“I’ve never been sober a day or two since I was 16,” Omps, who was 34, texted her sister on Oct. 5 of last year. “I do not want to be addicted. I fucking hate needing something to feel normal. I might as well actually get high if I’m going to be an addict.”

Though she resented the suboxone, people close to her said it was crucial to her recovery from substance use disorder. And so it was catastrophic that she could no longer obtain it, midway through 2023, after she was kicked off Medicaid. 

At the onset of COVID-19, the federal government suspended normal rules for Medicaid to keep people from losing coverage during the pandemic, allowing recipients, including Omps, to go three years without having to demonstrate eligibility. But that policy ended in March 2023, and Omps and millions of others across the country were swiftly dropped from government coverage—for instance because they forgot to file for renewal or made a mistake on their paperwork, or because they had moved to a new state or started earning too much money to qualify for Medicaid. In West Virginia, this change was compounded by the existing staffing and funding challenges in the state’s Medicaid office, and the legislature’s inaction to avert this cliff.

In 2022, Omps started working at the nonprofit West Virginia Family of Convicted People, where she organized events to protest and raise awareness about conditions inside West Virginia’s deadly jails. The job paid $22 an hour, which put her in a difficult spot: She was making too much money to stay on Medicaid, but the job didn’t provide health insurance and Omps didn’t couldn’t afford to pay out-of-pocket for her drug treatment.

“She had to go off of suboxone and that is what put her body under a lot of stress,” Omps’ sister, Victoria Omps, told Bolts recently. “It was so hard on her, because of how expensive it was going to be to stay on.”

Already in withdrawal from hard drugs, Omps suddenly found herself in withdrawal from the medication that was treating her addiction. On Oct. 18, she entered the steam room of a YMCA in Charleston, West Virginia’s capital city, then collapsed and died as she got up to leave. She was 34 years old, and though she officially died of a heart attack, Victoria and others who knew Ashley told Bolts they have no doubt about what killed her.

“I think it was entirely about her having to come off of suboxone,” Victoria said. “The withdrawal was so hard. That was the reason she was even in the steam room, so she could try to sweat it out of her pores.”

The so-called unwinding of Medicaid coverage has, as of late last month, led to the disenrollment of more than 17 million Americans, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. West Virginia has been hit particularly hard: It is one of the poorest states in the country, and thus has one of the highest rates of Medicaid enrollment. The return to normal Medicaid rules has led to the removal of nearly a quarter of all West Virginians who’d been enrolled as of last spring, the Kaiser analysis shows.

Those who work in drug treatment and addiction recovery in West Virginia say this drop-off in coverage has endangered people with substance use disorder and compounded a larger crisis in a state that has already led the country in overdose death rate every recorded year since at least 2014, according to federal data. 

As patients like Omps lost access to addiction treatment, advocates pressed state leaders to expand Medicaid eligibility and treatment options in the state. Instead, even in the face of this crisis for drug treatment and recovery, many West Virginia lawmakers have turned to a different approach, pursuing new punishments for people addicted to illegal drugs in a state that already incarcerates more people for drug possession than for almost any other charge. 

The state legislature, which is controlled by Republican supermajorities, already restricted syringe exchange programs in 2021; this year, it considered bills to outlaw syringe exchanges entirely, as well as to ban methadone—a medication that treats opioid addiction, as suboxone does—and the distribution of clean drug supplies. West Virginia lawmakers also have repeatedly advanced legislation to turn simple drug possession from a misdemeanor to a felony offense punishable by up to five years in prison. 

“We’re trying to be proactive here,” Republican state Senator Vince Deeds, the sponsor of that proposal, told Mountain State Spotlight in January. “Right now, if you have someone go in for simple possession, they’re back out and they’re committing more crimes to feed their habits. The idea here is to have early intervention with these end-level users.” (Deeds did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Bolts.)

Deeds’ bill passed the state Senate both in 2023 and this January, but it stalled in a House committee last week as lawmakers declined to pass it. Instead, House Republicans decided to study higher penalties for drug possession in the future, which would push this focus on increased penalties into coming years. 

Many who advocate for those struggling with addiction in West Virginia feel frustrated seeing lawmakers focus during their limited time—the 2024 session is already set to end this week—on such solutions. These advocates argue that treatment offers more public safety benefits than harsher punishment, a position bolstered by years of research showing that incarceration does not deter drug use. 

“Instead of putting the money and funds into increasing access to treatment, increasing resources and funding to organizations helping with drug treatment, they’re talking about throwing good money after bad by increasing penalties and increasing incarceration rates,” said Kenneth Matthews, a recovery coach who is himself in long-term recovery from addiction. 

“There’s not enough money put into treatment facilities,” he said. “Never in the history of people committing crimes has anybody in the midst of their substance use said, ‘Oh, they just increased the penalty, so I’m not going to do this.’ As someone who was formerly incarcerated and in long-term recovery, when I was in the midst of substance use I wasn’t following the legislature and I really didn’t care.”

David Foley, the chief public defender in Mingo County, a rural area in the southern part of West Virginia that The Guardian once called “the opioid capital of America,” said he sees a host of other criminal charges that seem to stem from untreated addiction. “I see so many crimes where, if they are not drug offenses, they are fueled by the desire to get money to get drugs, or it’s people so down on their luck because of drugs,” Foley said. “It just seems like the entire spectrum of criminal charges are in some way influenced by substance abuse.”

Mingo County Sheriff Joe Smith, a Republican, confessed that he sometimes wonders whether arrests and incarceration for certain drug charges are doing any good for people suffering addiction. Smith told Bolts that he and his deputies often arrest the same people over and over again for the same drug-related crimes, and added that even if he could arrest every single person who sells drugs in the area, he doesn’t think Mingo County could solve its problems related to addiction through enforcement alone.

“Out of every crime we work, 80 percent is drug-related. We’ll arrest someone who stole grandma’s earrings, but when you get to the root of it, it was to sell the earrings for a hit of meth or some fentanyl,” Smith said. “It’s a sad situation. I’ve arrested people, and arrested their kids, and worked overdoses off people who I’ve begged to get help.”

Overdose deaths are a regular occurance in Mingo County, which has a population of just over 20,000. Rebecca Hooker, who runs a social services organization in the county, told Bolts that, recently, on a single day in a single 10-mile radius, her community saw four people die of suspected overdoses. “The people in the sector of harm reduction or prevention or rehabilitation really need more money,” Hooker said. “Right now it’s just catch and release.”

Matthews said his work as a recovery coach is particularly difficult these days, now that he must contend with the fact that many of his clients, who are already at high risk of incarceration or overdose—or both—are also trying to navigate the ongoing Medicaid mess. He talked about one client who had to leave a treatment facility because they lost Medicaid coverage, then spent months re-establishing eligibility, only to find that the treatment facility had no bed space for him to return.

“I was worried he’d have a fatal overdose,” Matthews said. “People lost their health care and had to leave their residential programs because they no longer had the ability to pay for it through Medicaid. Some of them were able to hold on and some were not.” 

West Virginia’s state Medicaid office has faced criticism for not doing enough to help people keep coverage after the rules changed. In a letter last summer, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services admonished the state for keeping people on hold for long periods of time when they called in for help, and warned that this and other forms of administrative dysfunction would lead to many eligible people losing coverage. 

Rhonda Rogombe, health and safety net analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said administrative hurdles have been a particular problem for people needing treatment for substance use disorder. “This is a very vulnerable group of people,” she told Bolts, “and they’re being disconnected from programs they were enrolled in, or could be eligible for.”

Deborah Ujevich, who works at a detox facility outside Charleston, and was close with Ashley Omps, says people have been scrambling over the past year to find addiction treatment after losing Medicaid coverage. “People would call us for a bed and you look their Medicaid up with the system, you go look at member eligibility, and you see no enrollment found,” Ujevich said. “So you can’t take them, and they can’t get meds because the pharmacy isn’t going to fill their protocol.”

Omps’ death while searching for treatment was sadly not unique, Ujevich said, adding, “We have had a number of past patients die because they aren’t getting the care that they need.”

She finds it frustrating that the state continues to pursue harsh enforcement despite little evidence that incarceration is helping to stem substance abuse, especially after so many lost access to addiction treatment under Medicaid.

“They are doubling down here on bad policy and they are not taking into consideration what is actually happening. It’s very, very, very out of touch,” Ujevich said. “We’re really going backward.”

The post Drug Treatment Crisis Grows in West Virginia, But State Just Looks Toward More Punishment appeared first on Bolts.

“People know that our shower list fills up quickly,” Beddis said. She says the drop in center is one of only two places unhoused people in Kensington can consistently take a shower. Visitors can also pick up safer use supplies like drug testing strips, get clean clothes and snacks, or simply hang out—lounging and chatting under the center’s neon purple lights and framed posters of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

“It really is a community,” Beddis said. “If somebody spills their coffee, we have our regulars that will jump up and be like, ‘Just give me the mop. I’ll take care of it,’ you know what I mean?”

Kensington and the people who live, work, and use drugs in this small neighborhood on the city’s northeast side have drawn scrutiny in the run up to Philadelphia’s May 16 Democratic primary, which will likely decide the city’s next mayor.

In a tightly-run race animated by issues of crime and public safety, debates on substance use have honed in on Kensington’s opioid crisis and significant unhoused population. All five of the leading candidates say the city needs to end what’s widely described as an “open-air drug market” and increase policing in the neighborhood. At least two of these candidates also propose raising the police budget. 

But local critics of a law enforcement-first approach to substance use worry that it may elevate overdose risks and perpetuate harm against people who use drugs, especially in Black and Latinx communities that already experience more policing. Instead, they hope the city’s next mayor will embrace harm reduction—a set of public health and social justice strategies aimed at protecting the dignity, autonomy, and rights of people who use drugs.

The city government’s response to substance use and the overdose crisis has thus far involved a complex patchwork of departments including police, public health, behavioral health, and homelessness services, and dozens of others, with guidance from the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, grassroots organizers in the city are locked in a years-long battle with state and federal officials to create a space for safer drug consumption. The proposal, championed by a nonprofit called Safehouse, has enjoyed some support from city officials since 2018 but has been delayed by lawsuits and now state legislation, even as similar sites have appeared in New York City. 

The next mayor will oversee the city’s response to the ongoing overdose crisis and shape its policies, wielding powers like its budget proposals, executive orders, or appointing the police commissioner. The mayor’s position on an overdose prevention site may also make or break the proposal in light of some state politicians’ ongoing efforts to preempt the sites. 

“The next mayor must take research about the effectiveness of harm reduction techniques seriously,” said Shoshana Aronowitz, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing who studies racial equity in substance use treatment and works with several harm reduction organizations across the city. 

A skyrocketing overdose crisis

Over 1,200 Philadelphians died of accidental overdoses in 2021—the highest number ever recorded. The potent opioid fentanyl has found its way into stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and an increasingly unpredictable drug supply, plus a lack of adequate prevention resources are driving up overdose rates citywide, especially in its Black and Latinx communities. A 2021 city report recommended using the phrase “overdose crisis” rather than “opioid crisis” to more adequately capture this impact. 

Much of Philadelphia’s current response infrastructure dates to 2017, when Mayor Jim Kenney convened a task force to determine how to “combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.” The task force’s final report called for easier access to medication assisted treatment, in which doctors prescribe drugs called methadone and buprenorphine to relieve withdrawal symptoms and reduce the risk of overdose. It also advocated increasing access to naloxone, which can help reverse overdoses, expanding drug treatment court, and providing additional resources for housing and jobs training. 

As fatal overdose rates continued to increase, however, Kenney declared an “opioid emergency” in Kensington and directed law enforcement to reduce “open-air drug use and sales.” Since then, the police have increased foot patrols in the neighborhood, seizing cash and drugs and making over 2,500 arrests in 2022 alone.

Since 2020, a harm reduction program within the city’s department of public health has been distributing naloxone and fentanyl test strips through street-based outreach and training Philadelphians on how to spot and reverse overdoses. The city also funds some of the work of a Kensington-based harm reduction nonprofit offering syringe exchanges. And the department of health has committed to reducing overdoses that involve stimulants 20 percent by the end of 2023, according to its strategic plan. 

All five leading mayoral candidates have expressed some vision of treatment for people who use drugs, but Rebecca Rhynhart and Helen Gym’s proposals most resemble this existing plan. Both have expressed support for medication assisted treatment. 

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate would “improve prevention, [drug] testing, and treatment outreach,” especially in “underserved Black communities in North, Southwest, and West Philadelphia, where overdose rates are rising.”

Candidate Jeff Brown has advocated for drug treatment through the criminal legal system. 

“Drug court [is] a very effective way to have a good outcome, because you monitor their substance use. If they fall off the wagon, they have a choice. Do you want to go to jail for your crimes, or do you want to go back to treatment?” he said at a recent candidate forum about public health.

But Aronowitz warns that not all treatment options are created equal. “We know what doesn’t work,” Aronowitz said, “And that is expecting people to just quit cold turkey and be fine, because we know that that’s associated with extreme overdose risk.” 

“When a politician says we need more access to treatment, that’s not enough,”she continued. “We need to know if they’re going to fund the things that work and defund the things that not only don’t work but are potentially harmful.” 

The battle over Safehouse

Advocates doing harm reduction work in Philadelphia are pushing the city government to expand its focus on keeping people alive, beyond offering treatment, and they have fought to establish an overdose prevention site in Philadelphia, an effort the city government nominally supports. Such sites, also known as safe drug consumption sites, are places people can use pre-obtained drugs more safely, in the presence of staff trained to spot and reverse overdoses. 

As of July 2022, more than 120 overdose prevention sites existed in ten countries across the world, and no fatal overdoses had ever taken place in one. But they remain controversial in the United States. So far, only two such sites exist in the country, both in New York City, where staff have reversed more than 700 overdoses in the less than two years since they were created. Rhode Island legalized the creation of a pilot site in summer 2021 and is set to open one in early 2024. California governor Gavin Newsom last year killed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles to establish their own sites. 

In Philadelphia, efforts to open such a site have been caught for years in a protracted battle pitting harm reduction advocates and some city officials like DA Larry Krasner against the U.S. Justice Department, some state politicians, and opponents in law enforcement, business, and residential communities across the city. 

The struggle dates to a recommendation from Mayor Kenney’s 2017 opioid crisis task force to explore creating a space for safe consumption. In 2018, a nonprofit called Safehouse launched with the aim of opening a site in the city. But soon after, a U.S. Attorney appointed by President Donald Trump sued Safehouse invoking a federal law which prohibits “maintaining drug-involved premises” where criminalized drugs are manufactured, distributed, or used. 

In February 2020, the federal judge’s ruling in Safehouse’s favor led the group’s leaders to announce the site’s imminent opening in South Philadelphia. But after vehement opposition from neighbors, the plans folded in just two days. In 2021, a federal appeals court reversed the ruling that had cleared the way for Safehouse to open, relaunching the legal battle.

The plan remains uncertain at this time. Settlement talks between Safehouse and the U.S. Justice Department have been ongoing for over a year. Local opposition exploded last month, when a group including the police union and business associations filed a petition to step in as party plaintiffs in the lawsuit, fearing that the Biden Administration would reverse its position. 

Opponents to the site scored a decisive win earlier this month when Pennsylvania’s state Senate voted to ban overdose prevention sites anywhere in the state on a bipartisan 41-9 vote.

The bill was sponsored by Democratic Senator Christine Tartaglione, whose district includes parts of Kensington. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she opposes “prolonging and allowing a system of state-sponsored addiction in Pennsylvania.” 

The bill now sits in the state House’s Judiciary Committee. If it passed the chamber, it would move on to Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has indicated he opposes safe consumption sites.

Meanwhile, five Philadelphia city council members introduced a local bill on May 11 that would prevent an overdose prevention site from being created anywhere in their districts, an area amounting to about half the city. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes Kensington, led the effort, saying that such a site would only worsen the neighborhood’s struggles with drug consumption. 

“We cannot continue to allow them to find ways where they can continue to remain in the same cycle,” she told Inquirer. The bill would still need to get a committee hearing and be voted on by the entire city council—a process that may not happen before the council’s summer recess beginning in July—before going to the mayor to be signed. 

In public statements and court filings, Kenney’s administration has supported efforts to open an overdose prevention site, and remains supportive even in light of the new city and statewide bills. Whether the next mayor supports Safehouse would likely be critical to its chances given that the proposal is assailed from many quarters.

Among mayoral candidates, Helen Gym, a former teacher and city council member embraced by activists on the left, is the only one to have directly stated support for an overdose prevention site, though she did so before the protracted legal battle over Safehouse. 

“[Safe injection sites] are among the most promising new approaches to come forward while we work to end the opioid crisis. I support establishing one in Philadelphia,” Gym said in 2017. Her statement at the time added momentum for the proposal by giving it a prominent supporter on the city council. Gym has recently offered more circumspect answers in public comments, and did not respond to Bolts’ question about whether she currently supports opening a site in the city.

Another leading candidate, former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart, expressed measured support for the proposal. “I won’t take a tool that experts say saves lives off the table,” she told Bolts. “But I would not put a safe injection site in any neighborhood that does not want one.”

“I think that the debate over safe injection sites in Philadelphia has clouded the bigger issue which is what is the comprehensive plan for dealing with the opioid crisis in our city,” she added. 

Three other major contenders—real estate mogul and former councilor Allan Domb, grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, and former councilor Cherelle Parker—all oppose the sites. Parker has been a strident opponent since Safehouse’s efforts to open a site in early 2020, when she participated in the city council’s mobilization against the opening. 

“We should not be participating in a ‘I know what’s best for you’ decision making where we use safe injection sites as solutions,” Parker said in a debate on April 18.

Policing a public health crisis

The role of policing has proved broadly divisive in the mayoral primary, and yet the five leading candidates support increasing police presence on the ground in Kensington, distancing themselves from advocates who worry it would exacerbate criminalization. 

Gym and Rhynhart each said they would do so by reallocating existing police funds to prioritize Kensington, while increasing the police budget overall is a central component of both Domb and Parker’s platforms.

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate will take a “public health and resident-focused, community-led response,” mentioning a focus on neighborhood improvements, trauma support, and mobile crisis units, but did not detail how increased policing will fit in. 

Rhynhart’s campaign website states that she will attempt to disrupt public drug use by focusing on dealers, with a mix of warnings for “non-violent dealers” and arrests for “those committing violent acts.”

Sheila Vakharia, who helps lead research at the Drug Policy Alliance, warns that the line between people using drugs and people selling drugs is much more fluid. 

“There’s this idea that there is this big bad demon-ish seller and this poor victim user and oftentimes the seller is racialized. The victim is also racialized, but differently,” Vakharia said. “And oftentimes all of this can create heroes and villains.”

To both Aronowitz and Beddis of Savage Sisters, ending the overdose crisis requires a solution beyond what has been proposed by any candidate in the Philadelphia mayor’s race: addressing the toxicity of the criminalized drug market. They argue instead for access to a safe supply of criminalized drugs in a way that clinical and community-led programs have modeled across Europe and Canada, but which has not been piloted in the U.S.

“The way we regulate alcohol is safe supply,” Aronowitz said. “We make sure it’s not poison, and that when you take a drink, you can reliably know how much alcohol is in it.” 

But even if those goals are still far off, at the very least, they say, the city government should meet communities impacted by the overdose crisis with resources and care—not criminalization.

“Our friends have necrotic limbs. Can’t access treatment. Can’t access housing. Can’t access compassionate pain management. Can’t even get a shower,” Savage Sisters’ founder and executive director Sarah Laurel wrote on LinkedIn last month.

“It’s time we respond to this public health crisis accordingly.”

The post How Will Philadelphia’s Next Mayor Tackle the Overdose Crisis? appeared first on Bolts.

Tom Marino, a former member of Congress, is running this spring for a job he held more than two decades ago: district attorney of Lycoming County, in Central Pennsylvania. On his website, he vows to “prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law,” and in the brief list of issues he says he’d tackle with a “tough-on-crime approach,” he includes the fact that “drugs are making their way into our neighborhoods.”

Lycoming County has been hit hard by the opioid crisis, overwhelming local officials with a surge in overdoses. But Marino’s campaign posture today sticks out given the accusations he faced just five years ago that he worsened this trend.

In late 2017, Marino’s nomination to be then-President Donald Trump’s drug czar derailed after The Washington Post and 60 Minutes reported that he pushed legislation that made opioids more readily available. The investigation revealed that Marino collaborated with the pharmaceutical industry to draft language that gutted the Drug Enforcement Administration’s authority to go after large drug companies suspected of fueling the crisis, all while receiving big donations. Besides sinking Marino’s appointment, the news sparked a national reckoning over his law and, back home in Lycoming, condemnation as well as fresh reporting on overdoses.

But any debate over Marino’s record and how it fits with his new campaign’s rhetoric ended before it even began: No one filed to run against him. 

Pennsylvania’s deadline to run for DA as a major-party candidate passed on March 7 with no other contender entering the race, leaving Marino highly likely to win the job and complete his comeback with little additional scrutiny. Marino, who also survived a residency challenge last week, did not reply to Bolts’s requests for comment over his legacy and platform on drugs.

The same scene repeated itself throughout the state this month. Upon compiling the list of candidates in the 49 Pennsylvania counties with DA elections this year, I found that only 14—less than a third of the total—drew multiple candidates, with a few of those races seeming to offer voters a stark choice. 

Thirty-five counties, meanwhile, drew only one candidate by the deadline.

Missed windows for democracy

That’s 35 candidates—typically incumbents, but in six cases nonincumbents like Marino—who are poised to waltz into office without facing much scrutiny into their policies. In Dauphin County, where PennLive recently reported on mounting jail deaths and local officials offering little information or accountability, DA Frank Chardo faces no opposition, just like the last time he ran in 2019. The same is true for DA Brian Sinnett in neighboring Adams County, where the DA’s office faced allegations that it is not taking rape complaints seriously. In Lehigh, which saw sustained activism after prosecutors decided to not charge police officers in a publicized use-of-force case, the DA is retiring and his chief deputy is the only candidate who filed to replace him.

The strangest saga is unfolding in Northumberland, where DA Tony Matulewicz filed his petition too late by a matter of minutes and was denied a ballot spot. He is suing to be reinstated but, for now, challenger Mike O’Donnell remains the sole qualified candidate. O’Donnell, who is a Republican like Matulewicz, works as a defense attorney and said upon entering the race that “he wanted to fix a broken system,” but did not reply to questions about what that means.

Independents may still file to run later, but it’s very rare for candidates outside of the two major parties to win. In 2019, when each of these 49 counties held their last DA race, all 49 winners had filed as a Democrat or Republican. Newcomers could also mount uphill write-in campaigns.

It’s common across the country for DAs to run unopposed. For one, it’s hard for attorneys to challenge a sitting prosecutor without fearing professional repercussions should they lose, especially in smaller communities. Still, the number of Pennsylvania counties hosting contested elections plummeted this year compared to 2019. At the time, 24 of the 49 counties drew multiple major-party candidates, compared to 14 counties this year. 

The pattern is also not confined to the state’s smallest jurisdictions. There are 12 DA elections in counties with at least 250,000 residents, and only four drew multiple contenders; in Montgomery County, for instance, a county of more than 800,000 residents, incumbent DA Kevin Steele will be running for re-election unopposed for the second straight cycle.

“Many people just don’t know all of the power that district attorneys actually possess,” says Danitra Sherman, the deputy advocacy and policy director at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “As voters, we often get excited about presidential elections, but not so much about local races, or state races at times, when those that hold positions at these levels have more say on and decision making power over the day-to-day life.” The state ACLU launched a voter education drive on the role of DAs in 2017, and in 2019 they sent out questionnaires to candidates, asking for their views on matters ranging from sentencing to bail, but many did not reply. Sherman says they recently sent out questionnaires to some candidates again this year.

In counties with contested DA races, this year is voters’ first opportunity to weigh in directly on criminal justice since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the latest round of GOP attacks over crime, which has put issues surrounding policing and public safety squarely in Pennsylvania’s political spotlight. Yet even when there’s a contested race, candidates often downplay the huge amounts of policy discretion that comes with the role. 

My own review of Pennsylvania’s 14 contested DA races found that many of the people who filed this year are running as status-quo candidates (such chief deputy prosecutors bidding to replace their retiring boss), competing largely over who has the most professional experience as a prosecutor, and eschewing sharing their thoughts on issues—all standard fare in DA races. 

In addition, some candidates have little to no campaign presence at this stage and did not answer requests for comment. That includes the sole challenger in Delaware County, one of the most populous counties with a contested race.

Primaries in Pennsylvania are on May 16, and general elections are in November. State voters also weigh in on many local and state elections this year, including a seat on the state supreme court, county sheriffs, and Philadelphia’s mayor.

Still, a few DA elections are presenting voters with some contrasting paths on criminal justice policy.

What to still watch for

The year’s marquee race is the DA election in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, where longtime incumbent Stephen Zappala faces the county’s chief public defender, Matt Dugan. 

Over his nearly 25 years in the DA’s office, Zappala has embraced a reputation for harsh prosecutions—other than in cases of police shootings—and sternly opposed advocates who have pushed for decarceration, accusing them of disregarding victims. “I don’t agree with their philosophy on a lot of things,” he said during his most recent campaign, explaining why he was “done with socialists and ACLU forums” and skipping some candidate events. Investigations have revealed significant racial disparities in prosecutions under Zappala’s watch but he has routinely dismissed addressing systemic inequalities as beyond the purview of his job. “I’m not running for public defender,” he quipped four years ago.

Now a public defender is running against him, adding to a wave of outsiders, including civil rights attorneys, who have run for DA nationwide in recent years. Dugan is pressing a basic disagreement over whether the DA’s office should even be tackling the root causes of crime and tracking class and racial disparities. “I do see a place for the district attorney to think more about crime prevention and to address the issues that are really driving people into the criminal justice system in the first place,” he told the Pittsburgh City Paper.

Hundreds of miles away, in Monroe County, the retirement of a local DA—Republican David Christine—has sparked an intriguing three-way race. In the Republican corner is Alex Marek, an assistant DA in a neighboring county who is pledging to bring a “tough on crime” approach. 

Democratic candidate Donald Leeth takes exception to that moniker. “Unfortunately being tough on crime is always locking up more people for a longer period of time, and I think the evidence has shown that that doesn’t work, that doesn’t make us a safer community, that doesn’t address the underlying issues within our society and our criminal justice system,” he told me. 

Leeth used to work as an assistant DA but says he became more aware of disparities in prosecution as a defense attorney. He faulted racial disparities in the county’s court system and an overreliance on police officers as “first responders for everything.” But he also remained largely cautious when it came to specifying reform he’d implement, for instance saying he’d want to recommend cash bail in fewer cases, but also that it has its role in the court system.

Leeth also said he “would not be open” to seeking death sentences if he was elected DA, and called on the death penalty to be repealed.

Also in the running is Democrat Mike Mancuso, who currently works as the county’s chief deputy prosecutor, and who did not reply to a request for comment on the death penalty and other issues. (The winner of the Democratic primary between Leeth and Mancuso will face Marek in November.)

Monroe is one of the ten counties in Pennsylvania that has sentenced someone to death over the last decade, according to data gathered by the Death Penalty Information Center. Pennsylvania’s Democratic governors have imposed a moratorium on executions but the death penalty remains available and state prosecutors regularly seek it.

Washington County is also on that list. Republican DA Jason Walsh came into office in late 2021 after his predecessor’s death and he has since pursued death sentences aggressively; the county had eight capital cases as of August, and more since. Walsh now faces Democrat Christina Demarco-Breeden, an assistant DA in a neighboring county. When I asked Demarco-Breeden if there are aspects of the DA’s office that she wishes to change, she zeroed in on Walsh’s use of the death penalty. She is concerned that it just keeps growing and that the county’s defense resources are at a breaking point. But she also said that, if she became DA, she herself would remain open to applying the death penalty “to the most brutal homicides.”

Some Democratic lawmakers are championing legislation this session to abolish the death penalty. “My job is to make sure that’s not even an option,” said State Representative Chris Rabb when I asked how he hopes DAs handle capital cases in the meantime. The money “could be much better spent on any number of things, most notably violence prevention so that we don’t have as many people committing the murders that get people on death row to begin with.” 

Rabb, who represents Philadelphia, was a vocal defender of  Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, a figurehead for so-called progressive prosecutors, against state Republican efforts to remove the DA from office last year; Krasner, who easily won re-election in 2021, is not up again until 2025. 

Rabb says the GOP attacks on Krasner and other tough-on-crime messaging backfired—Democrats won a high-profile U.S. Senate race and flipped the state House—because most Pennsylvanians believe in reforming the criminal legal system. “They believe in second chances, and having parole and probation reform so that people are not surveilled for decades,” Rabb told me.

“Spending so much time denigrating Larry Krasner did nothing else than energize Philadelphia in saying, ‘You folks who don’t live in Philly claim to care about us, but what are you doing for us other than demeaning someone who we voted for twice?’” Rabb added. Krasner, unlike most of his peers, has faced opponents in every primary and general election.

Democrats’ takeover of the state House in the midterms changed the political dynamics around criminal justice reform by ushering progressive leaders into power. But Liz Randol, legislative director of the state ACLU, says one thing that hasn’t changed in Harrisburg is the role of the Pennsylvania DA Association, the influential group that lobbies on behalf of state DAs and has helped shape state laws to be more punitive. Randol is watching whether 2023 chips away at state prosecutors’ typical role as chief antagonists to reform legislation.

“The prosecutorial mindset runs through the entire criminal legal system, from legislating to charging, to sentencing,” said Randol. “Because the system is largely driven by the prosecutorial side of the equation, it’s going to take a lot to change it. But I certainly think you can poke holes in that veneer.”

The post In Pennsylvania’s 2023 DA Races, There’s Already a Winner: Unopposed Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

State Question 820 lost overwhelmingly, 62 to 38 percent. It trails in all Oklahoma counties, and the state’s rural areas rejected it by especially large margins.

In the five years since voters approved a measure to legalize medical marijuana, Oklahoma has seen an explosion in cannabis farms and dispensaries. Some business owners are making a fortune. 

But possession and sale outside of those strictures remains a criminal offense. An estimated 60,000 Oklahomans are weighed down by a past marijuana conviction and the number keeps climbing, with 5,000 people arrested over marijuana possession in 2020 alone, according to state data. 

“At a time when the state has legal marijuana millionaires, it seems both unjust and imprudent for there to be so many people who can’t get a job and can’t put food on the table for low-level marijuana convictions,” Damion Shade, executive director of OK Justice Reform, told Bolts. 

Had it passed, SQ 820 would have enabled these people to seek an expungement of their criminal records. Providing retroactive relief has become a staple of legalization efforts around the nation, since the effects of a conviction extend far beyond the sentence, affecting people’s ability to secure employment, housing, or college grants. And Black Oklahomans disproportionately suffer these repercussions; an ACLU study found that between 2010 and 2018, Black people were four times more likely to be arrested over marijuana than white people.

Organizers intended to qualify SQ 820 for the state’s November 2022 ballot. But challenges delayed approval and kicked it off to 2023. Then, Republican governor Kevin Stitt scheduled the referendum for March 7—a special election where SQ 820 would stand on its own—even though Oklahomans were already set to go to the polls on both Feb. 14 and April 4 for local and school board races. 

This left the state with a confusing schedule of three separate election days—each with their periods of mail-in ballots and early voting—within eight weeks.

“People can’t rearrange child care and jobs every month to go vote,” says Andy Moore, CEO of Let’s Fix This, an organization that promotes civic engagement in Oklahoma. “Doing it like this was clearly a way to suppress turnout.” 

While Oklahoma routinely sees some of the worst voter turnout in the nation (it was the lowest of any state in the 2020 presidential election), participation on Tuesday paled even in comparison to that low bar. Roughly 560,000 people voted in Tuesday’s election, 25 percent of registered voters and less than 20 percent of the total voting-eligible population in the state. 

When Oklahomans voted on medical marijuana in June of 2018, alongside the state’s primaries, nearly 900,000 people voted; turnout on Tuesday was 37 percent lower. 

“If we really want to get an assessment of what the voters want, we need to help them to the polls,” Moore told Bolts. “We can do things to make elections more accessible to more people so that we can have higher turnout.”

The governor who scheduled the election opposes legalizing marijuana and called on voters to defeat SQ 820, as did other prominent Republicans who said it would endanger the state. “I believe this is the best thing to keep our kids safe and for our state as a whole,” Stitt said on Twitter on Tuesday after the result was known.

Some Oklahoma Republicans are pushing changes to the ballot initiative process that could guarantee an odd placement on the calendar, lending credence to complaints that state officials are intentionally seeking to dampen turnout in those elections. 

One measure, introduced by Senator Warren Hamilton, would mandate that initiatives only go to voters in odd-numbered years, rather than on even-numbered years where turnout is far higher. The proposal goes against the burgeoning movement nationwide to move more elections to even-years in order to sync them with higher-turnout national election cycles and champion higher engagement.

Hamilton’s proposal is now technically dead because it did not survive a legislative deadline last week, though Moore warns that measures can always be revived by legislative leaders or poured into other legislative vehicles late into the session. But another measure, Senate Bill 518, is still alive. Introduced by Senator Julie Daniels, it would make it trickier to qualify a ballot initiative, doubling the time window for someone to challenge petitions and making it easier to invalidate signatures. The legislation would mandate that voters use their full legal name when signing a petition, raising the prospect that any misspellings, nicknames, or other deviations from a government ID could nullify their signatures.

Moore warns that this change would add to what he calls an “already totally bogus” verification process. Oklahoma officials drew complaints last year when they decided to outsource signature verification to a private vendor, claiming the authority to do so by invoking a new law, even if many legislators say they did not mean it to authorize outsourcing, The Journal Record reported last year. 

SB 518, which passed a Senate committee in February, is scheduled to be heard on the Senate floor on Wednesday morning. 

Daniels and Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment about their respective bills. 

Republicans nationwide have retaliated against popular initiatives they oppose by championing an avalanche of measures that make it far harder for organizers to gather signatures to get them on the ballot. In Oklahoma, voters approved a number of ballot measures in recent years that circumvented conservative lawmakers, including medical marijuana in 2018 and Medicaid expansion in 2020. 

SQ 820 won’t add to that list, however. Besides making marijuana more accessible in the state, the measure would have raised revenue off of a 15 percent excise tax on the sale of marijuana that would have funded public schools and addiction treatment programs.

The expungement provision would have given tens of thousands of people the option to clear their records, though it would not have made that process automatic. Last year, for convictions that were already eligible for expungement in Oklahoma (marijuana is not among those), the state adopted a “Clean Slate” law that will lift the need for people to file a burdensome petition for relief. 

Shade, of OK Justice Reform, helped champion that “Clean Slate” law, which he says did not modify the criteria as to which offenses are eligible to be expunged—it only made the existing process automatic. With SQ 820’s failure, he says, he hopes to persuade state politicians to pass a bill to at least allow marijuana convictions to be expunged, which at least some Republicans seem to be open to. “It’s my goal to reach out to stakeholders and begin figuring out what type of legislative success we have going after this,” he said.

The post Oklahomans Reject Recreational Weed in Low-Turnout Election appeared first on Bolts.

The existence of these providers, authorized by a 2016 law, serves as a recognition by the state that promoting safer drug use can reduce one of the nation’s highest overdose mortality rates. Advocates for harm reduction have also warned lawmakers that this first step is far from adequate.

For one, the program has been embraced by leaders mostly in Maryland’s more urban counties, preserving barriers to safer drug use in rural areas. Even then, participants are only shielded from arrest and prosecution if they constantly carry a small card proving they’re registered in the program.

Otherwise, getting caught with a syringe or other tools to consume drugs in Maryland can lead to a felony charge and up to four years in prison; lesser paraphernalia charges can still carry hundreds of dollars in fines—not to mention collateral consequences associated with incarceration, court debt, and a criminal record. 

“We are calling it a health crisis on the one hand, but on the other we are treating it as a criminal offense,” Marguerite E. Lanaux, lead public defender in Baltimore, told Bolts. 

While over most of the past decade officials in Baltimore ruled out charging people for low-level drug offenses, the new state’s attorney rolled back those policies earlier this year, worrying local reformers about the future of prosecution in Maryland’s largest city.

Making people register with a government-sanctioned program to obtain safe supplies is no solution, said Harriet Smith, director of education and services at the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition, during her testimony at a statehouse hearing in February. “You can’t lose the card and you have to keep it on you at all times. You have to hope that the police officers in your area will trust that the code on the back of the card corresponds to you and not someone else,” Smith told state lawmakers. “I don’t know about y’all, but I lose business cards constantly—and I’m not experiencing homelessness. 

She added, “Requiring people to keep a tiny piece of paper and find it during a tense interaction with law enforcement interactions is unreasonable and a deterrent to taking part in this public health program.”

Smith and other harm reduction advocates had gathered at the state house to support House Bill 173, a proposal to lessen criminal penalties for drug paraphernalia. The bill proposes to cut maximum penalties for possession of “controlled paraphernalia”—defined in the bill as syringes, needles, gelatin capsules, glassine envelopes and various chemical agents meant to dilute or enhance drugs—down from four years to one, and from a $25,000 fine to a ceiling of $1,000. 

The bill also clarifies that such charges only apply to people manufacturing or selling drugs, as opposed to people who simply use them. However, Smith noted that the distinction is often blurry, since many who use drugs also sell them.

Sponsoring the paraphernalia bill is state Delegate David Moon, a Democrat and self-described civil libertarian who ran for office in part because he wanted to decriminalize drug use. Frustrated that in Maryland, and so much of the country, those working to treat substance use as a health issue and not a criminal one must settle for baby steps, Moon confesses that he believes his own bill doesn’t go far enough; he’d prefer total decriminalization of paraphernalia meant for drug use. 

“I need to get the votes to pass it,” Moon told Bolts. “Unraveling the drug war, unfortunately, does not move at the pace I would necessarily move at in our state.”

Even in more liberal states, people like Moon often find it painfully difficult to sell people in power on the concept of harm reduction, a broad set of strategies meant to help people who use drugs stay alive and as healthy as possible. Advocates say they don’t seek to enable drug use but rather to build a society more conducive to safety and addiction recovery.

The approach is backed by piles of research from all over the world: studies consistently show that providing safe drug-use supplies and safe places to consume drugs saves lives and prevents disease. Conversely, research shows that criminalization is ineffective—and in fact counterproductive—as a strategy to cut down on drug use and on overdose deaths.

“This is a health crisis. This is not a criminal justice or criminal legal crisis we’re in. Other countries get it and we just don’t,” Nicole Hanson-Mundell, who works on re-entry for formerly incarcerated people as executive director of the Maryland organization Out For Justice, told Bolts. “It’s incredibly harmful for this country and this state to continue this practice of incarceration as the only tool to teach a lesson or help someone understand or hand down a consequence. It’s really lazy policy.”

Smith said that in her experience, it’s not enough to present lawmakers with evidence of harm reduction’s public-health benefits.

“The lessons we grow up with, what we’re inculcated with in terms of the myths of drug use, those are just as strong as studies,” she said. 

Harm reduction has gained some traction in American halls of power and is even now endorsed by President Joe Biden, a leading architect of the country’s “war on drugs” while a U.S. senator. But groups working to make drug use safer remain chronically underfunded, and, as Moon has found, even the most modest legal reforms in this area can be heavy lifts.

Every state but Alaska criminalizes drug paraphernalia in some form. In a majority of U.S. states, life-saving fentanyl test strips remain illegal. (Maryland legalized them in 2018.)

Proposals to operate supervised drug-use sites have ignited political firestorms, even in some of the most progressive-leaning places in the country. Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom last year vetoed a bill to allow supervised drug injection sites, and a 2019 effort to legalize those sites in Colorado flamed out right after launching and is only now being rebooted. Advocates in Maryland are hoping these sites will one day be legalized in the state, but their political path is far from clear.

Even the paraphernalia policy Moon himself calls inadequate has been stalling for years in Maryland. In 2021, a similar bill made it all the way to the desk of then-Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who had signed the earlier bills to legalize test strips and to set up the syringe services, but Hogan vetoed it because, he said, it was “dangerous” and would facilitate drug use and sales.

“I’m on year nine doing this crap,” said Moon, who was first elected in 2014. “People die, and we fail to reduce intravenous disease transmission.”

Though the bill is not as ambitious as Moon would like, many regard it as an important step. HB173 is endorsed by a wide range of public health groups, among others, and Moon is confident it’ll pass the legislature, as it did last time. (The bill cleared the House on March 2 and now sits in the Senate.) Unlike Governor Hogan, new Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, has been outspoken in support of alternatives to incarceration, and would be expected to sign the bill into law.

Lanaux, the public defender in Baltimore, said policymakers evaluating HB173 should consider the way paraphernalia possession is actually charged. It leaves no question as to whom this statute is meant to target, she said.

“At the end of the day, if paraphernalia is the charge, the person being charged is a user, not a dealer,” Lanaux told Bolts. “Dealers are charged with more serious offenses. So, this is not addressing drug dealing. It is punishing users.”

Lanaux and other public defenders told Bolts they believe that people in rural areas will continue to face disproportionate hurdles to safe use, even if Moon’s bill passes. In addition to the fact that most safe-supply providers are in the more populous counties of Maryland, the crisis of overdose deaths is a relatively fresh one in rural and suburban areas of the state; substance-use deaths have tripled, or more, in many places that a decade ago suffered only a handful of them every year. 

Smith said HB173 plays an important part in reducing stigma around drug use, particularly in areas where the overdose crisis is relatively new.

“I think it will mean that people are much more likely to grab supplies for their loved ones,” she said.

Baltimore has long been home to a plurality of substance-use deaths in the state, but prosecutors lately haven’t been as hard on people dealing with addiction. The state’s attorney in Baltimore for the past eight years, Marilyn Mosby, had adopted a presumptive do-not-prosecute approach to low-level offenses such as paraphernalia possession. 

“If you go to some of the outer counties, the ones further out are always going to continue to prosecute” for paraphernalia as long as the option remains, said Joshua Speert, acting district public defender for two counties west of Baltimore. “Other counties didn’t stop charging small theft or drug possession just because Baltimore did.” 

Ivan Bates, the new lead prosecutor of Baltimore who ousted Mosby in the summer of 2022, has reversed her approach. He announced earlier this year that he was rescinding Mosby’s policies of declining to charge some low-level cases and would instead ramp up the prosecution of “quality-of-life offenses.”

Bates’s office did not respond to a request for comment on how it will approach paraphernalia cases going forward in light of its opposition to declination.

Moon and others wish the state would simply eliminate the option of prosecuting paraphernalia possession by people dealing with addiction issues, and thereby start to create some parity among counties’ respective approaches to drug use and treatment.

“If it can be charged,” Speert said, “it’s gonna be charged.”

The post Maryland Inches Forward on Harm Reduction to Fight Overdoses appeared first on Bolts.

Minnesota’s Democratic lawmakers, newly in control of the state legislature, plan to legalize the recreational use and sale of cannabis this year. And they insist that in doing so they must account for past harm—namely, harm done by wildly uneven enforcement practices that made their state one of the most dangerous places in the country to be a Black person in possession of marijuana. 

“For me, it’s a racial justice issue. I wouldn’t support this without it,” state Senator Clare Oumou Verbeten, a lead sponsor of the legalization effort and one of just three Black women ever elected to the Minnesota Senate, told Bolts. “There’s the argument that people are already using cannabis, so let’s not criminalize them for it. Well, yes, but the people who have to live in fear are Black people. They’re impacted the most. We’re trying to right these wrongs.”

A recent nationwide report by the ACLU found that Black Minnesotans were more than five times more likely than white Minnesotans to be arrested for marijuana possession between 2010 and 2018, one of the highest racial disparities across all states. That’s but one example of longstanding systemic inequality that has earned Minnesota the nickname “Mississippi of the North.”

“We’re constantly at the top of these lists in terms of quality of life, best places to live,” Oumou Verbeten said. “It’s not true for people who look like me.”

This is why she and many other backers of Minnesota’s legalization effort want the state’s program to be as dedicated to racial and class justice as any in the country. While early adopters like Colorado waited years after legalization to adopt policy confronting the damage done by the war on drugs, Minnesota lawmakers seek to do that work upfront. 

Their legalization bill, House File 100, proposes to help marginalized communities gain footholds in the regulated recreational cannabis industry by giving them preferential access to business licenses. These licenses would be awarded based on a points system weighted in favor of the poor and those who can demonstrate personal or familial harm from cannabis prohibition.

The bill would also automatically expunge records of low-level cannabis convictions, including for petty misdemeanor and misdemeanor charges over the sale or possession of up to 42.5 grams of marijuana. These convictions can acutely inhibit social mobility by blocking people from stable housing and employment, and can, in some cases, plunge people into a prolonged morass of criminalization and poverty. 

Jon Geffen, a law professor and attorney with The Legal Revolution, a Minnesota nonprofit law firm, explained that prior conviction records are currently public in Minnesota. As a result, “you can use that data for anything you want: hiring, renting—hell, even dating if you want it. Whether or not it was weed it comes up as ‘drugs,’ and people rarely hire people with drug convictions. People lose jobs and apartments. Families separate because of these things.”

For some advocates, though, these equity provisions may be too little, too late for those affected by the war on drugs.

Many political leaders now cast equity as core to their legalization efforts, rather than a footnote to be addressed years after state industries ramp up. In New York, people with past marijuana convictions are being given a first crack at business licenses. In Maryland, new Governor Wes Moore, sworn in this week, has insisted the state’s soon-to-launch legal cannabis industry must prize social justice and “economic parity.” Like the regulated cannabis industry itself, this concept of licensing equity is a rather new one; Oakland pioneered it in 2017.

But these equity projects have rarely gone smoothly, or delivered their stated impacts. Some Oakland licensees feel that the city’s program has done them more harm than good. Lawsuits challenging cannabis equity provisions in places like Detroit, Maine and Missouri have slowed or thwarted progress. 

Also, even the most equity-minded cannabis legalization policies do little to repair certain harms. Giving people from overpoliced communities special access to cannabis dispensary or cultivation licenses, for instance, won’t change the fact that those people are less likely to have business ownership experience, professional mentorship, and investor networks—intangible assets that help sustain an operation. 

Angela Dawson, a northern Minnesota hemp farmer and a champion for agricultural opportunities for Black people, said the expungement plan laid out in Minnesota’s pending bill would do very little for people like her younger brother, whose marijuana conviction two decades ago threw him for a prolonged tailspin.

“He lost time in school, never graduated. He met up with some pretty bad people while he was in jail. He didn’t have an opportunity to do anything else,” Dawson told Bolts. “He just got out of prison in November.”

Clearing marijuana charges like his will be relatively easy for the state, policy experts in Minnesota say. But that can’t undo twenty-plus years of compounding challenges and lost time that stemmed from his first drug charge. 

“It shouldn’t cost you your whole entire future,” she said.

Oumou Verbeten acknowledged that this bill alone won’t unwind these longstanding harms. She said she hopes to pair the cannabis legislation with complementary bills to seal eviction records and to ban public employers from asking job applicants about their criminal histories. She is also sponsoring legislation that would restore voting rights to Minnesotans on parole and probation—a population that skews disproportionately Black, Native American, and Latino.

These and other bills are viable in large part because Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party flipped the state Senate in November, claiming full control of the state government for the first time since 2014. 

The state House passed legislation in 2021 to legalize cannabis but the bill fizzled in the state Senate, which was then under control of Republicans. (One GOP leader at the time said there was “zero chance” his party would go along.)  Minnesota politicos believe it’s nearly assured to pass this time around, though its final form may be several months and about a dozen more committee hearings away.

But now that they have a trifecta, Democrats see marijuana legalization as a headlining bill in a legislative session that is also poised to see Minnesota lawmakers codify abortion rights, advance paid family and medical leave, and seek to expand voting access.

A recent poll, conducted by Mason-Dixon, shows a slim majority of overall Minnesotans—and a wide majority of non-white Minnesotans—back cannabis legalization. The country at large favors it, too, and strongly supports expungement of cannabis convictions.  

The specific design of the major equity portions of this year’s legalization bill in Minnesota are getting mixed reviews from criminal justice reform and racial justice advocates.

On expungements, “the framework of it is pretty darn good,” Geffen said. He noted that the bill would make expungements automatic and free, a measure that MinnPost estimates would affect some 50,000 people with criminal records.

The state already accepts petitions for expungement, in a process that is anything but user-friendly. He described it as a winding road with all sorts of obstacles over which even his law students regularly trip. Any mistake along the way can lead a court to toss a petition, with no way for the applicant to recoup the $305 the state requires for every charge one seeks to expunge.

“So the populations that don’t use it are poor populations. It’s a double whammy, where poor people are over-prosecuted, over-charged, and then they don’t get expunged, even when they’re eligible, because they don’t have the money to pay an attorney,” Geffen told Bolts.

Tom Gallagher, a Hennepin County (Minneapolis) criminal defense attorney and libertarian advocate for legalized cannabis, wishes the bill went further by categorically granting gun ownership rights back to people who lost those rights because of felony drug convictions. He doesn’t expect liberal lawmakers to restore gun rights through this bill, but he argues they should, in order to thwart the cycle of criminality that drug prohibition can catalyze. 

“Let’s say you’re 19 years old and you get convicted of possessing two ounces of marijuana. Now, 10 years later, you get caught with a gun in your house, but now you’re an ineligible person in possession of a firearm, and you’re looking at a minimum of 3 years in prison in Minnesota,” Gallagher told Bolts. “It’s purely the status of the person in possession of the gun that makes the crime.”

The bill’s second core equity provision—licensing equity—also faces questions as to its scope and implementation.

The state has had a regulated medical marijuana industry for seven years, and, at present, that entire sector is controlled by one of two corporations,.

The new legislation contains provisions meant to chart a more equitable path for the recreational cannabis industry by requiring that the state substantially favor cannabis business license applications from so-called “social equity” applicants—that is, residents for at least five years in areas “that experienced a disproportionately large amount of cannabis enforcement,” as determined by a state report not yet produced. People could also qualify for “social equity” status in business licensing if they live in areas with poverty rates of 20 percent or more, or where the median family income does not exceed 80 percent of the statewide mark.

Oumou Verbeten said the idea, transparently, is to give a boost to Black and Latino would-be businesspeople, but that it’d be thorny, and possibly illegal, to legislate in explicit favor of one or more racial groups over others.

“If you look at concentrated places of poverty and overlay that with racial demographics, then, yes, a lot of those areas are where we’re going to see communities of color,” Oumou Verbeten said. “We want to make sure people who’ve been harmed get the priority. And those are people of color, and Black Minnesotans especially.”

This goal is easier stated than accomplished, Black leaders in Colorado’s cannabis industry told Bolts. Boosting an application is much easier and cheaper, after all, than providing sustained training and financial support needed to get a cannabis business up and running. 

And that’s leaving aside headwinds that these businesses face in the market; existing federal prohibition cuts off cannabis operators from the tools other industries enjoy, like basic inclusion in banking systems, or loans and guidance from the Small Business Administration.

“In trying to bend ourselves into equity and things that make right, basically the entire industry is failing top to bottom,” Denver entrepreneur Wanda James told Bolts. For years she was the only Black cannabis business owner in Colorado, among hundreds of businesses; now, she says, she’s one of a few.

“The really sad thing is we are setting up Black and brown entrepreneurs for a massive failure. And at that point of massive failure, they don’t even have bankruptcy protection,” because cannabis remains illegal federally, James added.

She said Colorado and other states can do much better in providing support to licensees and those harmed in the war on drugs, but she said she’s skeptical policymakers can ever truly legislate out the impediments to equity that she and others trace to federal prohibition.

Jeff Brinkman, a Minnesota hemp entrepreneur, is also concerned that the state will not adopt enough legal protections on how licenses can be transferred from one business to another. “I just feel that as the bill is developed and revamped, if they aren’t keeping their eye in the loopholes and on how to build this industry for small business, that’s when we’ll get the takeover” by wealthy interests. 

When “social equity” licensees fail to launch, policymakers are given cover to say, “See, we tried and it failed,” Hashim Coates, executive director of Black Brown and Red Badged, an organization representing Black and Latino business owners in the cannabis industry, told Bolts.

“Just creating an opportunity without the intention of success is not creating an opportunity,” he added. 

The post With Marijuana Bill, Minnesota Democrats Seek to Repair Harms of War on Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

Voters in Maryland and Missouri supported proposals to allow for the regulated sale of marijuana for non-medical purposes, joining 19 other U.S. states that have already done so. However, similar proposals in Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota all were shot down by comfortable margins.

Also, ten years to the week since Colorado and Oregon became the first two states to legalize recreational pot, Colorado voters are poised to approve a measure that removes criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. Oregon went first on this front, passing a ballot measure decriminalizing those substances in 2020. 

“The more public dialogue there is on drug policy issues, the more sensible the policy outcomes are,” said Mason Tvert, a policy expert and industry advocate who co-directed Colorado’s landmark 2012 campaign to legalize non-medical cannabis use. 

“As we saw in North Dakota, South Dakota and Arkansas, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Most people alive right now have lived the vast majority of their lives in a world where cannabis was entirely illegal, and where they were hearing anti-cannabis propaganda. It’s not surprising that there are still voters with concerns. … But the writing’s on the wall.”

Underscoring Tvert’s point is the fact that even President Joe Biden, who has been a dedicated soldier in America’s war on drugs, is coming around. Last month he ordered a federal review of marijuana’s classification as a “Schedule 1” substance, defined as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” and he pardoned thousands of people convicted federally and in the District of Columbia for marijuana possession.

The marijuana map is diversifying rapidly in the U.S., as the issue is no longer a project only of progressive advocates for drug policy reform. Missouri, which approved its cannabis measure by six percentage points as of Wednesday morning, went for Donald Trump by at least 15 points in the 2020 presidential election. Maryland, which went for Biden by 33 points and approved its cannabis measure by about 30 points on Tuesday, was the bluest state in the country that had yet to legalize recreational marijuana.

The Missouri and Maryland measures were the only two of Tuesday’s five state-level marijuana initiatives to allow for record expungement by people previously convicted of marijuana-related activities that have now been legalized by voters. These states will now automatically expunge records for certain people, and make others fill out petitions. Missouri’s approach to prior convictions has been especially controversial, as some reformers fear it won’t be as effective in practice as on paper. The chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, plus some prominent cannabis advocates, came out against the ballot measure.

It’s relatively new that marijuana ballot measures would take this issue on at all. A decade ago, the reformist initiatives were focused squarely on the question of whether or not to legalize, and left questions of social equity, record expungement, banking and more for later on. 

“What’s happening now is there’s a far more detailed discussion taking place,” Tvert said. “There’s this growing sense that it’s inevitable that it will be legal, and so what should the details be?”

The two Dakotas took opposite paths to the same result this year. North Dakotans overwhelmingly rejected legal marijuana just four years ago, voting down a measure that, unlike this year’s, would have allowed for some record expungement. The previous North Dakota measure lost by 19 percentage points, while this year’s was losing by just 10 as of Wednesday morning. 

Fifty-four percent of South Dakota voters supported legal marijuana just two years ago, but after a lawsuit championed by Republican Governor Kristi Noem, who won reelection Tuesday, the state supreme court invalidated that measure. Given a chance to vote again on the issue, South Dakotans rejected it by a six-point margin.

The Arkansas measure looked little like the other four on the ballot this year, prohibiting home-grow of marijuana plants and placing a hard cap on cultivation and dispensary permits. More exclusive markets can perpetuate race and class disparity in who has access to the substance, and who is policed over it.

Market exclusivity was of chief concern to many who opposed Colorado’s ballot measure on psychedelics. Among these opponents were some of the organizers who pushed successfully for a 2019 Denver reform to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms. They argued this year’s statewide measure, which allows for sale of approved psychedelics only by licensed providers, will benefit a small group of profit-seeking interests. “It’s opening the floodgates for corporations to come to Colorado to open their bougie life and healing centers,” one advocate who worked on the 2019 effort told The Denver Post. 

The post Wins and Losses for State Referendums to Legalize Weed and Psychedelics appeared first on Bolts.

On July 8, 2021, activists in Central Texas showed up at the office of Hays County District Attorney Wes Mau to deliver a cake with blue icing that spelled out the words “Failed Promise.” 

They were commemorating the anniversary of a commitment Mau and other local law enforcement officials had made a year earlier, in the summer of 2020, to give people charged with certain low-level crimes, such as  marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license, a way to avoid prosecution altogether by completing a court program or community service. Activists with the local group Mano Amiga (“helping hand” in Spanish) had pushed for a so-called cite-and-divert policy for more than a year as part of a larger campaign to roll back the kind of punitive, zero-tolerance policing and prosecution that have defined this county for decades, despite its close proximity to Austin, the state’s liberal capital city. 

At first, Mano Amiga activists like Jordan Buckley, who co-founded the group, cheered officials for finally agreeing to reforms. But then Mau dragged his feet so long that a whole year passed without a cite-and-divert program—hence the “happy birthday” party hat that Buckley ironically wore as he stood outside the Hays County government building last summer accusing the Republican DA of failing to live up to his word. 

“There have been scores of people who have been needlessly arrested for petty offenses and kept these petty offenses on their criminal record because our district attorney’s word is empty,” Buckley said before he and other activists walked the cake up to the DA’s office to offer him a slice (Mau never came out). “In Austin, for example, no one gets a criminal record for possession of marijuana,” Buckley said, “and yet it’s one of the leading arrest charges in Hays County because our district attorney is such a hardliner on cannabis.” 

Organizing by Mano Amiga since last summer has helped turn this November’s elections into a referendum on both marijuana decriminalization and pretrial diversion in Hays County. Activists with Mano Amiga gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot this year that would end citations and arrests for possession of up to four ounces of marijuana in the city of San Marcos, the county seat and home to one of the state’s largest public universities. 

This politically competitive county is also voting for a new DA. Mau is retiring, and the race to replace him could pave the way for the kind of pretrial diversion program that local activists have demanded, and officials have promised, for years. While GOP nominee David Puryear echoes the anti-reform, tough-on-crime rhetoric of state and national Republicans, Democratic nominee Kelly Higgins vows a “sea change” in the county. He has promised to decline prosecution of cannabis possession and at last implement a cite-and-divert program for other low-level charges. 

Higgins would also add to the growing roster of reform-minded officials in Hays County, the fastest growing county in the nation—a reflection of the larger population boom in the I-35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin. Some of those officials attended and spoke at a “Reeferendum Fest” Mano Amiga activists threw earlier this month to drum up attention to the ballot measure in San Marcos—including County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat first elected to lead the county in 2018 on a platform of criminal justice reforms and who is seeking re-election this year. 

When Higgins addressed the “Reeferendum” crowd,” he directly referred to the cite-and-divert policy. “I’m telling you it will happen,” he told activists. “I’m promising you it will happen.” 

San Marcos activists founded Mano Amiga in 2017 soon after Texas adopted a “show me your papers” law, Senate Bill 4, allowing local cops to investigate the immigration status of anyone they detain. At first the group focused on assisting immigrants caught in detention and at risk of deportation due to arrest for minor charges, but eventually their scope grew. 

“SB4 intensified what is commonly referred to as the ‘jail to deportation pipeline’ and made immigrant rights groups like ours, which primarily focused on deportation defense campaigns, realize we needed to push for systemic change that benefits citizens and non-citizens alike, keeping all our neighbors safe from the legal system and deportation,” Mano Amiga communications director Sam Benavides told me.

One of the group’s first broader policy demands was an ordinance requiring local police to issue citations for minor charges rather than the typical custom of hauling people off to jail over petty things like pot possession; while Texas law has allowed cities and counties to implement so-called cite-and-release policies since at least 2007, small-time marijuana possession remained the leading charge for arrest in Hays County for years. Activists called the policy a racial justice issue: Black people, who comprise about 5 percent of San Marcos’ population, accounted for nearly one third of low-level marijuana arrests in the city, and were almost always arrested over citation-eligible offenses. 

About a year after local activists started pushing for it, San Marcos became the first city in Texas to adopt an ordinance directing police to issue citations over making arrests for most low-level crimes with certain exceptions, like when someone is suspected of assault or family violence; larger cities nearby like San Antonio only managed to pass “resolutions” that simply suggested cops favor citations. The ordinance narrowly passed the city council over intense opposition from both the San Marcos Police Officers’ Association and the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, a statewide police union.

The local and state police unions haven’t taken a public position on this year’s referendum to decriminalize marijuana possession in San Marcos. But they have endorsed Puryear, the GOP nominee to replace Mau, the outgoing DA who has taken a notably hard stance on marijuana possession, even as state law made it increasingly difficult and costly to prosecute. 

Puryear, a former prosecutor and appeals court judge who didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for this story, has run in part on demonizing neighboring Travis County—which elected a reform-minded prosecutor who vowed to not prosecute drug possession in 2020. Travis is also home to the city of Austin, which voted to decriminalize small-time marijuana possession earlier this year. 

“Crime victims should know that we will doggedly pursue justice for them and criminals should know this isn’t Travis County,” Puryear wrote in one social media post soon after filing to run for DA. His campaign website states, “Dangerous ‘soft on crime’ policies have led to an exponential rise in robberies, sexual assaults, and murder in Austin and the surrounding counties.” (Data shows that violent offenses have increased statewide in Texas, as well as in counties around the nation irrespective of the politics of their lead prosecutors.) 

Puryear has also publicly criticized Higgins, his opponent, for promising to not prosecute abortion under the state’s new criminal ban, a stance that other Democratic prosecutors and DA candidates in Texas and across the country have taken following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling this summer overturning abortion rights. “To pick and choose which laws you will obey and enforce as DA, based on your personal feelings, sets an example of lawlessness and opens the door to chaos,” Puryear wrote in another social media post. 

Puryear’s rhetoric against declination also clashes with another campaign promise from Higgins: The Democratic nominee has said he would decline to prosecute all cases of simple possession of cannabis, including THC oils and edibles that can still be charged as felonies in the state, and often still are in Hays County, despite any individual town’s efforts to decriminalize. Higgins, a longtime defense attorney in Central Texas, argues that the hardline stance on marijuana is a sign of deeper dysfunction at the DA’s office. 

“The general impression that you’ll find if you talk to everyone in the courthouse is that the DA’s office is sluggish and vicious—they will charge anything if they can possibly construe as a crime,” Higgins told me. 

“The goals there are not to pursue justice, which is the oath, but to train up your prosecutors to get them more trials, and to be more unreasonable in plea offers to drive cases to trial,” he said. “That includes cases that in no other county would get tried to a jury, like vape pen cases.”

But as much as Higgins’s approach to cannabis is clear (don’t prosecute it), his plans for a cite-and-divert policy in Hays County are more vague. Activists at Mano Amiga have advocated for pretrial diversion not just for misdemeanors but also possession of small amounts of other drugs that still carry felony charges. They want a policy that provides alternatives to plea deals, criminal convictions, and prison time for low-level crimes like substance use, and programs that steer people toward services and treatment instead of punishment. 

“If there is any district attorney out there who actually wants to bring about real community change, and they don’t want it to be a dog and pony show, then they would create a cite-and-divert program to address felony drug offenses,” Mano Amiga policy director Eric Martinez told me. 

When I asked what would be covered by his vision of a pre-charge diversion program, Higgins told me, “The general rubric of party drugs, Friday night, what’s in your blue jeans,” before quickly pivoting to concerns about fentanyl and drug trafficking. “The rise of fentanyl is inhibiting my ability to be very, you know, liberal about a cite-and-divert program,” he said. “I’m not worried about things like THC and things where fentanyl doesn’t appear.” 

Higgins admitted that his thinking on the issue had evolved while campaigning, crediting local activists with helping expand his idea of reform. “Talking with groups like Mano Amiga, and I mean specifically talking with Sam Benavides at Mano Amiga, I got a little educated about what cite-and-divert means, and it is pretty attractive to me,” Higgins said. 

He sounded more resolute when speaking at the group’s “Reeferendum Fest” the following day, including the same word—promise—that activists had put on a cake to mock the last DA for failing to deliver. 

Local activists have long pushed reform on another issue: They criticize the often yearslong pretrial detention of people in the county jail, and demand fair representation for people accused of crimes who can’t afford to hire their own defense attorney. 

The long ordeal of Cyrus Gray underscores the stakes. In 2018, Gray was one of two people arrested and charged with capital murder in the 2015 death of another Texas State University student. Because he couldn’t afford his own lawyer and Hays County didn’t have a public defender’s office to help indigent people accused of crimes, a judge appointed a private attorney to represent Gray, who has maintained his innocence since his arrest. 

Gray has been detained pretrial inside the Hays County jail ever since. He has had two court-appointed lawyers during his more than four years in pretrial detention—the first of which, according to Gray, hardly represented him. 

“He came to see me three times within two years, and every time came to see me he tried to convince me to take a plea deal for 45 years (in prison),” Gray told me in a phone call from the Hays County jail earlier this month. “I would express to him, ‘I didn’t do anything, why would I willingly take 45 years of my life in prison knowing I didn’t do anything?’ And then immediately he’d find an excuse to leave—so these conversations would be like 10 minutes long.” 

Gray’s prosecution, which has generated local controversy, ended in a mistrial last month when jurors remained deadlocked after three days of deliberations. One juror who favored acquittal has publicly criticized police and prosecutors for bringing a flawed case (as of this writing, Mau’s office has said it plans to retry Gray at the end of this month). 

“Witnesses were badgered and harassed on the stand in ways that felt far beyond even a confrontational cross-examination,” the juror, Melinda Rothouse, recently wrote in an essay published in the Texas Observer. “The accused man’s friends had been coerced, threatened, intimidated and treated as suspects themselves by investigators to the point that implicating the defendant seemed to offer their only way out from under the thumb of the system.” 

Others like Gray are also spending years in the Hays County jail without a trial, the Austin Chronicle reported last month. Gray says they also go months or even years without seeing their appointed defenders. The Chronicle also described dangerous and degrading conditions, including unchecked violence and poor medical care—problems that plague local jails across the state. 

In recent years, activists with Mano Amiga have rallied around Gray’s case to argue for the need for a local public defender’s office to improve representation and overall conditions in the legal system. After years of activists organizing around the issue, Hays County commissioners voted unanimously this past spring to allocate $5 million in federal stimulus funds to build a new public defender’s office, which has yet to launch. 

Along with monitoring the implementation of the nascent public defender’s office and rallying for marijuana decriminalization, activists with Mano Amiga are already planning for how future elections could reform local law enforcement. 

Last month, Mano Amiga activists began the process of gathering the signatures needed to put an item on the local ballot next year to overturn the contract that the San Marcos city council recently approved with the city’s police union. Activists, along with the life partner of a woman killed in a car crash with an off-duty deputy, had pushed for disciplinary and transparency reforms to the contract, none of which were included. The campaign to repeal the police union contract follows a similar effort by San Antonio activists to put an ordinance before voters to curtail police union power, a measure which narrowly lost last year. 

As Hays County has grown, it has also shifted blue. Biden carried the county in 2020 after six consecutive wins for GOP presidential candidates, though elections there remain competitive. 

To Benavides, the organizing behind this year’s ballot measures is larger than the individual issues at hand because of how activism has started to reorient power in Hays County. “For me it’s so much bigger than any policy itself, it’s about showing people the power that they have as a collective,” she told me.

Gathering signatures and organizing for reforms has also underscored the need for change. “Every time we knock on doors we hear from people saying how they’ve been abused or mistreated by law enforcement,” Benavides told me. She says Mano Amiga has started branching out to help organize and push for reforms in surrounding counties. 

“I feel like there isn’t enough emphasis on the organizing going on in rural communities,” she added. “There’s so much going on in San Antonio, so much going on in Austin, and our goal is to bridge that gap and help build a corridor of resistance.”

The post How Years of Organizing Put Drug Reform and Diversion on the Ballot in Central Texas appeared first on Bolts.

Five states are voting on legalizing recreational marijuana, and most are staunchly Republican. The issue has long drawn support across the political spectrum, and these elections will again test the sense of a growing national consensus against marijuana prohibition. 

Even President Biden, who was a dedicated soldier in America’s war on drugs while a senator, is coming around. Last week he ordered a federal review of marijuana’s classification as a “Schedule 1” substance, defined as having h “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” and he pardoned an estimated 6,500 people with federal convictions for marijuana possession, plus thousands more convicted in the District of Columbia.

The national debate over the war on drugs is also shifting past marijuana. Colorado, which helped launch the wave of weed legalization a decade ago, is now considering a measure that would legalize psychedelics, emulating a reform adopted by Oregon in 2020. 

Bolts looks at the six state referendums, plus some intriguing local measures, that may affect drug policy this fall. 

Most measures would establish new state-regulated systems for the sale of marijuana or, in the case of Colorado, psychedelics, likely bringing in considerable new revenue into public coffers. 

But there is wide variance as to how they would handle people who have already been convicted over behaviors that could soon become legal. A review by Bolts shows that only two of the five marijuana referendums would set up expungement of past criminal records, which considerably saddle a person’s access to jobs and housing.

Arkansas | Issue 4: On legalizing marijuana

Arkansas could become just the second state in the South, after Virginia, to legalize marijuana for recreational use and sales. Issue 4 qualified for the ballot after a petition drive organized by the group Responsible Growth Arkansas, just six years after another citizen-initiated measure legalized medical marijuana. A September poll found wide support for the measure.

But Issue 4 is also raising concerns about inequitable design. The Arkansas Advocate found that Arkansas would have the strictest rules among the 19 states that have legalized recreational marijuana: It would be the only one to both prohibit home-grow operations and keep a hard cap on cultivation and dispensary permits, which experts predict would limit supply and competition, leading to higher prices at retail stores. A more exclusive market could also perpetuate race and class disparity in who has access to the substance, and who is policed over it.

Moreover, unlike in some of the other states with marijuana measures this year, Issue 4 does not provide for wiping clean the criminal records of people already convicted over marijuana.

Republican lawmakers are angry that organizations are using the initiative route to champion issues that they oppose, including the 2016 medical marijuana vote. They have placed another measure on the ballot that would make it harder for ballot measures to pass in the future.

Missouri | Amendment 3: On legalizing marijuana

Just north of Arkansas, Missouri has also legalized marijuana for medical use, and may now do the same for recreational use. 

Amendment 3, which also qualified for the ballot through a petition drive organized by the group Legal Missouri, would end existing state prohibitions on the possession of marijuana, set up a regulated sales system by distributing licenses via a lottery system, and allow home growth. Polling shows a closely divided electorate. 

Missouri borders eight states, only one of which (Illinois) has legalized recreational marijuana. Based on the experience of other states, that would presage an influx of out-of-state customers looking to buy legal marijuana in Missouri. But this could also cause new legal problems as these customers would be breaking the law the second they crossed back into their home states, where marijuana possession may be punishable by jail time. This has been a long-documented problem for people traveling into Kansas with weed from Colorado.

The Missouri amendment creates a path for people with marijuana convictions to expunge their records. But many marijuana advocates believe the ballot measure does not go far enough and are raising alarms. They stress that some people would be excluded from automatic expungement due to carve-outs or because they’re still serving time; they also note that the initiative would keep in place some criminal penalties, including for smoking marijuana in public. The chair of Missouri’s Legislative Black Caucus opposes Amendment 3 on these grounds. Organizations that support criminal justice reforms such as ACLU of Missouri and the Missouri Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, are supporting it.

Maryland | Question 4: On legalizing marijuana

Going off of the results of the last presidential election, Maryland is the bluest state in the country that has yet to legalize marijuana. Question 4 would end that distinction and legalize the possession and retail sale of marijuana.

Maryland lawmakers placed it on the ballot as a constitutional amendment that does not need the governor’s signature. (Republican Governor Larry Hogan has vetoed bills related to marijuana in the past.) Lawmakers also passed implementing legislation earlier this year (House Bill 837) that would be triggered by the passage of Question 4; Hogan allowed the bill to become law without his signature. 

The legislation would automatically expunge the records of people who have been convicted of offenses that would be newly legal under the law. It would allow people who are presently incarcerated for marijuana possession to petition for immediate release. 

If Question 4 passes, lawmakers would still have a lot of blanks to fill in the next session, as HB 837 did not flesh out the regulatory details of marijuana sales. Progressive advocates and lawmakers have already signaled that building an equitable retail system is a prime concern and that they want dispensary licenses and tax revenue to be distributed in a way that helps the Black communities that have been disproportionately affected by the prohibition of marijuana. A report released by the Baltimore prosecutor’s office in 2019 found that Black residents of Baltimore were six times likelier than white residents to be cited for marijuana possession. 

North Dakota | Measure 2: On legalizing marijuana

North Dakotans overwhelmingly rejected a measure to legalize marijuana just four years ago. But proponents of legalization are hoping for a different outcome by highlighting a broad alliance: Measure 2 qualified after a petition drive organized by a coalition called New Approach ND, whose chair is a member of the Libertarian Party and whose treasurer is a police officer-turned-defense attorney. The measure’s sponsoring committee features lawmakers from both parties. 

The Republican-run state House already passed a legalization bill in 2021, though the bill later died in the Senate. Measure 2 picks up where that bill left off: It would legalize the possession and sale of marijuana, and also allow home growth of up to three plants.

The measure would leave a lot of regulatory rulemaking for the legislature to take care of, but it does stipulate that only 18 retail licenses would be granted to start. That may limit the circulation of marijuana in a very vast, if sparsely populated, state. 

Measure 2 would not allow for expungement of criminal records, unlike the 2018 measure that provided for automatic expungement. 

South Dakota | Measure 27: On legalizing marijuana

South Dakotans already said what they think about marijuana in 2020: 54 percent of voters approved a ballot measure to legalize its recreational use. But after a lawsuit championed by Republican Governor Kristi Noem, that measure was invalidated by the South Dakota Supreme Court the following year for breaching the state’s requirement that initiatives only pertain to one subject.

Advocates returned this year with a drive to qualify a new proposal for the ballot. Measure 27 takes a simpler approach than the 2020 initiative. It would not change the state constitution, for one. It would allow for the purchase and possession of marijuana, plus home-grows of up to three plants for personal use, but it would leave questions of taxation and regulatory structure to the state legislature.

And it would not set up a process for people to expunge their past convictions.

The marijuana debate has seeped into the governor’s race, as Democratic nominee Jamie Smith has denounced Noem’s efforts to overturn the 2020 initiative. Another South Dakota election that touches on drug policy is the ballot measure to expand Medicaid access to tens of thousands of people; enhanced health insurance can improve paths to treatment over substance use issues that are otherwise funneled into jail, which played a role in other recent referendums over Medicaid. 

Colorado | Proposition 122: On legalizing psychedelics

With Proposition 122, a voter-initiated measure once known as Initiative 58, Colorado may add to a new trend: Building off of a 2019 ballot measure in Denver, and a 2020 ballot measure in Oregon, the measure would remove criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (commonly known as “magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. 

It would also set up a legally regulated system for state-regulated providers to sell psychedelics for a range of treatment and therapeutic purposes. 

Denver, the state’s capital city, did a version of this, and a government review panel that included law enforcement found no resulting threats to public safety. Some of the organizers of the Denver reform are now opposing  Initiative 58 because they fear the measure would specifically benefit a small handful of profit-seeking interests. “It’s opening the floodgates for corporations to come to Colorado to open their bougie life and healing centers,”  one advocate who worked on Denver’s decriminalization effort told The Denver Post. 

Local elections matter to drug policy, too

Under the hood of state statutes and prohibitions, localities retain vast powers to decide how aggressively to pursue the war on drugs. That, too, is at stake this year all around the country.

Colorado, for instance, is a home-rule state, meaning that towns and counties still have the authority to ban the sale of marijuana. Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city and the anchor of a historically arch-conservative region, has long resisted legal weed; residents cannot purchase it within the city, which misses out on all the local sales tax that other municipalities get to collect. Colorado Springs voters this year will decide Questions 300 and 301, which would enable recreational marijuana sales and tax them.

In Texas, where marijuana is illegal but where some liberal-leaning cities have asked the police to not enforce the statute, some towns like Killeen will weigh in on decriminalizing marijuana. 

And the war on drugs is also on the ballot in many elections for the law enforcement offices that have the power to make arrests or press charges over drugs—or refuse to do so. In many places, the debate still revolves around marijuana. The Democratic incumbent in Indiana’s Marion County (Indianapolis), for instance, has stopped prosecuting low-level possession but his Republican challenger is taking issue with that. “I do not want Indianapolis to become a San Francisco, to become a New York City, to become a Los Angeles,” she said at a recent forum.

Other candidates are promising to at the very least avoid jail time over drug offenses. And some reformers want to go further and keep the criminal legal system out altogether. Rahsaan Hall, running for prosecutor in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, says he won’t prosecute drug possession. “Those are not law enforcement issues,” Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse who narrowly lost the primary for sheriff in another Massachusett county in September, told Bolts last month. “Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues.”

The post Six States Are Voting on Legalizing Weed or Psychedelics appeared first on Bolts.

At first glance, a Dutch safe consumption site looks like any other clinic. Patients walk into a sterile medical environment and are taken to a cubicle with a sink to wash their hands. From there, they approach a metal table, where they take illegal drugs, under supervision from trained medical professionals.

Each of the more than two dozen safe consumption sites across the Netherlands provide a hygienic, judgment-free space where drug users, typically five at a time, can bring their drugs and consume them without having to worry about legal repercussions while under the care of medical staff who help minimize risk. 

“Suddenly, people that are normally out on the street who are completely alone and isolated find a place where they actually have a connection,” says Roberto Pérez Gayo, a policy officer with Correlation European Harm Reduction Network, and coordinator at International Network of Drug Consumption Rooms. His research into dozens of safe injection sites has found that, besides protecting people’s lives who may otherwise overdoses, these spaces can also at their best provide other services that meet clients’ various needs in tandem: addiction, the need for housing, medical care and mental health challenges.

Safe consumption sites have helped the Netherlands reduce overdose deaths since a peak in the 1980s, and the nation has since become a global leader in the movement for safe consumption. But as overdose deaths spike more than 5,000 miles away in California, Governor Gavin Newsom just this August killed legislation that would have allowed cities to set up similar safe consumption sites. 

Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 57, which would have created a pilot program allowing Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco to open safe, supervised spaces for people to use drugs without violating state law. After his predecessor vetoed a similar measure, Newsom told voters during his 2018 campaign that he would be “very, very open” to safe consumption sites if elected. But in a letter explaining his own veto this year, he claimed that opening the sites “could induce a world of unintended consequences,” such as “worsening drug consumption issues.”

However, study after study has found the opposite; that offering people a safe place to use drugs can significantly improve public health. Indeed, there has never been a reported overdose death in any official safe consumption site in the world. Advocates for harm reduction in the Netherlands say the country’s experience shows the importance of working collaboratively with policymakers, law enforcement, city leaders and most importantly, local residents to create places where potentially harmful drugs can be used safely. 

Machteld “Mac” Busz is Executive Director of Mainline, a quarterly magazine and advocacy organization that was founded in 1990 on the principle of harm reduction, encouraging the safer use of drugs instead of abstinence, and advocating for the treatment of addiction through a public health approach instead of incarceration. 

“We know that [safe consumption is] going to prevent all sorts of infectious diseases. It improves people’s quality of life, and it reduces overdose death,” said Busz.

While the Dutch have famously tolerated cannabis use and in the 1970s decriminalized use of many hard drugs, few services existed for those seeking to consume drugs safely at the height of the crisis in the mid 80s. An estimated 25,000 people used regularly, sometimes in public, and often shared needles, which littered parks and city streets. HIV spread to as many as a quarter of the country’s intravenous drug users; overdoses were a top health concern and drug-fueled street crime was rampant. 

On display in the hallway leading to Mainline’s offices is one portion of a multipart photo exhibit “House of HIV” exploring the HIV epidemic through the lens of the communities affected by it, created on the 40th anniversary of the first reported case of HIV in the Netherlands. 

House of HIV chronicles how activists mobilized to distribute clean needles and methadone, educating users about high-risk behavior. One black and white photo shows an activist giving a police officer a copy of Mainline, part of a years-long campaign to convince officials to abandon the criminalization of addiction for a harm reduction approach. Law enforcement officials went on to become important advocates of harm reduction and safe consumption sites, Busz says. 

After a decade of advocacy from organizers and lawmakers, the Netherlands authorized safe consumption sites in 1996. By 2019 there were 37 operating across 25 cities, the highest concentration in the world. 

While selling drugs like heroin remains illegal today, drug users in the Netherlands are met with resources, not incarceration. The sites offer access to clean needles and alternatives to heroin, such as methadone, as well as educational materials about harm reduction, social services, housing and healthcare. Proponents say this approach is responsible in part for the Netherlands having a tenth of the overdose rate that exists in the U.S., as well as a far lower crime rate.

“People resort to crime out of necessity,” says Busz. “If people instead can access a substitution program where at least they don’t have to chase after their drugs and money anymore, that leads to a significant reduction in crime,” she says, noting studies that have shown these alternatives to incarceration are also far more cost-effective. 

But it’s a mistake to think simply opening safe consumption sites can solve the opioid epidemic, says Gayo. The Dutch experience has found that these sites are most effective when paired with comprehensive social services, such as housing where consumption is allowed, and mental health support. 

Some sites operate within existing housing or medical facilities that serve areas struggling with addiction. Others serve marginalized populations, such as migrants or those experiencing housing insecurity, by offering a place to foster community. Once inside, users find a space that resembles a living room with couches and tables where they can consume drugs, rest, or listen to music with others. Staffers stand by in case of emergencies and build relationships with clients.

This communal environment helps officials connect clients with medical, mental health and drug treatment as well as educational and employment opportunities.

“Each of these facilities has to be contextualized within particular communities,” says Gayo. “Drug consumption rooms work, but in order to work, we need to have a bigger conversation about how to tackle the social inequality that produces negative health outcomes in marginalized and underserved individuals and communities.” 

The number of safe consumption rooms in the Netherlands has fallen as intravenous drug use decreases, with the population that continues to use these drugs aging. Experts attribute this to both the success of the educational efforts of the harm reduction movement, and shifting drug consumption habits among younger generations.

Overdose has been the leading cause of accidental death in the United States since 2017, a trend largely driven by the increased use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is lethal even in small amounts. In California, 10,416 people died of an overdose in 2021, nearly double the 2018 death toll. And by April 2021, the national overdose death rate had climbed nearly 30 percent from the previous year, according to the CDC. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate in the world; 1 in 5 people behind bars are charged with drug offenses, or nearly 400,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom are Black and Latino.

The failure of mass incarceration to dissuade drug use, the growing rate of overdose deaths, and the ample evidence that safe injection sites can decrease these deaths has created a growing demand in the U.S. for a different model.

For years, an underground network of safe injection sites have operated across the country, staffed by trained personnel who risk legal repercussions. A 2020 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed data from one such unsanctioned site—whose location was kept secret by researchers—and found it averted dozens of overdoses over five years without a single fatality.

Last year, the U.S. opened its first two authorized safe injection sites in New York City. Facing a spike of overdoses during the pandemic and after years of planning, the city forged ahead with the plan without authorization from state authorities who said it required further study. They have reported averting 300 overdoses since opening last November. 

Critics of safe consumption sites, however, frequently invoke images of neighborhoods flooded with drug users from across an entire region who disrupt local communities. 

“Fueling the drug epidemic with drug dens and needle supplies is like pouring gasoline on a forest fire. It merely worsens the problem,” California Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk wrote in opposition to the measure without citing any evidence to back these claims.

San Francisco is still considering moving forward with opening safe consumption sites regardless of Newsom’s veto. They would be run through local non-profit organizations in a model similar to New York’s. 

“We will keep working with our community partners to find a way forward” tweeted Mayor London Breed, who has spoken about her sister’s death from an overdose and who supports injection sites. She said she was “disappointed” by Newsom’s veto. The bill was introduced by state Senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco and called the veto ”tragic.”

In the Netherlands, safe consumption activists figured out how to win over critics and helped make safe injection sites accepted as a social norm. Their placement must comply with local and regional regulations, is based on where there is need, and “is negotiated with communities,” says Gayo. “Some communities feel more comfortable having a facility close to the neighborhood, and others don’t.” To avoid overcrowding and disrupting local communities, the more than two dozen sites are distributed across the country. 

To succeed, leaders of the safe consumption sites must work in constant collaboration with their neighbors as well as authorities, who must be responsive to their needs, says Eberhard Schatz, a longtime researcher and harm reduction advocate. 

The AMOC safe consumption site in Amsterdam consults with a neighborhood commission whose members include representatives of local neighborhoods, community centers, law enforcement and the coordinator of the consumption site.

Close coordination between these stakeholders can help decrease crime and public nuisance complaints, says Gayo.

The sites maintain a close collaborative relationship with law enforcement and local hospitals and clinics, who help connect users with the facilities and can respond in case of emergencies. “The facilities have a direct line with [first responders],“ says Gayo. 

Advocates in the Netherlands offer words of support for the U.S. harm reduction movement. “These are people that are taking matters in their own hands when you have a government that doesn’t care about you and just lets you die,” said Busz, who notes the parallels between the Netherlands three decades ago and the U.S. today. 

“Here the first drug consumption rooms and needle exchange programs were all led by drug users themselves in the beginning,” taking on considerable personal risk, said Busz. Government-supported drug injection sites were the result of activists proving to opponents that they can save lives without increasing crime. 

Busz says the state support is critical to acquire the necessary funding for success. “With all everything that we know now and evidence base that it is there… they should be backed by the state from the start.”

The post In the Netherlands, Safe Drug Consumption Sites Are Saving Lives. The U.S. Is Resisting. appeared first on Bolts.