Councilmember Andrew Lewis this past week as he was voting to reject the state’s new plan: “Part of respecting the Blake decision is figuring out how we’re going to do the diversion and treatment part of the package. We need to have a reset to have that proper conversation.”

Unbelievable that we’re only starting this reset now.

Other cities have been hashing this out for months — because it’s an emergency. Bellingham, for instance, started its own debate last winter. It eventually passed an ordinance against public use of drugs, with initial plans to coax users into treatment instead of jail using a program called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) that Seattle has had for years.

Some Seattle council members say strategies like this are restarting the war on drugs. (They aren’t, but that’s what they say — Councilmember Tammy Morales called it an “unprecedented attempt to ramp up the failed War on Drugs.”) They produced letters from doctors saying what we really need are alternative approaches, such as health engagement hubs, clinic-style places where drug users can get safe supplies and other help.

We do need these things. It’s been clear for years the city needs more treatment facilities. So stand them up! We need them regardless of what happens with enforcement of the new state law (which is focused heavily on diverting people toward treatment anyway).

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.

This is crying out for intervention beyond Narcan. If it’s social services, such as the outreach program Third Avenue Project, then it needs to be ramped up and expanded to other neighborhoods.

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. Where the war part is tamped down with milder sentences that can be avoided with pretrial diversion, or cleared upon completion of treatment. And the peace part is bolstered with an outpouring of aid in the form of new treatment programs.

Will that work? Seattle isn’t even going to find out because it’s more interested in fighting.