Rantz: WA Health Care Authority group recommends government give addicts fentanyl, other drugs

Democratic lawmakers will consider recommendations from a Washington Health Care Authority workgroup that the state effectively become a drug dealer, offering drug addicts access to a “safer drug supply.”

Substance Use Recovery Services Advisory Committee (SURSAC) defines “safer supply” as to refer “to the providing of regulated pharmaceutical options for people who have a substance use disorder to people who have been diagnosed with a substance use disorder.” Under the group’s recommendation, drug addicts would be able to “receive prescribed opioids as an alternative to the illicit, unpredictable drug market.”

SURSAC was created in 2021 to provide policy recommendations to the legislature around substance use recovery services. The group provided its recommendations to the public on June 13.

Drug use centers to Washington state?

SURSAC offered four frameworks for a safer supply program.

Under the first model, Washington state would establish a “supervised consumption” location where “drugs are prescribed and administered in a supervised setting under the care of health professionals and/or peer workers.” A second model would prescribe and dispense drugs to users who can administer it “on their own terms outside of a supervised setting, such as their own home.”

The third and fourth models are considerably more extreme.

The third model would create a “Buyers Club” where “Network of people in community [would] pool money and buy from a source and then use that to purchase drugs in bulk, test them, package them and provide them back to the community.” The fourth model would offer drugs “can be made available without prescription in dispensaries and shops (e.g., cannabis).”

Failed harm reduction model informs ‘safer supply’ recommendations

The goal of offering a “safer supply” is intended to be “an immediate response to the drug overdose crisis and offering people are alternative” to the dangerous illicit drug market, according to Erin Russell, a Baltimore, Maryland-based “harm reduction consultant” working on the SURSAC.

She acknowledged that this would not likely lead participants to stop buying street drugs. The goal, instead, is to “reduce that street drug use when they’re in the right treatment program.”

The entire effort is based on a failed harm reduction model, which aims to mitigate the threats of illicit substance abuse by providing clean supplies (from drug paraphernalia to illicit substances) to addicts in order to keep them alive to get into treatment. But the model, as applied, does not focus on treatment at all. Public Health Seattle and King County, for example, hand out free fentanyl smoking kits on demand and do not even mention treatment options during the transaction.

“Harm reduction is a philosophical and political movement,” Russell noted during the meeting.

Here are the official recommendations

SURSAC offered a series of recommendations that will be considered by the state legislature, which is controlled by Democrats who previously legalized drugs statewide. That resulted in a historic number of overdose deaths.

First, SURSAC recommends the state allow a clinical trial to offer a safer supply by a university in Washington. Second, the group wants Washington Democrats to pass legislation establishing a “scalable, safer supply pilot program.”

“The state would have to do that and be prepared for federal intervention or hope that it doesn’t happen, as in the case with marijuana. The second thing is a doctor would have to be willing to put their license on the line and prescribe. And doctors, you know, their controlled substances licenses would be, could be jeopardized, and they could face federal and state consequences for prescribing these [opioid] drugs for their unintended purpose,” Russell explained.

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