The drug problem in Walla Walla was once driven mostly by meth, said Walla Walla County Prosecuting Attorney Gabe Acosta.
In recent years, however, fentanyl has taken the Valley by storm.
‘Fentanyl is a scourge’: Police, prosecutors adjust to changing drug laws, operations
Officials from Walla Walla Police Department discuss the fentanyl crisis in the community.
“Fentanyl is a scourge,” Walla Walla Police Department Sgt. Steve Potter said. “It’s been a scourge since roughly 2019. It hit the Valley here pretty hard. That’s when we noticed overdoses and the impact was quick. It was faster than any of us anticipated.”
Walla Walla Police Department personnel say the drug issue in Walla Walla has been magnified by the prevalence of fentanyl.
The stronger illicit drug, as well as recent changes in the law, have left police and prosecutors adapting to the new drug landscape.
Treatment vs punishment
When possible, WWPD officers feel treatment, rather than just punishment, is a good choice for offending users. That is, if they want treatment.
Officers from the WWPD said treatment doesn’t work if the person doesn’t buy in. If they do want help, the help must come fast while the person still wants it.
There is no in-patient treatment center in Walla Walla County, and that makes things difficult, because finding a bed for someone while they still desire help can sometimes be impossible.
Some Walla Walla police officers have used money from the Walla Walla Police Foundation to get people help.
“I am in connection with people on the streets that are ready for help,” WWPD Officer Spencer Kelty said. “That window can be super brief. It is unfortunate when we see someone who needs help and they reach out to us, and I have to say, ‘Yeah, let me see if I can find you a bed, and let me see if I can get some money pulled together.’ It could be three to four days to get those sorts of resources. And in that brief time, they’ve already gone back to the street and on to their next thing.”
Kelty said being able to use Walla Walla Police Foundation funds has made a difference.
“(The Foundation) is there in place, so we have the means and the ability to do things that we’ve always wished we could in the past but never had the funds to do,” Kelty said. “The Foundation is great at getting me the money fast so I can take these people and get them in beds in private facilities because often the state is out of room.”
Kelty said he has sent people as far as California to get treatment.
“We have a men’s facility we use in (Tri-Cities) — U-Turn for Christ — that has been very open, even if they are full,” Kelty said. “Somehow, they make room. If a need arises, they will figure it out. The closest female facility of U-Turn, unfortunately, is in Perris, California. “We’ve ran into times where every female facility up here has been booked up and we have flown people all the way down to Perris for rehab.”
Enforcement
Local police said treatment alone isn’t the answer, especially when it comes to dealers — rather than users.
The WWPD partners with other local law enforcement agencies — College Place Police Department, Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office and the Washington State Department of Corrections — to form the Walla Walla Regional Anti-Drug and Gang Task Force.
The WWPD provides the command structure and provides four detectives to the team.
Potter said the task force sees the mid- and upper-level dealers as their focus, not the users. In fact, he said, officers work to combat the drug problem in the Valley to protect users.
WWPD administrative Sgt. Nick Loudermilk said that before the task force existed, he used to serve on the department’s Career Criminal Apprehension Team, a unit that targeted suspects with active warrants for arrest.
He said working on that team showed him firsthand the size of the drug problem in Walla Walla.
“Our goal was to find career criminals and get them off the street,” he said. “And everything revolved around drugs. We were just seeing drugs, drugs, drugs. It was like playing whack-a-mole. We’d do a search warrant at a drug house and get a house shut down. But the problem would just move to another house.”
Potter and Loudermilk said partnering with other agencies is the only way to combat the problem.
“Walla Walla’s problems are College Place’s, the county’s, Dayton’s and the Tri-Cities’ problems,” Loudermilk said.
Narcan limitations
Loudermilk said people have to know that there is no safe way to recreationally use drugs containing fentanyl.
Fatal Overdoses reported in Walla Walla County
While things like Narcan can save lives, it does not make fentanyl use safe.
“We have to be careful about not just having Narcan be the answer. Because Narcan’s not working on the xylazine laced fentanyl and people can give Narcan all day long and they could still die because of other stuff that’s there,” Loudermilk said.
He said xylazine, which is a kind of horse tranquilizer, has been found in fentanyl pills.
“It’s combined … so if somebody overdoses and they give them Narcan, then the Narcan is going to reverse the fentanyl,” he said. “It is not going to reverse the xylazine.”
He said he thinks there still needs to be efforts to keep people off drugs, and not just tell people to be careful when using drugs.
Q&A with Daze, Walla Walla Police Department’s New K-9
Detective Keltan Fulmer, left, gets some love from Daze as soon as she enters the Walla Walla Police Department. Detective Nick Klicker holds her leash.
K9 help
To assist with enforcement, the police have a drug detecting dog, K-9 Daze, who is now certified to detect fentanyl.
WWPD Capt. Eric Knudson, who oversees the task force, said the K-9 program is helpful.
“Well, it’s a tremendous game changer for us,” Knudson said. “Detective (Nick) Klicker works for the (career criminal apprehension team) … He’s getting into things with the dog that we might not otherwise see. It might be a traffic stop, and he sees drug paraphernalia or suspicious behavior, which may lead to a K-9 sniff.”
He said detection could lead to drugs being confiscated that wouldn’t have been otherwise.
“The dog might alert on the car, that would lead to a temporary seizure and search warrant,” Knudson said. “And then we go in and we find quantities of fentanyl. Fentanyl pills, fentanyl powder, whatever it may be. Those are drugs we would not have been able to take off the street.”
Klicker, Daze’s handler, said it helps that Daze can track a wide range of drugs.
“I would say that in most narcotic dealings that we’re dealing with, they’re poly-users,” he said. “Where fentanyl is just as involved as methamphetamine and cocaine, and we’re usually seeing all three together.”
The Blake decision
On Feb. 25, 2021, everything regarding policing and prosecuting drug crimes in Washington changed completely when the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state’s simple possession of a controlled substance statute violates the due process clause of the state and federal constitutions.
The decision was known in legal circles as the Blake decision.
Therefore, simple possession was decriminalized. Drug possession defendants with convictions from 1971 to 2021 could move to have those convictions set aside.
Although Washington lawmakers passed a new law in 2023 that recriminalized drug possession — this time as a gross misdemeanor instead of a felony — this change isn’t retroactive, so the cases from 1971 to 2021 are still void.
Walla Walla County Prosecuting Attorney Gabe Acosta said that new classification changed everything at his office.
“Prior to Blake … my caseload was almost 100%, not totally, almost 100% felony drug prosecution,” Acosta said. “I had a few other cases, but it was drugs that drove my caseload and when that (Blake decision) came down, I easily lost 50% of my caseload, maybe more.”
Acosta said the change had major implications. He said it didn’t only affect inmates sentenced to prison for possession charges, but also those who were getting treatment as part of their sentence.
“It (stopped) the criminal justice system’s ability to impact offenders with drug treatment,” Acosta said. “We had a number of defendants in drug court. We had a number of offenders in treatment with DOSA (Drug Offenders Sentencing Alternative) sentences. They were getting treatment. And then, all of a sudden, they got released. All charges dropped. The court released them. The support systems that were there to help them — treatment, housing, all that — gone.”
He stressed that people were dropped in the middle of treatment.
Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney April King said the Blake decision also led to some sentences being reduced for convictions of even non-drug related charges if they had a history of drug convictions.
Sentences in Washington are influenced heavily by an “offender score” based on a person’s conviction history. King said people with past drug possession convictions would have those convictions count against them when convicted of future crimes.
“When Blake came down, their offender score went down because those points were gone, and so people were also released from prison after Blake,” King said.
The recalibrated “offender score” led some people who were sentenced for violent crimes, such as assault, to receive reduced sentences and be released from prison.
Although possession is once again criminalized, Acosta and King said their office doesn’t often charge it because it’s a gross misdemeanor, not a felony.
Acosta and WWPD officials agree that mid- to high-level dealers should be a larger focus than arresting users, but both said being unable to arrest and prosecute users at the felony level made it harder to convict dealers.
“A number of these people that were arrested for mere possession wanted to not have that conviction,” Acosta said. “And they would be willing to give up information on their dealer or be willing to do a controlled buy or two to get that charge off. We were much more interested in going after their dealer than going after them. That tool has been taken away by and large.”
