(The Center Square) – As part of the solution to addressing the ongoing opioid epidemic, a Washington Health Care Authority work group has released recommendations that include turning the state into a drug supplier of sorts as part of a plan to provide safer drugs to addicts.
The Substance Use Recovery Services Advisory Committee, or SURSAC, was created via legislation in 2021 to provide suggestions to lawmakers around substance use policy and treatment options.
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SURSAC developed a set of proposals in a Substance Use and Recovery Services Plan, which was released in January 2023, and “outlined strategies to reduce overdoses and improve access to outreach, treatment, and recovery support for people with substance use disorder,” Katie Pope, deputy chief communications officer with the Health Care Authority, emailed The Center Square.
The work group provided its recommendations to the public on June 13, one of which is the concept of a “buyers club” as one of four potential frameworks for implementing a “safer supply” program.
The other three models include the state establishing a “supervised consumption” location where drugs are prescribed and administered in a supervised setting, prescribing and dispensing drugs to users who can administer them outside of a supervised setting, and making drugs like cannabis available without a prescription in dispensaries and shops.
Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, who has repeatedly offered legislation to require drug-addicted parents to undergo treatment before regaining custody of their children, has some reservations about the buyers club approach.
“We’ve been going in absolutely the wrong direction,” he told The Center Square.” It’s just terrible, and we see this mass human misery and suffering in our streets, and sometimes behind closed doors, and involving children. I mean we’ve got the highest drug-related deaths on record in our state, and while the rest of the country is kind of starting to recover from a lot of this stuff, we’re the only state that’s going in the opposite direction.”
Couture’s mention of Washington having the highest drug-related deaths was about a recently released report from the Department of Children, Youth & Families that found 27 children under state supervision died or suffered a near-fatal incident in the first three months of 2025. More than half of those were fentanyl related.
The lawmaker said SURSAC doesn’t seem willing to listen to alternative methods for tackling the worsening drug crisis.
“They only want to double down on the failures and what we’re talking about here is taxpayer-funded drug dealing where the state would hand out heroin, fentanyl and meth on our dime, and that’s not treatment, that’s surrender,” Couture said.
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SURSAC proposes that the state allow a clinical trial, potentially conducted by a university in Washington, to evaluate a safer supply model. The group also urges lawmakers to pass legislation establishing a scalable, safer supply pilot program.
“As much as I want to be optimistic and hope that this doesn’t have a chance in the Legislature, we’ve seen this movie before, and we’ve seen [Gov.] Bob Ferguson basically push, throughout his career, drug legalization, so we know that he has the ability to sign something like that,” Couture said. “This is not only giving the drug paraphernalia and a place to do it — the government-operated drug dens, as they call them – but now they want to be the drug dealer themselves. I mean, these are illegal narcotics. They’re dangerous. They’re killing people. We should be getting rid of them, not supplying them.”