Westneat: Drug deaths displace COVID

Paramedics also are straining to keep up. There now are 20 drug overdose calls every day, roughly double from a year ago. (These are predominantly nonfatal overdoses.) Inside city limits, Seattle saw twice as many drug overdose deaths last year (541) as COVID deaths (273).

“The number of overdose deaths has grown on an exponential scale,” the health department’s review of 2022 says. “Exponential” was the word they once used about the coronavirus — the fear that it might spread out of hand to the point it starts crippling the ability to respond to it.

Not long ago the drug crisis was simmering at a lower level; one national news outlet dubbed it “an epidemic in the shadow of a pandemic.” It’s not in the shadows anymore. COVID’s force has waned, especially due to the vaccines. The drug epidemic just keeps expanding.

Obviously COVID comes from a virus that could infect anybody; drug addiction is viewed as more of an individual struggle. But the drug scourge is spreading to a degree that it’s having severe effects on the broader community.

So what could be done?

The Legislature has been locked in a debate over whether to decriminalize hard-drug possession. The latest signs, though, are that lawmakers are headed in the opposite direction. New bills with the backing of influential Democrats would increase the criminal penalties, from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor, though the emphasis still would be to channel defendants into treatment.

Wherever one stands on this — from lock ’em up on the right, to hand them needles on the left — what’s lacking is the treatment part. The main point of sentencing a drug user to jail is to nudge them into rehab instead. But no approach is going to work if there’s no treatment to go to.

This past week the regional agency on homelessness released its five-year emergency shelter plan. It acknowledged there’s a connection between substance abuse and Seattle’s homelessness crisis (which seems like progress). It recommended something called “recovery housing” — drug-free shelter that also offers rehab counseling and support.

Then it said this: Due to the size of the addiction problem, we need an estimated 2,570 units of this recovery-based shelter. And right now we have … zero units.

How could we be this deep into the drug and homelessness crisis and still be at zero?

Seattle and King County were justifiably proud of how they handled the pandemic. We had the lowest COVID death rates of any large metro area. But we’re losing to this shadow epidemic. We’re losing because political leaders have for years been conflicted and directionless about what to do about it.

It doesn’t have to be. You can “flatten the curve” of addiction, using treatment and other strategies, as surely as with a virus.

What’s needed is that same unity of purpose that political leaders so successfully brought to bear on our last biggest public health crisis.