Seattle’s Ballard branch library. Photo by Dennis Bratland, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-4.0 license.
By Erica C. Barnett
If you need to use the restrooms at the Lake City, Ballard, Capitol Hill, or International District libraries and find them closed, it may be thanks to new “air-quality sensors” that detect vapor from drugs that don’t set off regular smoke detectors, like fentanyl and meth, and alert staff to immediately close the restrooms down for at least 15 minutes or until the air quality improves to a minimum threshold level.
Library staff already have the authority to issue temporary or permanent bans for people who use drugs in the restrooms and other violations of the library’s code of conduct or the law.
According to Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Elisa Murray, SPL decided to start shutting down restrooms at certain branches in response to drug use as a way to protect patrons and staff.
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“Prior to implementing this technology, staff only became aware of unsafe conditions when fumes reached the service desks or when a patron comment prompted staff to enter the restrooms and detect smells, at which point they’re already risking exposure,” Murray said. “An alert allows the behavior to be interrupted as early as possible, and access to live data informs staff decisions about whether or not the restrooms should remain closed without exposing staff to harmful chemicals.”
King County has long advised that fentanyl “fumes” are generally harmless. “When someone smokes fentanyl, most of the drug has been filtered out by the user before there is secondhand smoke. It doesn’t just sort of float around,” Washington Poison Center medical director Scott Phillips said in a King County Public Health blog post in 2022. “There’s no real risk for the everyday person being exposed to secondhand opioid smoke.”
Despite this, Murray said library “staff have reported feeling sick from drug-related fumes, and we have had to close restrooms because of fumes related to drug activity. Air quality sensors help us maintain a safe and healthy environment for both staff and patrons.”
Murray said the library has received no complaints from patrons or staff about the restroom closures. Using or possessing drugs in public became a misdemeanor in 2023, and people accused of either offense can be banished from certain parts of the city even without a conviction.
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1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority will significantly alter how it conducts the interviews with unsheltered people that form the basis of the countywide “Point In Time” count, which now occurs every two years and consists of one-on-one daytime surveys at fixed locations over multiple weeks, rather than a traditional one-night count of tents, people sleeping out in the open, and vehicles used as shelter.
Although the count will still be based on respondent-driven sampling—a form of statistical sampling in which participants recruit additional respondents from their personal networks—the questions the KCRHA interviewers will ask have been transformed. Instead of open-ended questions like “What have been your experiences with the police and justice system?” and “What has it [being homeless] been like for you?,” the survey consists of basic demographic and short-form questions along the lines of the old Count Us In survey conducted by the KCRHA’s predecessor, All Home.
The interviewers—about 130 volunteers—will receive more extensive training this year than the Lived Experience Coalition members who conducted the survey last year received, KCRHA community impact officer Owen Kajfasz said last week, and their jobs will be simpler. “By removing the qualitative [open-ended interview] component from this, we remove a lot of the complexity that would require additional training” beyond the three hours volunteers received this time around, Kajfasz said.
Last year, training for the interviews was conducted in person or online by then-KCRHA CEO Marc Dones; interviewers who couldn’t make it to a training session were asked to simply review the training documents. Interview transcripts obtained by PubliCola showed that the conversations were often rambling, discursive, and (according to experts we consulted) out of step with best practices for qualitative research; for example, interviewers frequently cut people off, talked at length about themselves, offered unsolicited advice, and improperly suggested they could connect people to services.
As we reported last year, the KCRHA used 180 of these interview transcripts as the basis for its Five-Year Plan, turning answers to questions like “what things or people have been helpful to you?” into a precise, detailed budget that favored parking lots for people living in vehicles over tiny house villages, for example.
This year’s count will also include more “hubs” throughout the county than last year’s count—17 in all—which Kajfasz said should give the KCRHA a more representative sample of the region’s homeless population. Last year, the KCRHA didn’t do any surveys in Federal Way or Kent, for example, which may have exacerbated other issues with data collection in South King County, the first region where the agency did surveys and the one with the largest number of data issues.
2. During a briefing about the ongoing state legislative session by city lobbyists Monday afternoon, Council President Sara Nelson expressed support for four addiction and overdose-related bills that aren’t on the city’s official legislative agenda: House Bills 1956 and 2222, and Senate Bills 6109 and 6134.
HB 1956, sponsored by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, University Place), would require the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to update school drug education materials to include “information about the potential lethality and other risks associated with the use of fentanyl and other opioids.”
HB 2222, sponsored by Rep. David Hackney (D-11, Tukwila), would allow prosecutors to charge parents with endangering their children, a Class B felony, if they allow them to be “exposed to” or have “contact with” non-prescription fentanyl or other synthetic opiates, potentially removing children from their homes if a parent is struggling with addiction.
SB 6109, sponsored by Sen. Claire Wilson (D) would make it easier for the state to take children away from their parents and place them in foster care if police, medical personnel, or child welfare workers find non-prescription opiates in their home. The bill would legally place opiate use by parents on the same level as “sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, [and] a pattern of severe neglect.”
SB 6134, sponsored by Republicans Chris Gildon (R-25, Puyallup) and Lynda Wilson (R-17, Spokane), would give $7 million to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs to create “multijurisdictional drug task forces that would track overdose trends and make opiate-related policy recommendations to the state.
Three of the four bills have begun moving through the committee process (which is no guarantee they’ll go any further in the short legislative session); HB 2222 has not been scheduled for a hearing.
DESC’s Morrison Hotel building on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle
By Erica C. Barnett
The Downtown Emergency Service Center, which operates shelters, housing, and mobile crisis response teams, will operate a new opiate overdose response center, serving up to 20 people a day, inside its Morrison Hotel building on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. DESC director Daniel Malone says the new facility will share the second floor of the Morrison, which housed the agency’s congregate shelter prior to COVID, with an expansion of DESC’s existing outpatient behavioral health clinic and serve people looking for services and a place to physically recover immediately after an overdose.
Currently, if someone overdoses in Seattle and emergency medical services (EMS) responds, they generally face two options: Go to the hospital in an ambulance, or walk away. A post-overdose stabilization site would create a third option where people could rest, receive IV fluids or medication to get them through the early stages of withdrawal, and initiate treatment for opioid use disorder. Patients could also access DESC’s outpatient behavioral health clinic, which connects patients with psychiatric care, counseling, and case management.
Methadone—an opiate that effectively replaces more harmful drugs like heroin and fentanyl, allowing people to resume normal lives—remains one of the most highly regulated drugs in the nation; patients typically have to show up in a physical location to take a single dose at a specific time every day, although lawmakers temporarily loosened those restrictions during COVID. Buprenorphine, which works by partially occupying the brain’s opiate receptors, is more widely accessible, and a new injectable form of the drug, trademarked Sublocade, lasts a month.
“It’s extremely important to us to make sure that we won’t have that kind of chaotic and disruptive activity happening on the sidewalk in front of the building, and part of our plan is to really enhance our capacity to have a much stronger presence to help ensure that the environment is calm and conducive to people coming and going safely.”—DESC Director Daniel Malone
“Methadone introduces a set of additional regulatory complications that the other medicines don’t have, but methadone would be an important tool in the toolbox,” Malone said.
Between January and July of this year, according to data from the King County Department of Public Health, emergency medical services responded to 2,546 nonfatal overdoses in Seattle, out of 4,918 countywide. Both fatal and nonfatal overdoses have increased steadily over the past five years, as fentanyl—a powerful opioid first developed as a pain medication in the 1960s—has worked its way into the street drug supply.
Funding for the new facility would come from the city of Seattle, King County, private grants, and the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute (ADAI). In July, the King County Council approved spending $2 million in unspent CLFR (federal COVID) funds to help renovate the second floor of the Morrison to accommodate the expanded outpatient center and the opiate recovery site.
The city of Seattle is expected to provide another $2 million for construction, out of $7 million in unspent federal funding that Mayor Bruce Harrell announced as part of his plan to “invest $27 million toward facilities, treatments, and services to address the opioid crisis.” As we’ve reported, the $27 million is actually $7 million in unspent federal grants for capital projects, plus a little over $1 million a year from state settlements with opiate manufacturers and distributors. That million dollars could could help fund the day-to-day operations of the new overdose recovery site over the next two decades, but it won’t be enough to keep the new site open full-time, Malone said.
“If there’s not enough money to [operate] 24/7, then some version where it’s only open certain hours may have to be implemented,” Malone said. Overdoses happen at all hours, so having only a part-time facility “would seriously limit the ability of this facility to meet all the community’s needs over the course of the day.”
Harrell expressed support for a post-overdose recovery center back in April, when he signed an executive order expressing the city’s commitment to site and “explore funding for” a new facility “where EMS can bring people after non-fatal overdoses to recover, get stabilized on medications, and access resources.” However, his office would not comment on the plan to open the site on Third Avenue, and would not confirm that DESC was the intended recipient of the funds Harrell announced last month. “There is [a request for proposals], and no decisions have been made,” Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said. “It is a competitive process, and we expect DESC will apply.”
King County just approved spending $2.2 million in unspent federal COVID relief dollars to help renovate the site, which used to house DESC’s congregate shelter, last month.
Map of Morrison Hotel and DESC’s current behavioral health drop-in center
The Morrison Hotel, which also includes 190 permanent supportive housing units, is located directly across from the King County Courthouse. The sidewalk around the building’s Third Avenue entrance is often occupied by people who are unhoused, have untreated behavioral health conditions, or are actively using and selling drugs, making the building a target of frequent complaints and a perennial subject for conservative local media such as KOMO News, which infamously blamed DESC for crime on Third Ave. in its followup to the agitprop film “Seattle Is Dying.”
In addition to funds for the overdose site itself, King County approved $200,000 for a “client engagement team” that will “manage client presence and prevent conflicts on Third Avenue in front of DESC’s renovated facility,” according to a King County Council memo.
“It’s extremely important to us to make sure that we won’t have that kind of chaotic and disruptive activity happening on the sidewalk in front of the building, and part of our plan is to really enhance our capacity to have a much stronger presence to help ensure that the environment is calm and conducive to people coming and going safely,” Malone said. The new staff will “be present not just inside, but in the immediate external sidewalk area… to connect with people who are out there and deal with anything that may be happening that is contributing to an undesirable environment.”
Judges and other courthouse officials have complained for years about safety issues around the courthouse, which also borders City Hall Park—a compact greenspace that recently reopened after a lengthy closure. King County Superior Court Judge Patrick Oishi, who has repeatedly raised alarms about the safety of jurors and courthouse staff, told PubliCola he hopes the opioid recovery center will have a positive impact on the street scene around the courthouse.
“Although it is difficult to predict what impact an opioid recovery center will have on the courthouse area, the Court commends Mayor Harrell, the City of Seattle, and King County for taking critical steps to address this significant public health crisis,” Oishi said. “It is our hope that responding to the opioid crisis will enhance public safety in the courthouse area.”
The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected Councilmember Andrew Lewis’ proposal to fast-track a bill empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for drug possession and public use, voting to allow the bill to go through the regular committee process. The impact of the vote is that the council will take up the bill after they return from the regular August recess, allowing council staff the time to draft amendments and analyze the latest version of the legislation.
Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen introduced the first version of the drug criminalization bill last April, after the state adopted legislation making drug possession and public drug use a gross misdemeanor. Initially, Lewis voted against the legislation, citing Davison’s unilateral decision to abandon Seattle Community Court, but he has since become one of the bill’s most vocal advocates, arguing that the work of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s fentanyl task force will produce policy and legal alternatives to the traditional arrest-and-prosecution system.
While the bill says diversion and other options are the “preferred” alternatives to arrest, it does not require diversion or lay out the kind of circumstances in which diversion would be appropriate. Instead, it directs SPD to develop “guidance on diversion” as part of policies that will “state that diversion and referral to services is the preferred response to possession and public use while acknowledging that arrests are warranted in some situations.”
The latest version of the bill includes 13 additional “whereas” clauses, along with eight new findings about the state of the drug crisis in Seattle. It also adds a new section to the Seattle Municipal Code stating that, in the future, police will adopt policies governing arrests for drug possession and public drug use, and that those policies will state that alternatives like diversion and treatment “are the preferred approach” when police make arrests under the new law.
At a committee meeting to discuss the drug criminalization bill Monday afternoon, council members discussed several issues with the legislation that PubliCola pointed out two weeks ago.
First, while the bill says diversion and other options are the “preferred” alternatives to arrest, it does not require diversion, provide funding for alternatives to arrest, or provide examples of circumstances in which diversion would be appropriate. Instead, it directs SPD to develop “guidance on diversion” as part of policies that will “state that diversion and referral to services is the preferred response to possession and public use while acknowledging that arrests are warranted in some situations.”
Beyond this, the ordinance delegates to individual officers the authority to decide whether a person poses a threat, based on “the totality of the circumstances and the officer’s training and experience,” which is essentially the current system, augmented by some new training on what constitutes a drug-specific threat.
“The standard mirrors the practical thought process that officers ordinarily apply in the field when deciding whether to make an arrest, and it allows for it encourages officers to exercise discretion,” mayoral advisor Andrew Myerberg told the council. If a person is only a “threat to self,” the bill says officers should “make a reasonable attempt to contact and coordinate efforts for diversion, outreach, and other alternatives,” but leaves that decision, too, up to individual officers.
“The fundamental goal of this ordinance and executives overall approach to the synthetic opioid crisis is to increase the proportion of individuals suffering from addiction who seek and accept treatment services,” Myerberg said.
Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda pointed out the obvious: The mayor’s office has not proposed funding for addiction, treatment, or diversion programs. “It seems important that the resources be sufficiently invested into the alternative strategies so that people are not being given a false promise that there will be a diversion strategy [but] we don’t have those resources,” Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said. “And where will that funding come from?”
The law does not address private use of illegal drugs inside people’s homes.
Second, while Harrell has stated (and mainstream media outlets have inaccurately reported) that the bill includes $27 million for treatment and other alternatives to arrest, the bill never mentions money or spending priorities. In fact, as council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda noted repeatedly on Monday, the “new” $27 million is a combination of $7 million in grant funding the city didn’t spend in previous years, plus $1 million a year from two state settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors. Harrell has indicated he wants to use the money to stand up and staff the proposed opioid response center he announced in April. That would leave no additional funding for programs like LEAD, REACH, and We Deliver Care, to which Myerberg said police could direct people who break the new law.
“When I’m talking to officers in the field about this [harm to others] concept, I guess there is a concern that it is an additional layer of complexity and standard that would be put on [officers. Personally I believe that the council should have incorporated state law, and then if some council members and others wanted to add policy or funding, they could have done that shortly after adopting the ordinance.”—Councilmember Alex Pedersen
At Monday’s meeting, Pedersen and Nelson raised concerns that the bill would create ambiguity and introduce new challenges for police officers that would make it harder for them to do their jobs.
“When I’m talking to officers in the field about this [harm to others] concept, I guess there is a concern that it is an additional layer of complexity and standard that would be put on” officers, Pedersen said. “Personally, I believe that the council should have incorporated state law into our Seattle Municipal Code and then if some council members and others wanted to add policy or funding, they could have done that shortly after adopting the ordinance.”
Myerberg said the legislation isn’t “asking [officers] to reinvent the wheel.” While it is Harrell’s “intent” to steer people toward diversion and treatment, officers will still get to make the calls they consider appropriate in all cases, including arrest if they believe it’s necessary to prevent harm or get someone to go into treatment or crisis care. “[Harrell is] asking them to do what they already do,” Myerberg said. “The executive remains clear that such a decision will be within the discretion of the officer. It will be fact-specific and individual-dependent.”
In late July, the Seattle Police Officers Guild “applauded” the new legislation, saying it would help “restor[e] public safety to the city.” This suggests that, at the very least, SPOG —which has a history of opposing substantive police reforms—does not expect the bill to cause major disruptions to officers’ usual way of doing business.
Including a preference for diversion in the police manual could lead to incremental change. But without significantly more funding, it’s unlikely to result in different outcomes, either for people using drugs in public or the general public witnessing public drug use.
Myerberg noted Harrell’s personal commitment to encouraging alternatives to arrest and prosecution, which stem partly from his direct experience as a Black man growing up in Seattle during the drug war. But intent is not the same thing as law; mayors come and go, and their lasting impact isn’t meaning well, but pushing through tangible, legally binding changes that last longer than a single administration.
A task force convened by Mayor Bruce Harrell to come up with proposals to address illegal drug use in public spaces has been meeting for several weeks to discuss how Seattle’s court system can address a potential influx of cases from the City Attorney Ann Davison’s office. This summer, the council is expected to pass a new law empowering Davison’s office to prosecute people who use drugs in public by aligning Seattle’s municipal code with a new state law making public drug use or simple possession a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony.
The city council rejected the proposal last month; Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who cast the deciding vote, plans to bring the measure back this summer and vote for it, a switch he says he feels comfortable making now that the task force’s work is underway. Only one of three sub-groups had met as of last week: The one focused on how the court will respond to a potential influx of new drug cases.
After just a couple of meetings, there appears to be broad consensus (with one exception that I’ll get to in a moment) in favor of expanding the Vital program, which provides intensive services to people with behavioral health issues, including addiction, and LEAD, a program run by Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association, or PDA) that offers services and case management to people before they are arrested.
Even Davison, who unilaterally withdrew the city from community court earlier this year—ending a program that allowed some people to avoid charges by participating in short-term programs—is reportedly open to expanding programs that divert drug users away from jail.
The idea, according to Councilmember Andrew Lewis, is to focus on “things that fall way short of the court” level and “keep things as far away from the court as possible,” since the court has essentially no extra capacity to take on a flood of new drug cases.
The task force includes representatives from Davison’s office, the PDA, Seattle Municipal Court, and—since last week—the King County Department of Public Defense, which was excluded from Harrell’s initial list.
The group, according to Lewis, generally agrees the city should focus on “things that fall way short of the court” level and “keep [cases] as far away from the court as possible,” since Seattle Municipal Court has essentially no extra capacity to take on a flood of new drug cases.
“This conversation is really laying bare that a lot of policy discussions are based on assumptions that aren’t true,” Lewis said. “It really did call out that we could arrest everyone downtown for smoking fentanyl and the King County Jail wouldn’t be able to book them—so where does that leave us?”
The exception to this consensus, according to multiple sources, is City Councilmember Sara Nelson, who has expressed support for a new local misdemeanor drug court that would push people into long-term treatment instead of diversion or services based on harm reduction, such as medication assisted treatment and focused case management. Nelson—who has objected to funding PDA-run programs in the past—supports an abstinence-only approach to addiction and has argued that programs that provide methadone and suboxone to opiate addicts are “not aimed at long-term recovery.”
King County has a special drug court for people facing felony drug-related charges; defendants who opt in must go through a rigorous, abstinence-based program that includes mandatory treatment, frequent drug testing, and regular court appearances. The program is high-risk and high-reward: If a defendant completes the program, which lasts a minimum of 10 months, the charges are dropped. If they don’t, the judge can find them guilty and sentence them for their original felony, which could mean a long jail sentence.
For misdemeanors, the reward at the end of the process would be comparatively minuscule—the dismissal of low-level charges that don’t usually lead to jail sentences in the first place. It’s unclear how many, if any, misdemeanor defendants would opt in to such a court; currently, every drug court in Washington state is focused on felony-level offenses.
The group Harrell announced last month includes two other task forces, in addition to the one focused on the courts, that will discuss treatment and enforcement.
Lewis said that now that the work groups are meeting to discuss the best way to respond to public drug use, the legislation making public use a gross misdemeanor in Seattle is “almost a Macguffin”—a device that gets the plot going, but isn’t particularly significant in itself.
PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard agrees with that assessment. In an op/ed for PubliCola last month, she said the city’s primary focus should be on investing in evidence-based approaches to drug use and homelessness, regardless of whether the council gives Davison the authority to prosecute drug users.
Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis takes questions from reporters after yesterday’s press conference
By Andrew Engelson
Yesterday, following last week’s city council vote rejecting a bill that would have given City Attorney Ann Davison the power to prosecute people for drug possession and public use, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the creation of a 24-member “Fentanyl Systems Work Group” tasked with finding and implementing solutions to the opioid overdose crisis. In King County, 462 people have died of overdoses involving opioids this year alone.
In a press conference at city hall on Monday, Harrell said he was committed to passing a new drug possession and public drug use ordinance that would align the Seattle Municipal Code with a statewide “Blake fix” law passed by the legislature in May, which set drug possession and public use as gross misdemeanors.
“We will pass a law that allows our department to make arrests,” Harrell said. “But we will do that with compassion, to protect people when we have to.” Talking about how the war on drugs harmed his own community, Harrell wiped away tears and briefly stepped away from the podium.
“I believe in my heart, the people that are using drugs, many of them are sick,” Harrell said. “They’re not healthy. We’re not going to go out and fill our jails with sick people.”
The Seattle Police Department is already authorized to arrest people for drug use and possession under the statewide law, although King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion would have to agree to prosecute those cases, which she has said she will not do. Currently, few people are arrested or prosecuted under existing felony drug laws.
When pre-booking or pre-trial diversion don’t work or aren’t appropriate, Councilmember Andrew Lewis said he would support a new therapeutic court “where there would basically be a court-supervised check-in treatment regime—which is basically King County Drug Court.”
The work group will include municipal judges (including former community court judge Damon Shadid), several city council members, Davison, Police Chief Adrian Diaz, department directors, and representatives from service providers, diversion programs, community groups, and racial justice organizations.
Councilmember Sara Nelson, one of the sponsors of the drug possession bill, was adamant that the council pass a law soon. “I don’t want to see any infringement upon the city attorney’s prosecutorial discretion,” Nelson said after the press conference. “And I don’t want anybody telling the mayor what he’s going to do, what he’s going to direct his officers to do.”
Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who cast the deciding “no” vote last week, has said that in order to vote for a new bill granting the city attorney new authority to prosecute misdemeanor drug crimes, he wants to see a replacement for community court, more funding for prefiling and pre-arrest diversion programs like LEAD, and other “necessary treatment and diversion programs.”
“I’m looking forward to hearing from everybody,” Lewis told PubliCola. “We’ve got two judges who are on this task force. We’ve got the city attorney’s office on this task force. I think that we can work through whatever differences we have to get a plan in place to have a successor therapeutic court.”
Community court has been the primary alternative to Seattle’s mainstream municipal court system since 2020. Though Lewis said he’s committed to finding a replacement for the court, he added that he’s actually more invested in diversion programs that target people before they get arrested in charged, such as LEAD for adults and Community Passageways for youth.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), which runs the pioneering pre-booking diversion program LEAD, said the debate over adding drug possession and public use to Seattle’s municipal code is something of a distraction, since diversion programs have existed as an option for more than a decade and will continue to.
“Since 2012,” Daugaard said, “we’ve had a framework in Seattle where even when there is legal authority to arrest, book someone into jail, refer them to prosecution, and prosecute them, our local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors have very often chosen not to do that, in preference for a pre-booking diversion framework where people get a warm handoff to harm reduction-based care.”
Daugaard says arrests for drug-related offenses in Seattle have plummeted in the past two decades and aren’t likely to increase. “The incidence of stops, searches, and arrests for drug crime fell over a decade from being at the very top of the reasons that people have course of contact with law enforcement to outside the top ten,” she said. “And that was not an accident.”
When pre-booking or pre-trial diversion don’t work or aren’t appropriate, Lewis said he would support a new therapeutic court “where there would basically be a court-supervised check-in treatment regime—which is basically King County Drug Court.” Participants in drug court, which lasts a minimum of 10 months, must check in frequently, stay sober, and meet other court-mandated requirements in order to have their charges dropped.
“We know that pre-file diversions are probably best for the overwhelming majority of people,” Lewis said. “But there is a small group of people where those interventions have not been successful, and they need a little bit more accountability and a little bit more structure. And that can definitely be provided by a therapeutic court.”
Daugaard says the more critical issue is finding sufficient funds for recovery services for people with substance use disorder, especially those without shelter. Though one selling point of the state’s drug possession bill was supposed to be an increase in funding for services and treatment, Daugaard says what the state actually provided is insufficient to deal with the scope of the problem statewide.
“The population in each region that it can serve is a small fraction of the total number of people who are using drugs in a way that could either be life threatening or problematic for their stability.” Addressing drug use in Seattle will require an injection of local resources beyond what the city has provided so far—something the council will have to grapple with during its annual budget deliberations this coming fall.
Although the count will 
By Erica C. Barnett
