Westneat: Seattle fails to set drug policy

I asked Harrell where he lands in the carrot-or-stick debate that’s has taken place in the Legislature. Should public use, or possession, of drugs be a crime, both to protect public spaces but also as leverage to coerce users into treatment? Or should it be decriminalized and treated as a health matter?

Surprisingly, the mayor admitted that he’s too conflicted to answer.

“I’m going to take a pass on that,” Harrell said.

I asked him to explain further, and he did something rare for a politician — he acknowledged he’s just not sure of the right answer. He said his views are heavily influenced by growing up in Seattle’s Central Area, where he saw scores of people arrested for using marijuana. He’s now reluctant about get-tough approaches that might double down on that mistake. At the same time, he said city residents should be able to walk downtown without stepping around groups of fentanyl smokers.

“I’m trying to bring an intensity to what we can do that will work, to what can be successful,” he said. “So I’m focused on treatment, treatment, treatment.”

The new recovery program, called “contingency management,” gives people rewards such as gift cards for showing up and for passing periodic drug tests. It’s based on the psychological notion that the brain has a dopamine reward center, which gets lit up by fentanyl and meth, but can also be counter-stimulated by winning small, immediate, cash rewards.

This small effort, funded out of the state’s opioid settlement, will probably get mocked on the likes of Fox News. Research shows it could work, though. A Seattle city review, with Washington State University, concluded it has limitations but is “proven effective,” and urged Seattle to try it.

Harrell said he wants enforcement targeted at drug dealers, not users (though the two sometimes overlap). Seattle police have been running drug stings for years, and Harrell vowed Monday to step that up.

“We have a moral obligation, in the face of so many people dying, to try something new,” Seattle Council member Sara Nelson said.

Recently, The Seattle Times ran a series on the brutal impact fentanyl is having on people’s lives. Several photos showed people smoking “fenny,” as they called it, down at Third and Pike, with the caption revealing that they’d provided their full names to be printed in the paper. This humanizes the crisis — these are real people out there struggling. But it also demonstrates how accepted the act of abusing this hyper-potent drug, in public, has become. “We’ve normalized the use of hard drugs in this city,” councilor Nelson said.

There likely isn’t one right answer, but the Bellingham approach has some merit. Don’t make possessing small amounts of drugs a crime; make the open use of drugs in public the violation. That’s setting some societal behavioral standards, which could be combined with far more treatment options. It’s not a war on drugs. It’s saying: Over there, we’ll do everything we can to help you. But you can’t use drugs here.

Mostly I’m worried the state is going to blink. It won’t be able to make up its mind. So like Seattle so far, it may not end up doing enough of either approach to even begin to stem this terrible tide.