Treat fentanyl like deadly poison it is

Another 30 or so Coloradans have died from fentanyl overdose since my column two weeks ago imploring the legislature to quickly pass a meaningful bill addressing the killer drug. There is still no law attempting to fix the disastrous 2019 bill making possession of fatal fentanyl a crime akin to theft of cable services, and the proposed fix making its way through the General Assembly risks making the situation worse.

The possession of a drug responsible for killing Coloradans at an unprecedented and annually-doubling rate will be harder to prosecute than cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine if that legislation tortoising its way through the gold dome becomes law.

The phrase de jour during a hearing that lasted until 3 a.m. earlier this month was “harm reduction,” a term apparently limited to consideration of the addict alone, not the broader community plagued by a permissive drug use environment. Harm appears to be defined as anything that might separate the addict from their drugs or the drugs from the community.

Some harm-reduction experts testified that the only policy that will work is to provide the safest possible environment for addicts to continue to use, including saving and resaving and resaving their lives until such time as they decide voluntarily to seek treatment, or until they die.

Before the legislature and Gov. Jared Polis gutted our laws, it was a felony for any person to knowingly possess a controlled substance that contained fentanyl (or meth, heroin, cocaine, etc). They did not have to know specifically that the drugs they knew to be illegal contained any specific compound, just that they knew it was an illegal substance.

In 2019, the legislature reduced the law governing the possession of drugs — including enough pure fentanyl to kill

2,000 people — all the way down to an arrestless, bondless, receive-a-ticket misdemeanor. The same knowledge standard is applied — the fentanyl possessor need only know that they have an illegal drug.

Last week, as the legislature finally started to address the burgeoning Colorado fentanyl crisis they helped facilitate, the House Judiciary committee (chaired by Rep. Mike Weissman and dominated by Democrats) voted to make it harder to prosecute those who possess deadly fentanyl than to prosecute those who possess cocaine. The bill’s current language allows possession of 1 gram of fentanyl — enough to kill 500 Coloradans — to remain a stay-on-the-street-andcontinue-to-use-and-die misdemeanor. There is no data-driven or common-sense reason to create a 1 gram limit, other than the politics of being able to say that they did “something.”

It would become a felony to possess more than 1 gram, but only if law enforcement can prove that the person “knew or should have known” that the drugs they possessed specifically included fentanyl. The result is to make it easier to prosecute someone with methamphetamine, heroin or cocaine, than it is to prosecute someone with what is possibly the deadliest street drug we have ever seen.

This is not a partisan issue. Democrats passed the bill out of the house judiciary committee despite bipartisan opposition. More than that, Polis — Colorado’s top Democrat and the man who reduced fentanyl to a misdemeanor with his 2019 pen — has finally seen the light. Polis publicly stated on Tuesday what everyone else already knew: fentanyl is a poison, like anthrax, and “any possession of fentanyl” should be a felony.

Our legislative leaders can now follow Polis’ lead and admit their mistakes and move forward with haste in fixing the law. There is no more time to wait. At least two more Coloradans will die from fentanyl today. And tomorrow. And so on.