Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Saturday, August 8, 2026 15:24
VIEWED: 10377
PAGE 1 of 13
https://nyti.ms/30sSnGj
Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs
While other cities are jailing drug users, Seattle has found another way.
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
Published Aug. 23, 2019
SEATTLE — On gritty streets where heroin, fentanyl and meth stride like Death Eaters, where for decades both drugs and the war on drugs have wrecked lives, the city of Seattle is pioneering a bold approach to narcotics that should be a model for America.
Anyone caught here with a small amount of drugs — even heroin — isn’t typically prosecuted. Instead, that person is steered toward social services to get help.
This model is becoming the consensus preference among public health experts in the U.S. and abroad. Still, it shocks many Americans to see no criminal penalty for using drugs illegally, so it takes courage and vision to adopt this approach: a partial retreat in the war on drugs coupled with a stepped-up campaign against addiction.
The war on drugs has been one of America’s most grievous mistakes, resulting in as many citizens with arrest records as with college diplomas. At last count, an American was arrested for drug possession every 25 seconds, yet the mass incarceration this leads to has not turned the tide on narcotics.
Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
The number of opioid users has surged, and more Americans now die each year from overdoses than perished in the Vietnam, Afghan and Iraq wars combined. And that doesn’t account for the way drug addiction has ripped apart families and stunted children’s futures. More than two million children in America live with a parent suffering from an illicit-drug dependency.
So Seattle is undertaking what feels like the beginning of a historic course correction, with other cities discussing how to follow. This could be far more consequential than the legalization of pot: By some estimates, nearly half of Americans have a family member or close friend enmeshed in addiction, and if the experiment in Seattle succeeds, we’ll have a chance to rescue America from our own failed policies.
In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with hard drugs and more on the public health toolbox.
Decriminalization is unfolding here in part because of Dan Satterberg, the prosecuting attorney for King County, which includes Seattle. It’s also arguably underway because of what happened to his little sister, Shelley Kay Satterberg.
At the age of 14, Shelley ran away from home because her parents wouldn’t let her go to a concert on a school night. It was a rebellion that proved devastating. She was away for several months, was gang-raped by two men, was introduced to hard drugs and began to self-medicate with those drugs to deal with the trauma of rape.
A photo of Mr. Satterberg’s sister, Shelley Kay Satterberg, and his daughter sits on his office desk. His sister died from an ailment stemming from past drug use.CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
As Dan Satterberg rose through the ranks of prosecutors, Shelley Satterberg wrestled with addiction. She was never arrested or jailed (middle-class drug users often avoid police attention, which focuses on marginalized people who use or sell in public).
Dan told me that he was angry at Shelley — angry that she had made terrible choices, angry that she had hurt their parents. But over time he also concluded that his own approach of prosecuting drug users accomplished little, except that it isolated them from the family and friends who offered the best support system to escape addiction.
In 2015, Dan took Shelley to Navos, a nonprofit that provides mental health and addiction services, and she was able to stop using street drugs and gradually put her life back in order. Dan saw that treatment made a huge difference in Shelley’s life and became a believer.
Yet it wasn’
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Good post G...
T 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I'm not surprised that the article didn't once mention the for profit corporate prison system we have in this country and how people like Kamala Harris have worked for decades to fill it with virtual slave labor.
Damn shame, that.
But I am in favor and full support of not throwing non-violent offenders in prison since prison ruins lives and families and is not at all in the business of rehabilitating anyone.
I hope it works out the way they hope it will.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
It's funny because I saw three videos in a row about the homeless drug=addicted in Seattel, and the people that they interviewed were fed up with the petty crime, trash, feces, needles etc that the drug-addicted (and mentally ill) leave behind. One of the videos, the lpngest one, cites several people who have had dozens - and in one case over a HUNDRED - "encounters" with the SPD for things like petty theft, threatening passersby etc, only to be returned to/left on the street to do the same thing all over again the next hour, day, or week,
It seems to me that while "jail" per se is not a reasonable response, some sort of involuntary treatment is required, and possible "harm reduction" housing. We're so worried about the freedoms of the mentally ill and drug addicted that we forget about the freedom of everyone else to walk the streets and not be harrassed,or to live in their homes and not be buglarized.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Sigs brings up a good point.
I can only talk from my own personal experience, but growing up in my late teens and early 20's with the wrong crowd, we did a lot of shit we shouldn't have done and that was with the threat of huge penalties if we got caught. Even when some of us did, and even after some of us were put in prison for drug offences, most of the rest of us did not learn from their mistakes.
I'm sure that for some people, this new system Seattle is testing out is going to be all they needed. A support group that actually cares, or one that is paid well enough and staffed with people who can really fake that they care even if they don't.
But giving everybody else a free pass? That probably isn't going to work out for a majority of cases unless there is some sort of "stick" involved.
Again, I'm happy to know that they're not throwing non-violent offenders into the prison machine anymore.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Three ecounters with the SPD, and if you haven't grabbed your chance at sobriety and/or treatment, off to the gulag you go! (Just kidding)
There are a lot of people who are drug addicted/alcoholics, mentally incompetent, mentally ill, etc and the difference between them and the people on the street is homelessness. A lot of people do stupid things in the privacy of their own homes and it doesn't raise a ruckus in the larger society because they have the space and the resrouces to do what they do, privately. Homeless people need to be involuntarily "homed".
I employ a formerly homeless man (he was homeless when I first started employing him) and he is neither a drug addict nor mentally ill, altho he has made a series of stupid decisions about jobs in his lifetime which cost him his place. But he DOES tell me about the other homeless people, and in addition to many of them being mentally ill and/or drug addicted, long term homelessness leads to a kind of feral behavior. We have feral people on our streets. They don't WANT to go into a home.
How do you domesticate feral dogs and cats? Well, you give them a home with a lot of encounters with people reinforced by food.
We can talk about the ultimate causes of homelessness (lack of good-paying jobs, real estate bubble which has lifted housing out of reach, unemployment and financial uncertainty which causes people to turn to drugs and drink out of hopelessness and anxiety, lack of treatment options for the mentally ill, too many returning vets with PTSD etc) but the immediate response shouls be involuntary housing and treatment.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs
Is it ending war so much??... or giving up and shrugging your shoulders at behaviors and people that they realize will never be stopped??
I mean, it's nice that someone showed them the definition of futile, but I'd be interested to see the rates of usage in people that have been forced to stop vs. people that have been asked nicely to stop using.
Either way, redirecting efforts to slow the flows of drugs from coming in IS probably a better use of time and resources.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Legalizing or at least decriminalizing marijuana is a great start. It can be grown right here, nearly anywhere, and compared to cigarettes and alcohol it's far less damaging. None of those people on the streets are there because they're weed fiends.
But how do you stop the flow of hard core drugs? They've been trying to for 3 decades already. I don't think that de-emphasizing the pursuit of marijuana is going to somehow make them more successful at getting more of the hard stuff.
And some of the hardest stuff can be made from pills that are legally sold by pharmacists or even over the counter meds. Sure, there are limits to what can be bought these days, but that doesn't seem to stop the meth plague going on across America. You don't need a bathtub to make a batch if you're not in the market of selling it. The kids figured out how to get high off meth with nothing more than an empty 2 liter of soda.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Legalizing or at least decriminalizing marijuana is a great start.
I've changed my mind lol, maybe neutering chronic (non medical excuse people) that use weed would be a great place to start.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
When unemployment and family/personal financial/economic insecurity spike, drug use and alcohilism go thru the roof. You see this in every modern nation that experiences economic turmoil. If you want to reduce drug addiction, people have to have meaningful, secure, good-paying jobs that take up their free time and give them agency over their future.
Our other problem is that we generate a crapton of veterans who come out of the military either with PTSD, or they become economically and socially disoriented in the transition from a situation where their needs, society and goals are provided for them and then dumped into maelstrom of uncertainty and isolation.
In particular, people have been isolated from each other. We may have more virtual contacts than ever before, but way fewer friends and famliy that we can lean on/count on when things go rough, and we feel no obligation to be the one that other can lean on either.
Finally, I think our consumerist society has everyone thinking that life should be fulfilling all the time. There are an awful lot of people who feel entitled to happiness, and don't understand that life DOES present its share of fear, doubt, pain, sadness, discouragement. We should be able to reach out to others for help, advice, or just a non-judgmental ear, but instead we're sniping at each other over the stupidest things.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME