By Guy Page
A Senate bill sponsored by 12 senators would decriminalize ‘personal use’ sale of methamphetimines, depressants, LSD, ecstasy, and narcotics other than fentanyl, heroin and cocaine.
S.300, introduced into the Senate Thursday, January 18, and sent to the Judiciary Committee, is framed as a ‘health-based’ response to Vermont’s illegal drug epidemic. It would:
- Create the new Community Care, Health, and Safety Fund to provide grants for community-based harm-reduction services. Safe injection sites are listed among those services.
- Authorize monetary-equivalent incentives for substance abusers to participate in a needs assessment; and
- Create the new Drug Use Health and Safety Advisory Board to determine the benchmark personal use supply, prevent and reduce criminalization of drug use, and hand out the grants in the new state fund.
But perhaps the most eye-raising section of the bill “eliminates criminal penalties for possessing and dispensing a personal use supply of drugs” and instead “requires that a person found to be possessing or dispensing an amount of a personal-use quantity of a regulated drug be provided information and access to available services.” Dealers of fentanyl, cocaine and heroin would remain subject to arrest.
The bill is sponsored by Senators Vyhovsky (lead sponsor), Bray, Clarkson, Gulick, Hashim, MacDonald, McCormack, Perchlik, Ram Hinsdale, Watson, White, and Wrenner. All are Democrats and/or Progressives. In the bill, the sponsors cite grisly statistics: “Drug overdoses reportedly killed 264 Vermonters in 2022 and drug toxicity deaths have increased by over 500 percent since 2010. Nonfatal opioid overdose emergency department visits have also been increasing. From 2018 to 2021, 1,631 individuals visited an emergency department for an opioid overdose.”
S.300 also alleges the criminal justice system has failed to reduce drug use.
“The stigma of a criminal arrest or conviction often results in detrimental physical, psychological, and economic impacts on the lives of those arrested. Involvement in the criminal legal system can interfere with employment, housing, educational opportunities, and professional licensing and lead to burdensome debt from fines… Iindividuals convicted of a misdemeanor have their annual earnings reduced by an average of 16 percent.
“Studies have also repeatedly found that periods of incarceration substantially increase the risk of fatal overdose. Within the first two weeks of release from incarceration, an individual is substantially more likely to die from a fatal overdose than a person who was not detained.”
Drug laws also are racist, the bill claims:
“Enforcement of the drug laws in Vermont, as well as nationally, falls disproportionately on persons of color despite similar rates in usage and sale of drugs. Prior to Vermont’s legalization of cannabis in 2018, Black persons were six times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than White persons.”
Funding would come from 40 percent of the cannabis excise tax, part of the Opioid Abatement Special Fund, and “an amount equal to the total annual reduction in expenditures projected to result from the elimination of criminal penalties for individuals in possession of personal use quantities of criminal substances.” Current law directs 30% of cannabis excise taxes to substance abuse treatment, not to exceed $10 million.
S.300 partially resembles early drafts of H.72, the ‘safe injection site’ bill passed by the House last week. Early drafts also featured measures towards hard drug decriminalization.