Everything Is Political: Seattle's Recent Drug Law Fails Black Folks

This week, the King County Department of Public Defense (KCDPD) released a report looking at arrests and prosecutions under the City of Seattle's 2023 drug criminalization ordinance, which supporters claimed to high heaven was about helping people access treatment. The data do not paint a pretty picture.

Only 6 out of 210 people charged with drug possession or public use in 2024 and 2025 have completed treatment or been ordered by the court to complete treatment. And, as absolutely no one could have predicted, the law is structurally racist.

"Despite comprising only roughly 7% of the city population, 25% of the 210 people charged with drug possession or public use are Black," the KCDPD study said. "That means that a Black person is 4.1 times more likely to be charged with drug possession than their white neighbor."

Pretty bad, right? But wait, there's more!

"Seattle is expending significant public resources on misdemeanor drug possession prosecutions despite the overwhelming majority of cases (71%) involving a very small amount of drugs (a gram or less) – cases that King County prosecutors decided years ago were not worth the resources it cost to prosecute them," per the report.

Tell me again how this is not the War on Drugs 2.0? How it's not just a cynical, slapdash attempt to push people society has deemed to be a nuisance out of public view? To punish the victims of economic racism for the crime of being poor? How was it ever intended to help?

We — "we" being Emerald founder Marcus Harrison Green, the ACLU of Washington, The Urbanist, The Stranger, various other experts, and myself, in my debut at the Emerald — said all of this when the racist drug criminalization law was in the works, and it sucks to be saying it again. Quite literally, I hate to say we told you so.

While it looks like the people behind this bill are about to get booted out of office, that's still a lot of time and a lot of money wasted and a lot of Black people arrested to not make a damn dent in outdoor drug use or visible homelessness. Let alone all drug use and all homelessness!

It's like the lawmakers who pushed this bill are that kid next to the stove whose parents are yelling across the room, "It's hot! Don't touch it! It's going to burn you." And the kid is looking at that coil like it's the only thing they can see, and everyone knows they're going to touch it. Because they don't care what their parents know, they need to find out for themselves. But it's frustrating, because we're not kids and parents trying to navigate a hot stove. We are all functioning, intelligent adults with access to a lot of sound research and data. We don't have to find out that the stove is hot for ourselves. We spent literal decades as a society doing that. And we wrote it all down specifically to keep future policymakers from burning their little hands!

Anyway, the people with singed fingers here are insisting it's fine; namely, Mayor Bruce Harrell and the project management team at Purpose Dignity Action (PDA), the treatment and case-management group that's supposed to help people who are diverted after arrest. In a joint statement, Harrell and PDA told The Seattle Times that the county's report was "misleading."

In reality, the joint statement said, three times as many people had been diverted to PDA's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD) program without being booked. LEAD's original name kind of tells the whole story of what it does — provide treatment and services to people with behavioral health problems or substance use disorder that come into contact with the criminal justice system — but it has since expanded the program to allow for non-law-enforcement referrals (and changed the name to reflect that).

Obviously, all the referrals here are coming from law enforcement, but any referral to LEAD is inarguably a good thing. A friend I met through skateboarding — we'll call him Jim — was homeless and badly addicted to both opioids and uppers. He was quite literally wasting away in front of our eyes, losing weight at a rapid clip and almost all of his abilities on the board. He got arrested under the city's new drug law, referred to LEAD, and placed in housing. So I'm not hating on those numbers. It's a good thing that somewhere around 600 people may have been connected to LEAD. But those other numbers … not so good.

The law is still disproportionately used to charge Black people — specifically, Black people who are suffering from something that most thinking people agree is a serious disease — with nonviolent crimes.

So, here's my big thing in all this: There is absolutely no need to arrest anyone! It's beyond useless. You do not need to charge people with a crime to compel them to get help. I understand the idea behind presenting drug users with the choice of jail or treatment is to force them toward treatment. It can be maddening to see someone continue to harm themselves and everyone around them, when all they have to do is say yes to some help.

But if there's one thing we learned from LEAD itself, specifically its CoLEAD work during the early phases of the pandemic, it's that people will accept help if you keep showing up and keep asking them what they need and offering it to them. People with the most critical mental health and substance-use issues, no less. PDA helped develop the framework behind that work, JustCARE, and data show that it works really, really well.

Which is all to say that this tough-love business is and always has been nothing but an act of political theater for the people watching KOMO from the comfort of their living rooms.

If we really want to "solve" homelessness, public drug use, and the disorder associated with those things, we know how. We don't need any more tough love. We don't need any more five-year plans or intricate bureaucracies.

We need to fund the hell out of our existing outreach, treatment, and emergency housing systems. We need to have a hiring surge of PDA staffers, not police officers. We need to buy up vacant lots and build tiny house villages by the truckload, not wait for the new Seattle Comprehensive Plan to trickle down some housing in 10 years. Everyone has their idea about what the best solution is, but we have a lot of provably effective solutions in our lap. We just need to pick a lane and drive in it.

Once we've gotten everyone inside, we can argue about whether it should be legal to smoke a blue (fentanyl) on a park bench. Right now, though, people aren't getting high in public by choice. They're doing it because they're hooked and have nowhere else to do it. They're not going to stop doing it because we made it a little more illegal. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

The truth is that the only way to "clean up the streets" is to get people housed and helped. That takes time and money. It's a lot of work to sell voters on the long game, so our lawmakers tried the quick fix instead. Turns out that stove really was hot.

But let's not forget who's really getting burned here. These lawmakers stand to lose an election, while the 210 people arrested under this law were faced with losing their freedom, many of them over less than a gram of drugs.

Got something *political* I should know? Tell me about it: Tobias.CB@SeattleEmerald.org.

Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is a writer, editor and restaurant worker who lives in South Park. He was formerly the associate editor of Real Change News, and his work has appeared in The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, Vice, Thrillist, Thrasher Magazine, Curbed, and Crosscut, among other outlets.