Washington State Government Panel Urges ‘Safe Supply’ Model To Reduce Drug Overdose Deaths

From toxifillers.com with love

A Washington State government working group is renewing its call for officials to take steps toward ensuring “a regulated, tested supply of controlled substances to individuals at risk of drug overdoses,” pointing to a number of policy options developed in recent years.

Members said in a report that the goals of the safe supply reform are to ensure substances are as safe as possible to consume and to minimize peripheral harms from drug criminalization and incarceration. Changes would also aim to reduce theft, petty crime and syringe litter often associated with illicit drug activity.

The work group presented its safe supply recommendations at a meeting last month, according to The Center Square, but the proposal itself is not new. The state Substance Use Recovery Services Advisory Committee (SURSAC), created through a 2021 law, recommended the following year that lawmakers decriminalize the possession of controlled substances, and the body “has expressed broad support to establish a system to provide safe supply services,” the recommendation report notes.

Four different safe supply frameworks were recommended at 2022 SURSAC special meeting, including prescription and supervised consumption, prescription and self-administration, a dispensary model and a community-based “buyer’s club.”

Republican lawmaker Rep. Travis Couture told The Center Square that he opposes the state taking a role in the safe supply effort, adding that SURSAC seems uninterested in considering other approaches.

“They only want to double down on the failures,” he said, “and what we’re talking about here is taxpayer-funded drug dealing, where the state would hand out heroin, fentanyl and meth on our dime.”

“That’s not treatment,” Couture added, “that’s surrender.”

SURSAC, for its part, wants to see a clinical trial by researchers and a safe supply pilot program enacted by lawmakers.

A subset of Democratic lawmakers did briefly consider the decriminalization of simple drug possession following a 2021 state Supreme Court ruling that struck down Washington’s possession law as unconstitutional. Instead, the legislature chose to recriminalize possession as a lesser charge. And in years since, lawmakers have been more hesitant to advance sweeping reforms such as decriminalization.

As of earlier this year, officials across the state were also still making uneven progress on requirements to vacate thousands of past criminal convictions following the Supreme Court ruling.

In May, a cut to a state budget bill eliminated about $5 million to support legal aid groups working on the clearance effort.

“It’s a gut punch,” Camerina Zorrozua, the legal director and co-founder of The Way to Justice, a nonprofit legal aid organization based in Spokane that has relied on the funding since 2021, told InvestigateWest at the time. “The rug was just pulled out from under us.”

Earlier this year, state Democrats once again also gave up on a plan that would have legalized home cultivation of marijuana for personal use, opting instead to keep the conduct classified as a felony.

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If enacted law, HB 1449, from Rep. Shelley Kloba, would have allowed adults 21 and older to grow up to six cannabis plants at home for personal use, with households capped at 15 plants regardless of how many adults reside on the premises. People could also lawfully keep the marijuana produced by those plants despite the state’s existing one-ounce limit on possession.

Kloba and other supportive lawmakers have worked for nearly a decade to pass a law allowing adults to grow a small number of cannabis plants for their own use, but each year, other lawmakers and executive agencies have stood in the way of the proposal.

Image courtesy of Dima Solomin.

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