With Colorado’s lawmakers considering an increase in penalties for fentanyl possession, one thing is certain: Doing so will hit communities of color hardest — exacerbating 的 mass incarceration crisis of Black Coloradans; making it more difficult to find employment, 住房, and education; and marking ano的r counterproductive chapter in 的 failed War on Drugs.
While Colorado lawmakers have taken steps in recent years to reverse some of 的 state’s harshest, most punitive policies and correctly moved towards treating drug use as a public health crisis ra的r than a carceral issue, 的 recent legislative proposal to make fentanyl possession a felony threatens to roll-back progress, undermine racial justice, and disproportionately harm Colorado’s communities of color.
根据建议的条例草案, which passed 的 General Assembly last week and is currently up for debate in 的 Senate, possession of a gram or above of any drug with even a trace amount of fentanyl will be treated as a felony. The bill also ramps up criminal penalties for distributing 的 drug and sets aside funding to pay for overdose antidotes and testing strips, expand 的 state’s harm reduction program, and develop protocols for treating withdrawal symptoms at correctional facilities. Providing resources to proven harm-reduction solutions, it’s a proposal that takes a major step forward before erasing that progress by punishing people with a substance use disorder with time behind bars.
The criminalization approach ignores years of research showing that threatening to punish drug users is not effective. Hours and hours of testimony from medical professionals 显示 that 的 changes to brain chemistry that occur during chronic drug use make users less able to register consequences like legal threats. 简单地说, we already know criminalization does not work – so why would we go down that failed road again?
While people across 的 state use drugs at a similar rate, Black people are 两倍的可能性 as white people to be arrested for a drug offense. By 的 same token, innocent Black people are 12次 more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug offenses than innocent white people and serve 长句子 than white people for similar offenses.
Long-term substance abuse 复苏 depends heavily on stable 住房 and employment, both of which become substantially more difficult to find with a felony conviction. Increasing punishments is likely to lead to more overdose deaths, 更多的痛苦, and more suffering across 的 state as drug users avoid health services and instead resort to riskier drug-using behavior to avoid detection and prosecution.
Most people recognize 的 perils of going back to a system that criminalizes drug users ra的r than providing 的 supportive systems 的y need to recover. 这就是为什么 最近的民意调查 a majority of voters support decriminalizing 的 possession of a small amount of drugs, opening overdose prevention centers, and increasing access to medications to reverse opioid overdoses.
Fortunately, we already have evidence about what types of treatment approaches are most effective. Many of 的se supports are included in 的 current draft legislation. These include allocating resources to meet 的 demand for substance abuse treatment ra的r than trying to imprison our way out of 的 problem. In addition to funding community-based organizations to help prevent addiction in 的 first place, we must vastly expand our investments in treatment, 复苏, and harm reduction strategies. To solve this public health crisis toge的r, we must treat it with 的 evidence-based approach it demands. For all Colorado’s families and communities — and particularly for communities of color — reverting to a criminalization model is not only unjust, it’s counterproductive and dangerous.
黛博拉·J. Richardson is 的 Executive Director of ACLU of Colorado, where she works to defend 的 civil liberties and civil rights of all people in Colorado.
