But drug policy reform advocates have long known that once victories are achieved, they can’t simply move on to the next step forward. Effective implementation of reforms requires careful monitoring, for one thing. What’s more, there’s always the chance that their opponents will succeed in pushing policies back in the opposite direction. 

This reality has been starkly illustrated by Colorado’s recent fentanyl law. 

In 2019, state lawmakers took action at a time when many Western states had only begun to feel the impacts of fentanyl overtaking heroin in the unregulated opioid market. The resulting bill, HB 19-1263, took effect in March 2020. Encouragingly, it made possession of up to 4 grams of most drugs classified as Schedule I or Schedule II (including fentanyl) a misdemeanor rather than a felony, reducing criminal penalties. “We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction,” said State Rep. Leslie Herod (D), one of the bill’s sponsors, at the time.

Despite these major factors, the 2019 law was scapegoated as the primary contributor to the unprecedented surge in overdose deaths.

At that point, Colorado had yet to see a spike in fentanyl-involved deaths on the scale that would follow. But rates had been rising, and the earlier experiences of the East Coast and other regions suggested that worse would come. The implementation of HB 19-1263 also coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its well documented threats to people who use drugs. Added to that were chronic issues like the underfunding of harm reduction services, and the failure of Denver and other cities to meaningfully address the needs of unhoused people. 

Despite these major factors, the 2019 law was scapegoated as the primary contributor to the unprecedented surge in overdose deaths that Colorado, along with many other states, suffered in 2020 and 2021. 

“Some politicians and commentators have claimed HB19-1263 created or worsened the overdose crisis in Colorado,” noted a March 2022 briefing from Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and the Harm Reduction Action Center (HRAC) in Denver, “but the state’s overdose death rate began rising in 1999 and started to spike in 2016, when simple drug possession was still a felony.”

Regardless, political momentum to crack down on fentanyl and people who sold it soon hardened. “Fentanyl dealers are killers, and the law should treat them as such,” said State Senator Barb Kirkmeyer (R), in calling for HB 19-1263 to be reversed.  

During the summer 2022 legislative session, the Fentanyl Accountability and Prevention bill (HB 22-1326), which sought to escalate penalties for possession, distribution and deaths involving illicit fentanyl, passed with little opposition from elected leaders. Unlike the 2019 law, which was intended as a blanket reform to felony possession of most drugs, not just fentanyl, the new bill was in direct response to the rising overdose rates and seizures—issues that law enforcement insisted needed to be addressed by lowering the felony threshold to 1 gram of any fentanyl-containing mixture.   

The opposition that was voiced came largely from the public, during legislative committee meetings, in op-eds, and from across the spectrum of public health experts and direct service providers. But it was almost entirely ignored by legislators. 

“It felt like I was in the twilight zone.”

Although funding provisions were included to increase the availability of naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and drug education and awareness campaigns, advocates pleaded in vain that the criminalizing components offset the good, because criminalization is both inherently harmful and a huge barrier to harm reduction access.

“It felt like I was in the twilight zone,” Ruth Kanatser told Filter of the passage of the new law. Kanatser has worked at HRAC—which conducts direct harm reduction services, community engagement and advocacy—for nearly 20 years. She has spent untold hours educating elected officials on which policies and services actually work for people who use drugs such as fentanyl. 

“The committee meetings almost broke me,” she said. “I thought to myself, how am I going to still do this? I can’t know whether to trust my allies in the legislature anymore.”

She referred to Rep. Herod—who sponsored both the 2019 reform and the 2022 re-felonization bill, and whose district in Denver includes many constituents served by HRAC—and House Speaker Alec Garnett (D), who also sponsored the refelonization bill, as two of the most disappointing former allies. 

It’s too soon to empirically evaluate, at a data level, the impact of fentanyl refelonization in Colorado on measures like overdose deaths, incarceration rates or service delivery obstacles. But based on the drug war’s history, many already know what to expect. 

Markie, a person served by HRAC, said that because of the message the new law sends, a change has already been noticeable in terms of relationships with police. “I’ve seen cops I’ve known over the years, and they’re just more irritable, harsh, and honestly I think afraid by the stuff they’ve heard [about fentanyl],” she told Filter.

“They became really aggressive, pulling us out of the car, threatening us, and accusing us of being dealers.”

Billy, another HRAC participant, described being involved in a traffic stop after the law passed. It started off routinely, they told Filter, but quickly changed when the officers learned there was fentanyl in the car. “They started treating us like we were awful people. They became really aggressive, pulling us out of the car, threatening us, and accusing us of being dealers.”

Lisa Raville, HRAC’s executive director, additionally described Colorado’s “Good Samaritan” law, which grants limited immunity from prosecution to people who call 911 during an overdose, as “basically being nullified” by the refelonization of fentanyl. Some of HRAC’s participants said they would still call 911, but just one person being afraid to do so could cost a life.

The newest wave of regressive drug policy efforts sweeping the nation in response to fentanyl include all of prohibition’s greatest hits, like long mandatory minimums, expanded prosecutorial power, and felony weight cutoffs measured by quantity of street drug, not pure compound. But the national resurgence of drug-induced homicide laws is a specific threat with particularly cruel implications for its targets—often friends or loved ones of people who died, with whom they may have shared their drugs.

During the passage of Colorado’s new law, intense discussion revolved around one provision of HB 22-1326 that law enforcement claimed would make overdose cases difficult to prosecute. The provision was intended to give some protection from the harshest penalties when a person was unaware that a substance they sold or shared with someone who later overdosed contained fentanyl. Despite some members of law enforcement conceding that there should be some tolerance for those situations, police nonetheless advocated for an amendment to remove the provision. In a compromise, the committee ultimately decided to amend the provision to allow for a defendant to present an argument to a jury that they were unaware of fentanyl’s presence.

The disastrous backward step is all the more heartbreaking given the slow progress that preceded it.

In some quarters, awareness of the new law seems to be lagging behind the threats. At the Rocky Mountain Symposium on Addictive Disorders, a regional treatment industry conference chock-full of local organizations which I attended on August 5-7, almost none of the outreach representatives I spoke with had even heard of the bill’s passage, or knew about the changes to the law. 

However, one representative of a community-based nonprofit, requesting anonymity, shared her concern that passing out fentanyl test strips would risk setting someone up for a drug-induced homicide charge, by indicating that they knew of the presence of fentanyl in their sample.

On International Overdose Awareness day, the day after I visited HRAC, an annual gathering was held at the center, where community members distributed free harm reduction resources, shared a pancake brunch and mourned the lives of lost loved ones.

People who use drugs and harm reduction providers are all too used to draconian, harmful and racist drug policy. The disastrous backward step in the legislature is all the more heartbreaking given the slow progress that preceded it. But it will only increase their determination to continue the community and mutual aid efforts on which so many rely. 

Photograph of a fentanyl-containing substance courtesy of Kastalia Medrano

The post The Consequences of Colorado’s Fentanyl Refelonization appeared first on Filter.

After caring for people all night, I feel I need something to help me sleep past the coming sunrise. I lick the brownie’s oily residue off my fingers and carefully crawl into my tent, trying not to wake my girlfriend. Exhausted, I fall asleep.

Suddenly my eyes are open, and I find myself alone, completely disoriented, barely recognizing my surroundings and feeling like an alien in my own body. I am completely stoned, I realize. It seems to take several minutes for me to simply stand up, and even longer to remember where I am. It’s daytime. All I can think about is how I need to tell my girlfriend that I am in no shape to be on my own. Despite the fact that I’m around thousands of people who would be happy to care for my wellbeing, I can only trust her right now.

I eventually find her and immediately feel relief. She gets jealous when I tell her I’m high, so I give her the rest of the brownie. Soon enough, she too is so stoned she’s getting afraid, and the caretaker role reverses. I find us a nice spot in the shade to set up our hammock, and after guiding her through a calming breathing meditation, we lie down and laugh uncontrollably for hours.

Apparently, even as an experienced partier and drug-taker, I too am capable of falling into an unwanted altered state and need my own support.

***

The next night, while working my last late-afternoon shift, I sit for a man in his late teens who’s completely silent, lying down with his eyes closed and almost completely immobile. He wandered into the Zendo tent alone hours earlier, before I relieved his previous sitter, and we’ve no idea of his first name, let alone any drugs he’s maybe on.

Every 20 minutes or so, his body tenses up, his arms and legs flex and the muscles in his face tighten in an almost violent grimace. He remains in this state throughout my six-hour shift. I return the next morning to check on him as most people are packing up to leave the grounds, but his condition has only slightly improved.

As a regular festivalgoer I’ve long observed an unsettling relationship some people can have with psychedelics. Drug experiences can be particularly risky at events which have zero-tolerance policies, where organizers seem to care little about the safety of people who unintentionally find themselves on a bad high.

Harm Reduction at Boom

It’s this issue that brought Maria Carvalho to become executive director of the Kosmicare Association, an NGO that provides everything from onsite drug-checking to round-the-clock psychological support for anyone seeking it at Boom, a huge biennial transformational festival in Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal. “In the past we’ve handled many challenging situations with people using drugs,” Carvalho tells me, “however more recently, we’ve simultaneously had to deal with very adulterated drugs and some years we see more first time Boom-goers than others, who aren’t always used to seeing these services available.”

At this year’s Boom, Kosmicare’s drug-checking service, headed by Daniel Martins, was able for the first time to set up high-performance liquid chromatography equipment and an ultra-violet spectrometer. These devices enabled the team to accurately identify any impurities in the tested samples, and also to assess the specific quantities and dosage strength of drugs present. Nearly 700 samples were tested, and dozens of pills were found to contain high enough doses of MDMA for alerts to be posted, encouraging people to start with half a pill or less.

“I definitely think that more people from increasingly diverse backgrounds are taking psychedelics now.”

“We can do this kind of work because in Portugal the government decriminalized drugs in 2001, and it’s considered a matter of public health,” explains Artur Mendes, one of Boom’s lead organizers. Mendes admits that from a business standpoint, it’s costly to provide harm reduction programs at the festival, but he says safety is his main concern. “It’s very important for festival promoters to acknowledge that drug usage is everywhere, but we are lucky to be able to create an environment where we have specialized information and direct services, though we don’t advocate drug usage.”  

According to the annual Global Drug Survey, in the last two years there has been a considerable increase in people reporting use of LSD, MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms. The trend is difficult to interpret, but may be related to the rising popularity of the electronic dance music scene. Nearly half of the survey respondents in 2017 reported first dropping acid in their late teens, with MDMA being the second most popular drug among people under 25 years of age.

“I have been attending big festivals for almost 10 years and I definitely think that more people from increasingly diverse backgrounds are taking psychedelics now than before,” says Ismail Ali, legal counsel for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the parent organization of the Zendo Project.

Ali has also volunteered for both Zendo Project and Kosmicare, and has plenty of insight into what may cause someone’s trip to turn sour. “Festivals are incredible vortexes of celebration, connection, and community and can be deeply healing for people to participate in,” he says. “Adding psychedelics to that can sometimes increase the serendipity, the magic, and the depth of interaction. However, for some people, the over-stimulation and extreme environments—loud noises, bright lights, huge crowds, etc.—can be incredibly overwhelming and can actually undermine the value of the psychedelic and the festival experience.”

“One of the most traumatic experiences we can have as festival promoters is when someone dies.”

“The main drive that brings people to Boom is discovery of a new sense of self,” says Mendes, though he admits that among the 170 countries represented by Boom’s attendees, it isn’t always possible for people to escape certain self-destructive patterns from everyday life.

In 2016, the first ever death of a festival attendee who’d received psychedelic harm reduction support occurred, when a man helped by Kosmicare at Boom had to be transported to the hospital and ultimately died there despite attempts to resuscitate him.

“One of the most traumatic experiences we can have as festival promoters is when someone dies,” says Mendes. “Unfortunately there’s not much more we can do to prevent these tragedies; sometimes we see patterns of consumption and behavior from people who may be used to it in more conventional settings within the dominant modern culture outside the festival. When there are 30 to 40,000 people at an event, we can have everything in place and respond to emergencies very fast, but it’s impossible for us to deprogram someone’s lifestyle outside of the festival in just one week at Boom.”

An Uphill Battle—Particularly in the States

Providing adequate medical care at music festivals has been a slowly improving uphill battle, one that Stefanie Jones, director of audience development for the Drug Policy Alliance, knows all too well. Jones points out that while there has indeed been an explosion of festivals in recent years, increasing accessibility of psychedelics seems to provide an easier source for new experiences among people who are not used to the kind of partying taking place outside of the nightclub scene.

Jones’ years spent advocating for better care of people using drugs are paying off. “Fortunately there’s been more concern to provide honest drug education and harm reduction services at events where it needs to be,” she says, “and there’s an openness and a willingness to consider stronger health-oriented approaches rather than strictly from a zero-tolerance standpoint through law enforcement.” She notes that harm reduction “has obviously been long accepted among festivalgoers themselves.”  

“People who use psychedelics are hungry for knowledge that can protect their health.”

A growing body of research is also reinforcing the impact of providing well integrated harm reduction services at festivals. Kosmicare has surveyed users of its drug-checking services and found that people are less likely to take a drug that has been shown to be heavily adulterated or impure.

Carvalho’s experiences tally with this idea that people who use psychedelics are hungry for knowledge that can protect their health. “Young people are usually very open to receiving help and show little resistance or defensiveness to being supported through a psychedelic emergency,” she says. “They are also usually open and curious about general drug information and welcome the opportunity to have their substances checked.”

Dierdre Ruane, a doctoral sociology graduate from the University of Kent in England, conducted her dissertation research on psychedelic support services over two summers in 2014 and 2015. Her findings reveal a stark contrast across festivals in countries that have vastly different legal approaches to handling drug use.  

For example, in the United States, where virtually all events abide by zero-tolerance policies, the presence of drugs is not at all affected, but the quality of the drugs is the least pure. Ruane’s main takeaway from her research is that psychedelic harm reduction support services are absolutely crucial to optimize the safety and wellbeing of festivalgoers. But she notes that more work needs to be done to integrate such services with on-site medical support and streamline prevention efforts like education and drug-checking.

I ask Carvalho whether festivals are the best environment for doing drugs, and for her the answer is simple: “That’s not an opinion we care to have.”

“We provide harm reduction service, which, by definition, has no judgment towards people for their choices or behaviors,” she continues. “The use of drugs for recreation is as legitimate as the use of drugs for healing or personal growth. It could be that people are looking for some of those things in a non-ideal place, but it’s not our job to decide that. We have information about risks, we have skills to deal with potential problems, and we can help manage them regardless of the environment or a person’s motivations.”

What Any Parent Wants to Know

The young man whom I’ve been hoping will be fit enough to leave Zendo as the festival ends finally seems able to stand up and get oriented.

A friend who’s been looking for him is relieved to learn he’s being cared for, and fills us in on how the young man had been drinking and smoking weed before taking some untested powder that they assumed was MDMA.

Though he’d never tried it before, he had no history of experiences like the one he was having from the drug combination. His cell phone has been ringing all morning, and turns out it was his parents calling. They have no idea their son has come all the way from San Diego to a festival in northern California.

I speak with his parents, though out of respect for his confidentiality, I provide only the most vital information that any parent would want to hear: Their child is safe and going to be OK.

The post How Harm Reduction Services Are Keeping Festivalgoers Safer appeared first on Filter.