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.

Baltimore police fired a hail of 44 bullets at Keith Davis in June 2015, striking him three times. Keith survived, but he has since been tried five times over the events of that day. After he was acquitted of robbery but found guilty of illegal gun possession in 2016, the local prosecutor’s office added murder charges and has relentlessly tried to convict him ever since. Two convictions were overturned due to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct; two other trials resulted in a hung jury. Still, prosecutors under Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby indicated they were planning yet another trial—a fifth over the same allegations—which according to at least one legal observer would be nearly unprecedented. 

Since her husband’s arrest in 2015, Kelly has been his most vocal and tireless advocate, pitting her against Mosby, who sought a third term in last week’s election.

“Keith is the most aggressively prosecuted man in American history,” she told Bolts. “We have a city full of murders and Keith faces a continuous cycle of malicious prosecution.” A judge ruled in June that Mosby’s continued prosecution of Keith Davis was driven by “personal animosity.” 

Mosby’s campaign was plagued by other major legal woes, including a federal grand jury that indicted her earlier this year on multiple perjury charges over false statements she allegedly made related to her purchase of two vacation homes. Prosecutors have accused Mosby of lying to lenders to receive more favorable mortgage terms. Mosby said the charges were politically motivated and launched a re-election bid anyway. 

In the run-up to the city’s July 19 elections, Kelly publicly backed Ivan Bates, the only candidate challenging Mosby in the Democratic primary who said he would drop the charges against Davis if elected. She even campaigned for Bates on Election Day alongside other members of “Team Keith,” a group of supporters who have waged an aggressive grassroots campaign to raise awareness of his case.

“Having so many people come to the polls that were familiar with Keith’s story … come out and say, ‘Hey, I voted for Bates,’ was a good feeling,” she told Bolts.

Bates defeated Mosby last week, grabbing the Democratic nomination by a comfortable margin of 41 to 29 percent over the incumbent. Another challenger, Thiru Vignarajah, received 30 percent. Bates will be unopposed in the general election, which makes him the city’s presumptive next prosecutor.

Since his win, Bates says he is now subject to a gag order, which Mosby has been accused of violating, that prevents him from making additional comments on what he’ll do with Keith Davis, but he told Bolts he stands by his previous statements.  

“Ethically I can no longer talk about that because I’m no longer, quote unquote, a private citizen, but I can say, the way I felt then is still and will always be the way that I felt. I still feel that way,” he told Bolts. “My word is very important to me.”

Beyond his position on Davis’s case, Bates largely anchored his campaign on talk of ramping up prosecutions—criticizing Mosby for being too lenient on crime at a time of rising murders. Gun violence has increased around the nation but is especially high in Baltimore, and Bates has vowed to seek lengthy prison terms for illegal gun possession.

He has also said he would increase prosecution and penalties for the kind of lower-level cases that decreased significantly under Mosby, such as drug possession, prostitution and loitering.

Mosby took part in national networks of so-called progressive prosecutors, and she implemented a series of criminal justice reforms over her two terms. She engaged in reviews of old sentences, stopped prosecuting canabis possession, and during the pandemic she stopped charging low-level offenses like drug possession and prostitution. 

Mosby rose to national prominence in 2015 for charging six Baltimore police officers over the death of 25 year old Freddie Gray in police custody but she was unable to secure a conviction in that case. Mosby’s opponents have blamed her for ongoing high murder and crime rates that have plagued the city—a critique she herself deployed against her opponent Gregg Bernstein in the 2014 election. Vignarajah accused her of turning Baltimore into a “crime scene” and campaigned more aggressively than Bates on rolling back her reforms; he was endorsed by Larry Hogan, the GOP governor who regularly clashed with Mosby. He finished narrowly ahead of Mosby but more than than 10 percentage points behind Bates. 

Kelly Davis and some other local activists reject the notion that Mosby is progressive. Davis cites the ongoing prosecution of her husband, as well as reports that Black residents are still greatly overrepresented in cases that Mosby’s prosecutors bring to court. During the first six months of this year, city prosecutors requested that defendants be held without bail as they await trial, a process that often takes months, in over three out of every four cases observed by the group Baltimore Court Watch.

Data also indicates that arrests for some low level offenses such as drug possession, minor traffic violations and prostituion dropped significantly after Mosby stopped prosecuting those cases in March 2020. A 2021 Johns Hopkins study, commissioned by Mosby, found that police made 443 fewer arrests in the 14 subsequent months. While the report does not establish causality, it did find that the decrease in arrests did not pose threats to public safety, and the majority of the averted arrests were of African Americans.

Bates argues that Mosby’s policies of not prosecuting some offenses has fueled crime and caused confusion; during an interview, he mentioned a former client arrested with multiple pounds of cannabis telling him he thought that Mosby had legalized drug dealing.

Bates says he’ll resume prosecuting arrests for lower-level infractions such as drug possession. He said this not for the sake of punishing people. He argued that arrests give officials the opportunity to connect people with treatment and support, offering the example of police “engaging” a sex worker “to find out this person is being sex-trafficed and if they are, given the resources and the services that they need.” 

Marguerite Lanaux, Baltimore’s top public defender, believes in alternative approaches that look to reduce the scope of the criminal legal system.

“Where you’re talking about treatment and treatment services, those things can occur without being justice-involved,” she told Bolts. She hopes that the city’s next prosecutor will reject the “immediate, feel good approach that more incarceration somehow leads to lower crime rates.”

Robbie Leonard, a defense attorney in neighboring Baltimore County, shares Lanaux’s analysis.

“There are other ways of providing services to people outside the court system,” he told Bolts. “And sometimes that’s hard for an attorney that’s only practiced criminal law to think outside courts, police, outside of arrests, and judges, but it can be done.”

Leonard also cautioned Bates against reflexively undoing policies that have proven effective, noting the mounting evidence that incarceration does not reduce recidivism or bolster public safety over the long term.

But Bates has said he’ll seek lengthy prison terms for gun possession. “If you’re a violent offender and you’re carrying an illegal handgun, we’ll be invoking the five-year minimum mandatory sentencing,” he told Bolts. There have long been heated debates in Maryland over whether to eliminate or strengthen mandatory minimum sentencing, which critics stress balloon prisons and pressure defendants into guilty pleas to avoid the harshest charges. Bates defends their deterrent effect. “I never enjoy sending people to jail,” he said. ”However I also can no longer stand by when we have so many funerals of young people in the city.”

Leonard, who is a former public defender, ran for prosecutor himself this summer in Baltimore County. (The county does not include the city of Baltimore.) He challenged State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, a fierce opponent of police and criminal justice reform. This was Shellenberger’s first primary challenge since he took office in 2006. 

As of publication, some votes remain to be counted and the local press has yet to call the race, but Shellenberger leads 51 to 49 percent and appears to be the likely winner. Leonard told Bolts he is heartened by the results because it shows that there’s a path to victory for a reform candidate in the county, which has the reputation for being more conservative than the city.

Shellenberger is set to stand trial later this year over his office’s handling of sexual assualt cases, something Leonard says motivated him to run. The Daily Record reported on Thursday that Shellenberger told his staff he would take a leave of absence from his office, citing exhaustion. GOP nominee James Haynes awaits the Democratic nominee in November.

Three other prosecutors lost elsewhere in Maryland, all in Republican primaries. Saint Mary’s County’s Richard Fritz lost to Jaymi Sterling, a former employee of the office who is also the daughter of the current governor; Hartford County’s Albert Peisinger lost to Alison Healey, who benefited from heavy support from a local police union; and Lisa Thayer Welch ousted incumbent Justin Gregory in Garrett, a smaller county.

See: The full list of candidates running for prosecutor in Maryland.

None of these new GOP nominees will face an opponent in November; in total, all but three of Maryland’s 24 prosecutor races are now resolved.

Baltimore City was meant to have a contested general election as well but Roya Hanna, a defense attorney running as an independent who has also proposed rolling back some of Mosby’s reforms, announced on July 29 that he would drop out and endorse Bates, effectively sealing Bates’s victory.  

Bates gained prominence for working as the defense attorney for Alicia White, one of six officers charged by Mosby over Gray’s death in police custody, and in 2018 for his role in exposing the Gun Trace Task Force, a group of corrupt Baltimore cops convicted of crimes ranging from robbery, extortion and overtime fraud.

For the city’s next state’s attorney, one of the first decisions will be how to handle the prosecution of Keith Davis. A court hearing scheduled for August will decide the date of the new trial sought by Mosby; if the trial goes forward, it would be his sixth.

Leonard praised Bates for his criticism of Mosby’s handling of the case. “Not prosecuting Davis is very important,” he said. He also hopes that Bates will not pursue a total break from some of the incumbent’s reforms. “He really needs to think about some of the policies Marilyn Mosby had that were successful, implement them, modify them—don’t eliminate them because they were implemented by someone he had to beat.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Jaymi Sterling’s relationship to Governor Hogan.

The article was updated on July 29 to reflect Roya Hanna’s decision to drop out from the general election.

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Cook County, Illinois: State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announced a shift to treating drug possession writ large (beyond marijuana cases) as a public health matter, with a default of no incarceration. “Incarceration is not treatment, and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office will no longer address the public health crisis of drug addiction in our criminal justice system,” she said in a Jan. 24 speech. “Diversion will be the presumption in drug possession cases.” In the same speech, Foxx launched a program to “pursue the expungement of all misdemeanor marijuana convictions.” What this means according to the Chicago Citizen is that people will be able to apply for expungement with her office’s assistance without paying an expungement fee, instead of going through the existing process that requires a payment. “Failing to take action that provides relief to those who already have a marijuana conviction is not justice,” she said. Illinois lawmakers are mulling legalizing marijuana, and advocates are pushing for such legislation to contain an automatic expungement process.

Baltimore City, Maryland: Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore state’s attorney, announced on Jan. 29 that her office would no longer prosecute marijuana possession no matter the quantity. She also said that she would act to vacate thousands of old convictions. In a 14-page white paper, her office laid out her rationale, detailing the “crisis of disparate treatment of Black people for marijuana possession and other offenses without any seeming regard for the possible adverse public health effects resulting from such enforcement.” Interim police commissioner Gary Tuggle said he will still arrest people. “If you are arrested for having and being in possession of a marijuana you will then be released without charges,” Mosby told NPR in response.

St. Louis County, Missouri: St. Louis County’s new prosecutor, Wesley Bell, issued a policy of no longer prosecuting the possession of under 100 grams of marijuana; he will still prosecute larger quantities if he is also accusing a defendant of an intent to sell. Bell’s decision echoes that announced in June by Kim Gardner, the chief prosecutor of the city of St. Louis.

One outstanding question is the persistence of modes of enforcement besides prosecution. In these Missouri jurisdictions, municipal officials can still issue citations that remain on one’s record and result in fines; this has limited the impact of local steps toward decriminalization in the past. When St. Louis made the possession of less than 35 grams of marijuana into an offense for which the police should issue citations in 2014, this has made no dent in the racial disparities in police enforcement. According to the Riverfont Times, 85 percent of people who were either arrested or issued a citation in the ensuing years were Black. This mirrors Baltimore’s past dynamics. In 2014, Maryland as a whole decriminalized the act of possessing under 10 grams of marijuana. But Black residents received 94 percent of the marijuana citations subsequently issued by the Baltimore Police Department between 2015 and 2017, according to the white paper from Mosby’s office; that is virtually identical to the share of people charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession in Baltimore during that period who were Black (96 percent).

Scott Hechinger, senior staff attorney and director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, warned more broadly that, absent legalization, marijuana will remain a pretext for heavy-handed policing. “The larger issue is that as long as marijuana is a crime on the books, it will be used by law enforcement as a justification to hurt people,” he said. “Marijuana is one of the primary justifications that allows law enforcement to approach, stop-and-frisk our clients. The claimed odor of marijuana is what makes already-pretextual car stops into full-blown car searches.”

Another matter for continued scrutiny is the manner in which prosecutors will implement their own stated policies. Raven Rakia reported in The Appeal in November that the Brooklyn district attorney, who had announced he would stop prosecuting most marijuana possession cases, was still prosecuting people caught with vaping marijuana oil.

Hechinger, who works in Brooklyn, said that one issue is the mismatch between rhetoric and practices on the ground, but also that prosecutors often leave “exceptions and carve-outs” in their decline-to-prosecute policies such as the amount possessed, whether the person stopped has a record, and the form of possession. If the reason prosecutors adopt decline-to-prosecute policies is the “known disproportionate law enforcement impact on communities of color,” Hechinger said, then it shouldn’t matter who you are and how much you have” because “these carve-outs tend to replicate pre-existing racial disparities” in the prosecution of marijuana possession. “It’s worth always questioning the rationales behind the carve-outs,” he added.

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