Spokane City Council to vote on resolution asking Inslee to declare a statewide emergency for opioid epidemic

The Spokane City Council is scheduled to vote Monday on a resolution asking Gov. Jay Inslee to declare a state of emergency in the wake of a drug overdose crisis blamed largely on fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sponsored by Councilman Paul Dillon, the resolution calls on county leadership to model overdose data reporting done in densely populated counties in the state, such as King and Snohomish.

The models used in those counties would be “instrumental in providing real-time data to Spokane County government entities throughout the region, as well as nonprofit organizations and community groups working with affected people,” the resolution says.

Online overdose dashboards for King and Snohomish counties both list county numbers of fatal overdoses that involved fentanyl in the years 2023 as well as to date in 2024.

On Spokane County’s online overdose dashboard, there is not currently any data listed for the number of fatal overdoses involving fentanyl in 2023 or 2024.

Spokane County Regional Health spokesperson Kelli Hawkins said the discrepancy has to do with the state not typically verifying yearly overdose death records until months after a year ends. This makes the data reported by King and Snohomish counties “preliminary” and not always accurate, Hawkins said.

Yet inadequate data collection about overdoses in Spokane County has spurred frustration from elected officials, health care workers and activists who want more information about the opioid epidemic’s devastating effect.

So far in the United States, nine states have instituted emergency orders in the wake of the country’s deadly opioid epidemic: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia.

These states have been able to leverage resources to make Naloxone, a life-saving opioid reversal medication, more widely available, Dillon said in an interview.

The resolution calls on the state Department of Health to add fentanyl overdoses to its list of notifiable conditions. Those are diseases that require health providers to report to state or local public health officials, according to the CDC.

In Spokane, the number of daily overdose calls increased by 30% between 2023 and 2024, according to the resolution. Today, an average of more than six overdoses is called into police dispatch daily, according to the resolution. In 2023, law enforcement in Spokane seized nearly 200,000 illicit fentanyl pills from the public along with 81 grams of powder (enough to produce another 50,000 pills).

If the council passes the resolution, Spokane officials will send a copy to the office of Inslee, asking him to declare a statewide emergency order. Spokane would not be the first municipality in the state to ask the state to declare an emergency order.

Governor’s office spokesperson Mike Faulk said an emergency order would not do much to help the state’s opioid epidemic.

“There’s really not that much that we have available to us that an emergency order would do here,” Faulk said. “Staff already looked a lot into it. … The main thing with emergency orders is to free up state resources or cut red tape to make it easier to deliver resources. There’s not a lot of that applicable here.”

When the state Legislature was in session, Faulk said his office was telling the public that state lawmakers were better positioned to pass laws to combat the opioid epidemic.

When asked if Inslee’s office would consider declaring a state of emergency, Faulk said the office would likely decline it.

“I think it would be, ‘No, and here are other ways we might be able to be helpful and address your legitimate concerns about fentanyl.’ ”

Faulk added there is no “untapped resource” at the state’s disposal that could be accessed with an emergency order.

“Think back during the pandemic,” Faulk said. “A lot of federal resources were allocated. The emergency order helped distribute those.”

In 2022, more than 2,000 people died of opioid-involved overdoses in Washington. That’s more than twice the number who died of the same cause in 2019. Indigenous communities face death rates four times higher than the statewide average.

Fentanyl was involved in 90% of fatal opioid overdoses in the state last year and 65% of all overdose deaths, according to the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute.