Panelists urge more treatment capacity and legal fixes to cut drug demand

At a public forum on public safety, panelists including Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders and former Seattle City Attorney Anne Davidson stressed that reducing drug demand and expanding treatment capacity are crucial to stemming violence and repeat offenses.

Sheriff Sanders said law enforcement alone cannot solve the problem. “The only way, in my opinion, that we are going to solve this problem is to cut the demand,” he said, arguing that treatment capacity must expand so officers and narcotics task forces can prioritize higher-level investigations and get people into care.

Anne Davidson and others described cases in which newly built treatment beds went unused because of legal and budgetary disputes. Davidson said a UW Medicine facility had medical staffing and beds but could not accept patients because public defenders did not participate in the involuntary-commitment process; the result, she said, was layoffs and an unused unit.

Panelists discussed the state’s involuntary-treatment law (the Involuntary Treatment Act, or ITA) and whether its legal thresholds for commitment should be revised so that people who are gravely disabled by substance use or serious mental illness can be placed more swiftly and humanely. “We don’t want to institutionalize people unnecessarily,” Davidson said, “but we also have substances now that create a class of population who cannot self-care.”

Speakers described operational barriers beyond law: who pays for public defense to protect a patient’s legal rights, the administrative complexity of placing someone involuntarily, and the interaction of misdemeanor defelonization with access to state psychiatric hospitals. Panelists said these legal and budgetary gaps can leave clinically appropriate beds sitting empty and businesses and neighbors bearing the day-to-day consequences.

Sheriff Sanders and former officials suggested practical steps including prioritizing beds for treatment admissions from narcotics investigations, strengthening coordination between medical teams and defense counsel, and considering statutory adjustments to the ITA’s definitions and processes. They emphasized that any changes must preserve constitutional protections while improving access to care.

The panel closed the segment by urging lawmakers and health-care systems to align budget lines and processes so treatment capacity can be used when clinically indicated; no specific legislation was adopted at the forum. The session moved on to related topics including retail crime and county funding pressures.