Harrell’s approach to fentanyl crisis: Heavy on spectacle, light on substance
By Marcus Harrison Green
On June 15, 2023
Seattle don’t be fooled, we are not dying. But nor are we well.
Depending on your echo chamber of choice, the City Council’s narrow rejection last week of an ordinance to prosecute public drug use and possession either averted a foolish and futile war on drugs or condemned our city to a lawless hellscape of fentanyl consumption.
Unsurprisingly, the bill’s failure brought a crush of criticism and backlash, perhaps most intensely on Councilmember Andrew Lewis who represents the downtown Seattle corridor, where our addiction crisis is most acute.
Lewis was widely seen as the swing vote in the 5-4 decision. He told me that he originally planned to vote in favor but changed his mind at the eleventh hour.
“I was looking at my statement that I was prepared to read when I planned to vote in favor of it, but couldn’t bring myself to say any of it because I knew it wasn’t true. We can’t hide behind a security blanket that this bill was going to get rid of open-air drug use,” he said.
Whatever you think of his decision, it was a rare display of political courage. A recent poll showed that 66% of likely Seattle voters are grievously dissatisfied with our city council. Lewis is up for reelection this year, and a brutal campaign trail awaits.
With the death of one proposed ordinance, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell held a press conference Monday to birth another. Ostensibly, the briefing’s purpose was to announce a 24-person work group to develop a new plan “in the coming weeks” and “advance effective and sustainable solutions addressing illegal drug use in public spaces.”
Personally, it felt as if the mayor had been called into the principal’s office to explain the city’s handling of the crisis thus far.
Directly countering recent criticisms, he dismissed concerns about the defeated ordinance leading to a new war on drugs as overblown. Pointing to some of the Black ministers assembled with him, he stated that together they’d “lived through that war.”
While I don’t doubt that they had, cynically I looked at all of the Black faces gathered there — none of whom spoke with the exception of Harrell’s wife Joanne — and wondered if they weren’t strategically placed as heat shields to block criticism.
While there was more spectacle than substance Monday, what did emerge — besides calls for the use of harm reduction strategies, pretrial diversionary programs and community court alternatives focusing on treatment — is that arrest will still be integral to whatever legislation is presented. For the purpose of aligning municipal code with state law.
I pray I’m not naive in assuming that along with the clarity the mayor promised to give police officers making “compassionate” arrests, the new plan will include methods to avoid disproportionately arresting the poor and people of color.
In forming this new policy, he pledged to include the right people and ensure the right voices were heard.
I also hope his work group is asking the right questions, particularly now as we forge a pathway forward.
I’ve yet to meet anyone lobbying for pervasive and unquarantined open-air drug use, wanting their nostrils twinged by fentanyl smoke on the light rail, or gleeful to witness public violence on downtown corners.
Wanting to remedy this in any way with ferocious urgency does not make you evil or malicious. It makes you human. But equally human are the 712 Seattleites who died from overdoses last year. Equally human are the unhoused with whom we share this city, many of whom suffer from substance use disorder.
For this reason, we must forgo the temptation to do anything simply because we must do something. This doesn’t pit people wanting safe streets against those seeking assistance for drug users struggling with addiction. They are often one and the same.
We have more than 50 years of evidence showing that primarily carceral approaches to drugs have done nothing but vault us from addiction crisis to addiction crisis, whether it has the prefix of crack cocaine, opiate, meth or fentanyl.
Drugs consumed in public are mostly done so because the user has nowhere else to go. Contrast that with an affluent banker using cocaine inside his private residence who is rarely, if ever, punished.
In illustrating how our homeless crisis is a precursor to our addiction crisis, Michelle Johnson told me she didn’t begin using until she was homeless. They provided temporary reprieve from the horrors of the streets. She now lives in permanent supportive housing at Cottage Grove Commons, which does not require sobriety.
She sees the rich irony in the fact that she is now left in peace to regularly consume drugs in her home, whereas she faced constant harassment from law enforcement when she was unhoused.
This piece was republished from the Seattle Times.