Andrew Lewis, the downtown representative on the City Council, is working quickly to back up his swing vote that helped sink City Attorney Ann Davison’s hopes of a public drug use crackdown in Seattle with a new plan that he says would address the lack of structure for treatment and diversion in the proposal voted down Tuesday.
CHS reported here on Tuesday’s vote by the council that narrowly rejected the bill that would have enabled the city attorney to prosecute drug use and possession on Seattle’s streets over the plan’s lack of investment in city resources for treatment and diversion and a history of drug enforcement that has consistently and disproportionately targeted people of color and the homeless.
Drug prosecution has been left to the county where the prosecutor’s office has said it does not currently have the resources to charge people arrested under the state’s new harsher penalties for low-level drug crimes.
Lewis moved quickly Wednesday to begin a push for a new plan “to expand addiction treatment, diversion, and address public drug use” in Seattle that he says would enable the city attorney to move forward under the new state drug law.
“As elected officials, we have a duty to the public to truly implement the Legislature’s recent legislation, both its language and its spirit. The legislation that was signed by Governor Inslee is primarily about encouraging higher use of evidence-based treatment programs that save lives and prevent relapse into addiction,” Lewis said in a statement. “While there is a law enforcement component of the legislation, this is meant to be a last resort, not the primary use. I will propose legislation that adopts the Legislature’s Blake fix – fully – once I know that we have answered the key question of what happens to people if they are charged under its powers.”
Lewis said Wednesday he will work to shape a plan that includes development of a successor therapeutic court to Community Court after Davison removed her office’s support for the program prior to Tuesday’s vote.
Lewis said his plan will also include a process to “develop and fully-fund treatment-based pre-file diversion” while working with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office “to scale and deploy the plans outlined in his Executive Order on Seattle’s fentanyl crisis.”
The final step “after creating those necessary pathways for treatment and diversion,” Lewis said, should be a new try at the drug crackdown legislation “making the Seattle Municipal Code consistent with State Law on possession and public use.”
The move from Lewis will challenge the council’s most progressive members Teresa Mosqueda, Tammy Morales, and Kshama Sawant who voted against the bill Tuesday. The more centrist Lisa Herbold who also voted against the bill but said she was ready to support the plan if more treatment resources were in place could be more likely to break with that group along with Lewis.
Dan Strauss, representing Ballard, and bill sponsors citywide rep Sara Nelson and northeast Seattle’s Alex Pedersen, plus Debora Juarez voted yes on the previous proposal.
In the race for District 3, Some of the candidates seeking the seat Sawant will leave behind weighed in on the drug prosecution bill. Candidate Ry Armstrong spoke against the bill during public comment and called the bill “a pathetic excuse for legislation called the War on Drugs.” Andrew Ashiofu also posted a statement about the bill, saying, “As a black man I know my history and how this was used to attack and punish the community. As a queer person this is harmful and dangerous.” Candidate Alex Hudson, meanwhile, shared a column critical of the legislation by Seattle Times writer Naomi Ishisaka headlined This is exactly how not to fix the fentanyl crisis. Joy Hollingsworth, leading the race so far in contributions and a cannabis industry professional, said she supported increased harm reduction strategies, mental health services, emergency shelters, and diversion methods as she criticized a “War on Drugs” approach to the fentanyl crisis. “I want people who are experiencing drug disorders to get the best treatment and care they possibly can,” Hollingsworth said Tuesday. “That pathway might be different for everyone, but what I do know, is we have to do something and stop being so numb to what’s going on in our community.”
Groups like the Downtown Seattle Association and the Seattle Police Officers Guild union, strongly condemned Lewis and the council’s defeat of the bill.
Lewis is one of the few incumbents seeking reelection to remain on the council.
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No doubt the same crew will leap in here to decry the bleeding hearts who are letting this fair city go to the dogs.
Increasing the legal severity of the crime would not change anything. Nonviolent offenses are bottom tier. Only when someone graduates to a more serious offense like assault or robbery would the drug charge even be considered.
As the county prosecutor notes, there are no justice system resources available to hold, process, and try these offenders. The courts are full, the jails are full. It would be catch and release and then people would complain about THAT.
This is not a Seattle issue – it is happening in large cities across the country. No one has figured it out. But more police and harsher penalties are pretty clearly NOT the answer, since most everyone gave that a shot already. And don’t give me that but-we-defunded-them rigamarole. We all know that’s a load of bs.
Do you believe Anne Davidson brought this issue forward for performative purposes? She has stated a desire to have her office handle these cases. Why would she do that if she had no ability to actually handle the cases?
Why are you asking what we think of her belief system? If her belief system conflicts with facts, let’s maybe go with facts.
I am saying the person in charge of the City Attorneys office may have a better understanding of what her office is capable of than you or I do. So why would she advocate for this change in the law if she did not think her office could handle the resulting workload? She would just be setting her office and herself up for failure, which would make no sense.
It IS happening in other cities. Portland just moved to make daytime camping illegal, for example.
As for prosecution of habitual drug users, sellers and encampment dwellers, if we leave them alone they die. OD are all time highs. Crime by these encampment dwellers are at all time highs. Letting that status quo continue puts everyone at greater risk of dying from OD or from drug addict assault. Only a Progressive thinks this is somehow a good thing.
The century old War on People Who Use Drugs is a demonstrably morally as well as fiscally bankrupt futile exercise in wanton, and guaranteed to be utterly ineffective, jingoistic barbarism tripled down upon by a circular firing squad of foolishly weaponized and utterly self serving ignoramuses and self-dealing parasites who profit from human suffering by engendering, championing, and attempting to sustain a coercive Pharmacratic Police Surveillance State.
No amount of the making of bellicose and perniciously sanctimonious war upon human nature itself under the phony rubrics of theocratically inspired paternalistic, over-medicalized, and pseudo-psychiatric, garbage will ever meaningfully and justly benefit society. The last century proves that very handily. It is demonstrably true than nearly all of the societal dangers and harms surrounding drug use actually arise out of prohibitions surrounding drugs themselves, and criminal elements arising out of illicit markets.
Legalize drugs. Provide them in pure forms dirt cheap to adults (who well should remain civilly/criminally accountable for actual, as opposed to illusory “moral”, harms perpetrated against others) – eliminating illicit markets entirely and allowing adults to make their own choices about their own bodies, minds, and lives. Exactly what a free society is, and should be, all about. Reject paternalistic police state authoritarianism that seeks to coercively infantilize the populace. End this pernicious war upon ourselves.
The War on Drugs failed. So has the “harm reduction” strategy as is event by the number of OD deaths, chaos in the streets and magnet effect of the all-carrots-and-no-sticks approach that has attracted thousands of addicts to Seattle and other west coast cities. We obviously need a more balanced approach. To get there we will first need to vote out and turn the page from the leftist zealots (Lewis, Morales, Sawant, Herbold, Mosqueda, Strauss, Constantine, Holmes, Satterberg, O’Brian Gonzales) that inflicted the disastrous decriminalization/enabling experiment on our city. Yes, Strauss voted the right way this time so he has a shot at re-election, but he is part of the problem.
I asked Alex Hudson how she would have voted on this legislation, and here is her response:
“Drug possession and public usage remains illegal in Seattle, as it is across Washington, because of State law. The proposal to move prosecution from the County to the City had no fiscal note, equity analysis, or adequate public input. Also, if the goal here is to create proactive opportunities to help those suffering from addiction, we need to add more capacity and put in place the mechanisms to get people into treatment.
As a Councilmember, basic due diligence requires understanding what legislation will cost the city, who it will impact, and how the caseloads will be handled, and it’s not responsible or prudent to take a vote for any bill without that.”
In other words, she would have voted “no.” Disappointing.
And not surprising.
I am the only one of 8 candidates running for district 3 that would have voted in favor of criminalization, because there is obviously a need for intervention. Would I prefer involuntary commitment under Ricky’s law? Yes, but we don’t have the beds.
It is a truly toxic compassion that prefers instead leaving people in the streets to keep killing themselves.
I don’t care if people get high. I like to get high. What I don’t like is packs of drug fiends doing drugs in the middle of the day on downtown sidewalks. Don’t arrest them, confiscate their drugs and tell them to go away and “get a room”. Keep confiscating until they quit coming back. By the way, we should do the same for people smoking joints or walking around with alcohol on city streets. Some civility, please.
With the failure of this legislation by our lefty Council, the problem now is that nothing will change. The SPD will not arrest anyone for drug use and/or possession because they know that the King County Prosecutor will not prosecute for this. She is on record as saying so.