Tag: opiate epidemic

Addiction, Drugs, Seattle magazine

After Needle Incident at Ballard Library, Library System Will Install a Handful of Sharps Containers on a Pilot Basis
UPDATE: On Friday, the Seattle Public Library said it now plans to install sharps containers in all restrooms at the downtown, Ballard, University District, and Capitol Hill branches on a six-month pilot basis. In an email, library spokeswoman Andra Addison said the pilot is intended to help library staff “better understand the performance and durability of the containers we have selected, as well as any physical impacts to the restrooms.” The sharps containers will stay in the restrooms after the six-month pilot period ends, unless there is a compelling reason” to remove them.
“In addition to monitoring use of the containers, the Library will also be tracking whether or not the containers reduce the number of needles found inside or outside the libraries,” Addison said.

This story originally appeared on Seattle Magazine’s website.

 

In the wake of an incident in which a custodian was pricked with a hypodermic needle at the Ballard library last month, the Seattle Public Library system will install sharps containers on a pilot basis at several of its branches, potentially including Ballard. The custodian was taking out the trash in the women’s restroom when he was stuck with a needle tucked inside the package for a sanitary pad and was taken to the hospital, where he was released without incident.

Earlier this month, library spokeswoman Andra Addison said SPL had no plans to install sharps containers in any of its branches, despite the recent dramatic uptick in public use of injection drugs, including heroin and fentanyl. “We don’t allow illegal drug use in the library. It’s against our rules of conduct,” Addison said. Addison claimed the incident in Ballard was the first of its kind in the library system, and said “we don’t really have a need for” containers for drug users (and insulin-dependent diabetics, for that matter) to dispose of used needles.

Since that story ran, however, the library has told staffers that it now plans to install sharps containers on a pilot basis in collaboration with Seattle Public Utilities, which already has installed sharps containers at a handful of locations (including three park restrooms) around the city. Earlier this week, SPL chief librarian Marcellus Turner told a citizen inquiring about sharps containers that the library “recognize[s]we need to enhance our practices and are moving in that direction.

“We also are conducting additional research with other library systems and have contacted Seattle Public Utilities to understand how the Library might participate in or be served through its Sharps disposal project,” Turner added.

According to library spokeswoman Caroline Ullmann, the library is “moving forward with a project that pilots two approaches 1) a container placed outside of a branch on Library property and 2) a container placed inside a branch. We are doing this at several locations at one time with the goal being to find out if one type of device or treatment is preferable to another. We are in the process of determining the locations for the project and confirming a timeline,”

The King County Public Library system, which operates outside Seattle, has sharps containers branches in Burien, Renton, and Bellevue, locations where library staffers reported finding needles on bathroom floors and flushed down toilets.

According to library spokeswoman Caroline Ullmann, the library is “in the process of determining the locations for the project and confirming a timeline.” Asked whether the plan is to locate the inside sharps container in a restroom—and, if so, whether it will be in the men’s or women’s restroom—Ullmann responded, “I have not heard if we’ve decided precisely where in the branch to locate the container.”

The five library branches with the highest number of drug-related incidents are Capitol Hill, the University District, Ballard, Lake City, and South Park.

Addiction, Drugs, Election 2017, Elections, legislature, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: “Clearly An Undisclosed Pledge”

1. Last week, former mayoral candidate Cary Moon wrote her campaign a check for $207,000, bringing the total she contributed to her own campaign to nearly $400,000—the largest amount spent by any self-financed candidate in Seattle history.

The campaign for now-Mayor Jenny Durkan now argues that the contribution confirms what they predicted in two complaints they filed last year, alleging that Moon was engaging in a campaign-finance “shell game,” accepting a loan-on-paper from her campaign consultant Moxie Media with a promise to pay Moxie back after the campaign was over.

Shortly before the November election, the Durkan campaign filed a complaint with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission against the Moon campaign, charging that Moon had unlawfully contributed tens of thousands of dollars to her own campaign within 21 days of the election, in violation of a state law prohibiting candidates from giving more than $5,000 to their own campaigns within that period, or had promised to repay a large loan to her campaign during that period, which, they argue, would also violate a city election rule prohibiting vendors from extending credit to campaigns in a way that is outside the “ordinary course of business.” A week later, the campaign filed a separate, similar complaint at the state Public Disclosure Commission, charging that the campaign’s final report before the election “clearly indicates that Moxie Media is relying on Ms. Moon to cover debts that are clearly beyond the pace of their other fundraising efforts. The increase in debt by $77,459.18 [over the last two weeks of October] is clearly an undisclosed pledge from Ms. Moon and is over 15 times the amount that Ms. Moon can pledge during the 21 days before the election.”

According to the SEEC complaint, “A close look at the Moon campaigns [sic] filings indicates that one of two things, both illegal, is going on: either her campaign’s vendors are making tens of thousands of dollars in illegal in-kind donations to her campaign, or Moon is contributing (or promising to contribute) tens of thousands of  dollars to her own campaign in direct contravention of the 21-day self-contribution limit,” the complaint alleges.

The complaints zeroed in on tens of thousands of dollars campaign consultant Moxie Media spent in the final weeks of the campaign on up-front expenses like postage, which can’t be deferred until after the campaign is over. In the last two weeks of October, according to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, the campaign’s debt increased by more than $85,000, to $186,000 (the election was November 7). This amount of last-minute debt, the Durkan campaign suggests, violates the spirit of the ban on late contributions. “If these actions by the Moon campaign and Moxie Media are acceptable, then there are essentially no limits to the amount that a campaign consultant can spend out of their own funds on media, mail or other paid communication buys on behalf of a wealthy candidate for whom they work, under the assumption that the candidate can reimburse them for all of those up front payments after election day, when campaign contribution limits (like the 21-day restriction on candidate self-contradictions [sic]) no longer apply,” the state complaint says.

Moon’s camp says the loan (or pledge) was completely within the normal course of business, and notes that Durkan’s own debt increased by about $45,000 in the same period, to $98,000. They also point out that the debt was hardly a secret—the campaign reported it on every election filing.

Moxie Media’s Lisa MacLean did not return a call for comment.

Although consultants are allowed to extend credit to candidates for 90 days, the complaint charged that the Moon campaign and its consultant, Moxie Media, were aware that the debt would ultimately be paid by Moon, not other campaign contributors. At the time of the complaint, October 25 of last year, the campaign was reporting more than $125,000 in debt, which was almost as much as Moon had raised from individual donors at that point in the race, raising questions about her ability to generate enough in donations after the election to pay back that debt without using her own money. By the end of November, three weeks after Moon had lost the election, campaign finance reports indicated her campaign was $206,000 in the red.

If the SEEC tosses the complaint, the Durkan campaign says, it will essentially be saying that there is are no limitations on campaign contributions by self-financed candidates, opening the floodgates for candidates to make massive loans to struggling campaigns in the hopes that a big last-minute financial push will make up for a lack of grassroots support. (The PDC will consider the campaign’s complaint, too, but on a much slower timeline because the agency is working its way through a huge backlog caused primarily by a single conservative activist who has filed dozens of complaints against local Democratic Party districts alleging various reporting violations.)

But officials with the SEEC and the state PDC say this is the direction the courts seem to be going already. In addition to Buckley v. Valeo, in which the Supreme Court ruled that limiting a candidate’s spending on her own campaign violated the First Amendment, there’s Family PAC v. McKenna, in which the Ninth Circuit district court ruled that a 21-day limit on large contributions to ballot initiatives (though not individual candidates) was unconstitutional.

The direction the courts are going, in other words, is in favor of unlimited spending and contributions by wealthy candidates to their own campaigns. This may mean more self-financed campaigns in the future, but it may also mean more laws meant to encourage candidates to raise their money from individual donors, like the initiative that provided each voter $100 in “democracy vouchers” to spend on city council campaigns this past election. There’s also the distinct possibility that Moon—a candidate whose consultant, Moxie Media, bragged was “well-resourced” before she had even declared she was running—was simply an outlier in Seattle politics: A progressive candidate with deep pockets who failed to win the imagination of the public (Moon received 1,088 individual contributions to Durkan’s 4,210) yet was able to eke out a second-place primary election finish in a very crowded (21-candidate) field. A big test for the viability of non-wealthy candidates will come in 2021, when democracy vouchers go into effect for mayoral candidates. Although vouchers do not include restrictions on self-financing, they do place other limitations on candidates, such as spending limits, in exchange for public funds.

2. At 10:00 this morning, the state Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee will hold a public hearing on a bill, SB 6150, that would update the state’s current abstinence-first approach to opiate addiction and require the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) to promote the use of medication-assisted treatment and other evidence-based approaches to opiate addiction. Currently, state law says explicitly that there is no fundamental right to medication-assisted treatment for addiction, that total abstinence from all opiates should be the “primary goal” of any opiate addiction treatment, and that if a doctor does prescribe medication, it should only be a stopgap measure on the way to total abstinence.

Overwhelming evidence has concluded that medication-assisted treatment with opiates is effective at saving lives, reducing the harm caused by buying and consuming illegal drugs, and reducing or eliminating the use of harmful opiates. There is still some debate about whether people should continue taking replacement drugs like suboxone for the rest of their lives—they are opiates, and do cause dependency—but there’s no question that punitive, abstinence-only policies result in more deaths and ruined lives than compassionate, evidence-based approaches like medication-assisted treatment, and it’s high time that state law reflected that.

The bill would also declare the opiate epidemic a public health crisis, seek a waiver from federal Medicare and Medicaid rules to allow opiate addiction treatment in prison, and develop a plan for purchasing and distributing naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug, throughout the state.

If you enjoy the work I do at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a monthly Patreon subscriber or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. All the content on this site is free, and I don’t run ads, which means that your contributions are what makes my work here possible.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Addiction, Drugs, Elections

Safe Seattle’s Harley Lever: Safe Consumption Sites Can’t Scale to the Size of Seattle’s Heroin Problem

This is part 2 in a series of interviews with advocates on both sides of the safe-consumption issue.

Earlier this week, a coalition of public health experts and people who have lost loved ones to overdoses announced that they are suing to block Initiative 27, which would ban supervised drug consumption sites throughout King County, on the grounds that public health decisions are outside the scope of the initiative process. The group, called Protect Public Health, argues in their lawsuit that under state law, King County and its public health department are responsible for making public-health policy decisions for the county, and “[i]t would be antithetical to this scheme to allow citizens to delay or override urgent action on a public health crisis merely by raising sufficient funds to qualify a referendum or initiative.” (You can read the full complaint here.)

Last week, the King County Elections Department confirmed that initiative supporters had collected enough signatures to qualify for the February 2018 ballot.

With safe consumption very much in the news this week, I thought it would be a good time to hear from some advocates on both sides of the safe consumption issue.

Today, my conversation is with Harley Lever, one of 21 candidates for mayor in the recent primary election and a leader of the Facebook group Safe Seattle, which organizes on policies related to homelessness and drug addiction. Safe Seattle has been vocal about their opposition to proposals that would reduce penalties on people who live on Seattle streets, in tents, or in their cars or RVs, and in favor of more frequent and punitive encampment “sweeps,” in which homeless people living in tent encampments are forced to move from place to place. Safe Seattle says it supports increasing access to shelter and services and providing treatment on demand, but that people who refuse to leave their encampments or RVs and relocate to shelters or treatment should be fined, jailed, or forced to move along. Most recently, they have opposed legislation proposed by city council member Mike O’Brien that would give people living in their vehicles immunity from some traffic laws and fines if they enter a program that puts them on a path to permanent housing; the proposal would also enable the city to set up potentially dozens of small “safe lots” around the city where vehicle residents could park without punishment or parking fines. Arguments against the legislation range from “I have to follow the law, so why shouldn’t they?” to “if RVs become legal everywhere, I guess I’ll just sell my house and go live in one tax-free.”

Safe Seattle has also been supportive of Initiative 27, arguing that safe consumption sites will increase crime and open drug use in the surrounding neighborhoods, and that they will only enable drug users to keep using instead of seeking treatment. Many of Safe Seattle’s writers and commenters have argued that forcing people into drug treatment is an effective way to get people into recovery, and that if Seattle does allow a safe consumption site, IV drug users will congregate around the property and use (and overdose) outside, littering neighborhoods with needles and the bodies of overdosed addicts.

Lever, however, he says opposes safe consumption sites for more complicated reasons: He doesn’t believe they can scale up to the size of the city’s opiate and heroin problem. He says he’d rather see the city spend its money on widespread access to naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug, and detox and treatment on demand, than on sites that might save a few lives but won’t effectively address the underlying epidemic. Like King County Public Health’s recovery division deputy director Brad Finegood, Lever’s knowledge of the toll drug addiction takes on users is personal: Two of his brothers have been addicted to heroin, and one is currently homeless and living with active addiction in Boston. I talked to Lever by phone last month; his comments have been edited for clarity and to remove the names of his family members.

Here’s Lever:

Image result for harley lever seattleOur story is the same story that’s happened to scores of people from my hometown, as well as throughout Boston. People just started using OxyContin recreationally. You have a couple of beers, have a Xanax, and it makes you feel really good. No one ever contemplated the level of addiction that it would create. Before the city or state even realized what was happening, we started seeing break-ins at pharmacies and crime spiking, because Oxy 80s sold for 80 bucks on the streets, and as people got progressively more addicted, they started stealing. It just skipped my high school class by about nine years.

The state of Massachusetts and a lot of pharmacies started smartening up about what was going on and did everything they could to restrict access to Oxy, and as it became more difficult to access, people started switching to heroin, and my brother was one of those. He got off heroin temporarily, but he went into the Army, where he started thriving, which was good. The only problem was, they made him a medic, which is a stupid thing for person to do who has documented addiction disorder. He did really well for three tours in Iraq, and then he went to Afghanistan and we think our cousin started sending him OxyContin, so he came back addicted.

“[My brother] is homeless. Fortunately, because he’s a veteran, he can get access to VA help. He overdosed four times last year, and every time he was saved by a person who had naloxone.”

My cousin eventually got arrested and is currently serving a five-year term in federal prison, and his family’s pretty much been tossed on their heads. Both of his kids were born addicted to opioids. They still have developmental delays and issues even now. His wife still struggles with opioid abuse disorder. And then, most recently, in August of 2016, my cousin’s ex-husband died of heroin overdose. So just in our immediate family, we’ve seen a lot of the devastation.

On a larger scope, I have a lot of friends who are either dead or are actually still addicted to heroin or in prison. This is an ongoing problem in our community.

[My other brother] has totally turned his life around. There are a lot of stories like this too, where people went down the wrong path but were able to get out of it and stay out of it. He went down dark path, but you would never know it looking at him. He went cold turkey. I think that he realized the path he was going down was not a good one. We’ve never talked about it, but I assume that, like many people gripped with addiction, he hit a rock bottom and he turned his life around.

“I don’t necessarily think a safe injection site will make the situation worse. My issue with the safe consumption site, in the context of Seattle, is that it can’t scale to the size of the problem.”

[My brother] is homeless. Fortunately, because he’s a veteran, he can get access to VA help. He overdosed four times last year, and every time he was saved by a person who had naloxone. He’s been on suboxone, methadone, and Vivitrol. I think the problem with him is, he’s done it for so long that his impulse control mechanism in his brain is really shot. He’s been in this constant cycle of being in treatment, getting sober, living in sober living—and then almost every single quarter, right when he gets his [benefit] check, he goes and spends it and he’s back in that cycle.

I don’t necessarily think a safe injection site will make the situation worse. My issue with the safe consumption site, in the context of Seattle, is that it can’t scale to the size of the problem. We have 23,000 opioid-addicted IV drug users in King County. On average, they inject three times a day. So you have 69,000 injections a day. The two [proposed] safe consumption sites can only supervise 500 injections combined, so we have choices. Either we can scale up and offer [274] other facilities to supervise all the injections, or we can do what saves my brother consistently and have widespread distribution of naloxone and layperson training. For the $3 million it will cost to fund these two safe consumption sites, we could literally give every single one of the 23,000 addicts 47 prescriptions of naloxone. What we should be doing is having a CPR crowdsourcing model, where we teach lay people to reverse overdoses.

“[Canada] and other countries that have these systems in place have government-run health care. They can provide access to detox and rehab on demand. We don’t have that.”

I don’t think they really ever contemplated fentanyl. It used to be that you could use black tar heroin for a long time and not risk overdosing like you see with fentanyl. What I fear most is that we’re going to die our way out of this epidemic. Fentanyl is not as prevalent here yet as it is on the east coast or up in B.C., but it’s going to make its way here. I just fear those 23,000 opioid addicts we have here are going to die and never get a chance to recover.

We have to actually look at the recovery system here in Washington State. We don’t have access to detox or rehab on demand. One of things I hear a lot of proponents talking about is how they do all these great things [at Insite in Vancouver and other safe consumption sites around the world], but [Canada] and other countries that have these systems in place have government-run health care. They can provide access to detox and rehab on demand. We don’t have that. We might have a bed available to you in nine to 12 weeks, which is a lifetime for detox. We’re also looking at months for rehab. We need to fix that structure. I think that’s a critical component.

“The compassionate side of me says we shouldn’t be [banning safe consumption sites]. The strategic side of me says, yes, we should, because we should be focusing on better solutions than safe injection. “

They do have HIV testing and hepatitis C testing. I think that’s absolutely a great point. But we also can do that with our navigation teams. I was talking to Daniel Malone from DESC and we both agree that if we have a mobile van where they can meet with opioid addicts where they reside, that would be a more strategic, cost-effective approach [to dealing with certain health problems common to opioid addicts].

The compassionate side of me says we shouldn’t be [banning safe consumption sites]. The strategic side of me says, yes, we should, because we should be focusing on better solutions than safe injection.  I recognize that a lot of people do it out of hatred towards drug-addicted people. What I always say to someone who hates an addict is: You are going to have an addict in your family. And once you do, this whole mantra of ‘They chose to stick a needle in their arm’—well, they did it under the influence of withdrawal and pain and sadness and different types of trauma.

Some people say, ‘I had to hit rock bottom. I had to be threatened with jail. I had to have these pressures.’ I think [tough love] absolutely works with some people. I think it would be silly to say that only tough love works, because there’s some very stubborn people out there. I’d probably be one of them, because I’m a bit hard-headed at times.

Honestly, I don’t think my brother will ever recover. My mother has said the same thing I’m just waiting for the call. We wish it was different. It’s been 15 years and he’s been so very lucky to survive, but we know, based on just the trajectory and frequency of his overdoses, he’s on more than borrowed time.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, phone bills, electronics, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Drugs, human services, King County, Uncategorized

County Presses Pause on Safe Consumption Sites

Two weeks ago, rejecting the unanimous recommendation of the King County Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force, the King County Council voted to prohibit funding for supervised drug consumption sites except in cities that explicitly approve them—a sop to suburban cities and rural areas where residents are vehemently opposed to the sites and a slap in the face for the task force, which recommended a pilot project that would include one supervised consumption site in Seattle and one somewhere else in the county. (The county refers to supervised consumption sites by the clunky acronym CHELs, for Community Health Engagement Locations).

The council also voted to prohibit the county from funding safe consumption sites anywhere outside Seattle, and barred spending any of the county’s general fund on a Seattle site. As a result of those restrictions, any money for the pilot project would have to come from the county’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency levy—a tax that generates about $66 million a year but is already largely spoken for. The supervised consumption pilot was never supposed to be funded entirely through the MIDD, and supporters say that as the cost estimate for the pilot has ballooned to more than $1 million, the likelihood that it can be funded MIDD dollars alone is virtually zero.

“EFFECT: Restricts the General Fund Transfers to DCHS and Public Health such that 86 no General Funds can be used to establish CHEL sites. Restricts the MIDD  appropriation such that no MIDD funds can be used to establish CHEL sites outside 88 the city of Seattle.” – King County budget amendment barring county spending on safe consumption sites outside Seattle

Kris Nyrop, who wrote an op/ed for the Stranger comparing the council’s move to the “state’s rights” politics of the 1980s, says the vote “effectively kills” safe consumption sites, at least for the next two years, because “The MIDD dollars are all already accounted for until the fall of 2018” and because “the [King County] health department has dithered so long on this that they have given the opposition time to really organize” against it.

Supervised consumption sites, where addicts can use illegal drugs under medical supervision in a location that also offers medical care, detox, and referrals to treatment, are common in Europe but almost unheard-of in North America, where more puritanical attitudes toward addiction have made them controversial. The idea behind supervised consumption is that it keeps people from dying of overdoses and treatable conditions (like wound infections), prevents disease transmission via dirty needles, and gets people who may not have seen a doctor in years into the health care and social service system, providing a lifeline toward housing, treatment, and recovery.

“We haven’t yet done the work that we need to do at the council to understand the proposal, the benefits, or the criteria for when and where these [safe consumption sites] make sense.” – King County Council Democrat Claudia Balducci

The sites are controversial for obvious reasons: Intuitively, giving drug addicts a safe place to consume dangerous, illegal drugs seems like condoning their behavior. (This view assumes that addiction is a choice and ignores the fact that forcing people into treatment, an alternative that safe consumption opponents frequently suggest, is cost-prohibitive and doesn’t work, but it’s ultimately an emotional argument, not a rational one.)

“Trust me, you don’t treat alcoholism by inviting alcoholics to the bar,” Republican county council member Reagan Dunn, who has been public about his own struggles with addiction, said before the vote. “Fifty-six percent of my constituents said they are extremely against these sites. Only 20 percent of people indicated they were open to considering these sites.” Dunn said he was concerned about the county’s liability if users OD and die inside the facility (in almost 15 years, not one person has died at Insite in Vancouver) and worried that the sites would become magnets for heroin dealers. He suggested that Seattle should be a test case for the site, “before we take the show on the road” to suburban areas that don’t have the same capacity to provide treatment and emergency services.

Republicans weren’t the only ones arguing that safe consumption sites should be limited to the state’s largest city. Suburban Democrats like Claudia Balducci (a former Bellevue City Council member) and Dave Upthegrove, who represents South King County, argued that the county would be overstepping its authority if it opened a safe consumption site where residents opposed the idea. “One of the things that always drove us crazy at the city level was when higher levels of government told us what to do at our city,” Balducci said. “I come from a city that has decided this is not what they want in their city. It doesn’t fit the needs or the desires of their community…. [Safe consumption sites] work best in locations where there’s a lot of street drug use,” she added.

Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard, who sat on the heroin task force, argues that “it sets a dangerous precedent to withhold funding for health services from residents of towns whose elected officials have ideological problems with those medical strategies. … The health and well-being of people who live in Kirkland and Kent affect that of people in Seattle, and vice versa.”

Larry Gossett, a Seattle Democrat, scoffed at the implication that drug addiction—particularly heroin addiction—is a problem restricted to big cities like Seattle. Noting that, nationally, heroin and opioid addiction is largely a rural and suburban problem, Gossett said, “I do not understand this concept that people who live outside of Seattle and in suburban and rural areas are different than people who live inside of cities.” Council member Rod Dembowski, whose district includes Shoreline, Kirkland, and Woodinville, added, “There is a serious rural crisis going on, with people dying every day, and I don’t think it’s fair to the citizens of my district to say, ‘No, you don’t get to have return on your investment’ if such a facility would serve their needs. … I don’t think the public health of the 2.1 million residents of this county should be decided based on fear.”

On the  phone last week, Balducci defended her vote, arguing that the budget amendment is a temporary pause, not a permanent spending prohibition. “We haven’t yet done the work that we need to do at the council to understand the proposal, the benefits, or the criteria for when and where these [safe consumption sites] make sense,” she said. “We have to do a little more background work and figure out, what are these [safe consumption] sites and who do they serve.” Balducci also suggested that a huge debate about safe consumption sites could blow up her ongoing efforts to establish the first permanent men’s shelter on the Eastside in Bellevue. “We are facing a really tremendous backlash about that, and one aspect of the opponents’ position is that this is just the camel’s nose under the tent and they’re going to legalize heroin next and [addicts] are going to be out in all the neighborhoods.”

Of course, they’re already there.

Daugaard, who still holds out hope that the council could reverse its decision during the ongoing budget process, says that if they don’t, “it will be very difficult to keep the promise that the heroin task force made to neighborhood leaders in Seattle: that Seattle would not be left alone to respond to this need, which is fundamentally unfair given the widespread use of heroin and opiates throughout the county.  Waiting until 2019 to move forward inevitably will mean avoidable overdose deaths, and no solution to drug use in unsupervised public sites like bathrooms and parks.  Hopefully we all can agree that the status quo is unacceptable. Waiting is not a plan.”

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please considerbecoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, phone bills, electronics, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

 

Addiction, Development, Drugs, Election 2017, Health, King County, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Planning Is Necessary. Stalling Is Not.
L-R: Commissioners Vickie Rawlins, Brendan Donckers, Eileen Norton, Bruce Carter, Charlene Angeles

1. The Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission dealt another blow to defenders of Mayor Ed Murray yesterday afternoon, agreeing unanimously that the mayor’s supporters couldn’t create a legal defense fund and solicit unlimited anonymous contributions on his behalf.  Moreover, the board ruled that the supporters’ backup plan—limiting the amount of contributions and disclosing the names of donors—was equally unacceptable, on the grounds that the city’s ethics rules contain no provision allowing legal defense funds for elected officials.

“Given our current ethics code, or what we care about in the city about transparency and accountability, I don’t see a path for you,”  commission chair Eileen Norton addd.

Murray’s supporters proposed creating the fund to help the mayor defray the cost of defending himself against charges that he sexually assaulted a young man in the 1980s, and some speculated that one reason the mayor announced he would not run for reelection was to eliminate one objection to the fund—that it would violate campaign-finance rules.

 

“There is concern about whether the mayor has the resources” to defend himself, Flevaris said, “and the folks putting the fund together want to address that issue and make sure that the lawsuit can’t be used as a political tool” against him. “When you have a scandalous lawsuit like this, we think [that] informs this issue.”

“I don’t think the emotional issue around the lawsuit should inform our decision,” Norton responded.

Flevaris and Lawrence argued that by keeping the names of contributors to the fund anonymous and requiring donors to sign a nondisclosure agreement, the fund would avoid any appearance of political impropriety. However, commission director Wayne Barnett countered that if, for example, “someone involved with the development of an arena in SoDo makes a substantial gift to the legal defense fund, I don’t see how an unenforceable nondisclosure agreement is going to persuade a reasonable person that it was not given with an intent to influence” city policy.

Moreover, Barnett said, if the commission granted the defense fund the right to solicit anonymous, unlimited contributions, the commission wouldn’t have a leg to stand on the next time a campaign came before them asking for the right to take anonymous contributions, which has happened in the past.

Murray can still accept very nominal gifts under the city’s gift rules, but the commission did not appear to leave any path for the legal defense fund to proceed. After the vote, Flevaris said he was glad that the commission had given the attorneys for the fund some “clarity” on whether they could proceed. Once Murray’s term ends on December 31, he will be a private citizen no longer subject to the city’s ethics rules; however, Flevaris said “time is of the essence” in the lawsuit. Paul Lawrence, another attorney for the mayor’s supporters, said he hadn’t “heard anything to suggest” Murray would resign in order to start collecting contributions to help him defend against the lawsuit.

Turina James: “I’m the face of a heroin addict. Just a year and seven months ago, I was right out there with all of them. Without harm reduction … I don’t know what I would have done.”

2. Also yesterday, the King County Council’s Health, Housing, and Human Services Committee decided to delay for another month a motion that would direct King County Executive Dow Constantine to prepare a report and work plan for the creation of two pilot supervised drug consumption sites in King County. Citing the number of people (about 40) who showed up to testify in the middle of the afternoon, committee chair Jeanne Kohl-Welles postponed the measure that was the subject of all that testimony on the grounds that there was too much else on yesterday’s agenda.

Most of those who turned out to testify—including emergency room nurses, recovering addicts, Real Change vendors, and residents of neighborhoods, like Belltown, where injection drug use is common—supported the sites. However, the delay speaks to the disproportionate weight of opponents’ voices.  Yesterday, those opponents claimed, as they always do, that supervised consumption sites will turn entire neighborhoods into apocalyptic landscapes overrun by strung-out zombies who shoot up, turn tricks, and lie half-dead with their faces on the sidewalk in front of “legalized shooting galleries” that exist to “enable human suffering.”

“You seem to be forgetting that heroin is illegal,” one opponent, who identified himself as a recovering addict, said. “This plan is completely insane,” argued another.

Peer-reviewed studies from supervised-injection and -consumption sites around the world show that they reduce deaths from overdoses, infections, HIV, and hepatitis C, and connect people struggling with addiction to services and treatment.

Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard, a member of the task force that, almost nine months ago, recommended a supervised consumption site pilot project as part of a comprehensive package of recommendations to address the opiate and heroin addiction epidemic, said after the meeting that she was frustrated with the slow pace the committee has taken. “It’s hard to say that it’s behind schedule, given that it would be the first of its kind in the country. That said, this isn’t ideal, because these recommendations have been sitting for months.” Noting that the task force only recommended a three-year pilot project, Daugaard said the only way to demonstrate whether supervised consumption can work, or that it’s doomed to disaster, is to try it.

“The answer to those questions [opponents raised] lies is the implementation. We will find out whether there are good, bad, or neutral effects, and we will make an assessment at that point,” Daugaard said.

“But staying in this limbo is the worst of all possible worlds. Planning was necessary. Stalling is not.”

3. In response to a 58 percent increase since 2013 in the number of complaints about vacant buildings, mostly single-family houses, that have fallen into disrepair across the city, the council is considering legislation that would streamline the process for declaring empty buildings hazardous and tearing them down.

Currently, city law requires property owners to wait a full year before tearing down a building if it was most recently occupied by renters; the changes would lower that timeline to four months (which the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections says  is still plenty of time to “ensure that good-quality rental housing is not inappropriately removed”) and make it easier for the city to demolish or clean out hazardous properties and so-called squatter houses. At the city’s planning, land use, and zoning committee Tuesday, Seattle fire chief Harold Scoggins said that in the past 28 months, the fire department has responded to 47 fires in vacant buildings. “That’s very significant for us,” Scoggins said.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support