It would be difficult to think of a policy that has failed more definitively than America’s war on drugs, sending even small-time users to prison for years. This policy has cost the economy trillions, ruined tens of millions of lives, ruptured the family structure, exacerbated racial inequities — yet we still have a fatal overdose every seven minutes in the United States.
“Legislative and law enforcement solutions to drug problems in the U.S. have consistently caused more harm than they have solved,” noted Alex Kral, an epidemiologist with RTI International, a think tank. Countless studies have shown, he said, that public health approaches work better.
That’s the context in which Seattle took another crucial step in September: Satterberg announced then that he would no longer prosecute cases involving possession of less than one gram of drugs, even cocaine and heroin (one gram is more than a simple user would normally have at any one time). In practice, that means that dealers still get arrested, but not ordinary users.
“Seattle is leading on this,” said Daliah Heller of Vital Strategies, a New York group that examines how to reduce overdose deaths. “It’s extremely significant.”
