Wichita can pass drug reforms to save careers and lives. Let’s do it. | Opinion

On Tuesday, the Wichita City Council will be considering some common-sense reforms to city drug ordinances.

And they’d do well to pass them because these reforms could save careers — and lives.

Part one of what the council will consider Tuesday is the ultimate no-brainer, removing fentanyl test strips from the list of drug paraphernalia that can put you in jail via Wichita Municipal Court.

Fentanyl overdoses killed 242 people in Sedgwick County in 2021 and we’re on pace to go over 300 deaths this year.

The problem is, illicit drug dealers often sell fentanyl under the guise of being prescription opiates or other drugs.

A story published by The Eagle last week tells of a Derby mother’s heartbreak when she found her 19-year-old son dead of fentanyl poisoning after taking what he thought was a purloined pharmaceutical drug.

“Our son thought he was taking half of a Percocet,” Christie McCullough said. “He had taken half the day before, but that last half was where the lethal amount of fentanyl was.”

Users of illicit drugs use test strips to determine whether what they’re getting is laced with fentanyl, like the pill that killed Keith McCullough and hundreds of others.

It would be better if they didn’t take illicit drugs at all, but it shouldn’t be a death-penalty offense and too many of our fellow citizens are dying. Test strips give them at least a chance to live long enough to turn their life around from addiction.

The council need not think twice about it. As a society, we should be promoting the use of test strips, not banning them.

Part two of Tuesday’s council discussion will be about possession of marijuana and paraphernalia for using it.

It’s seven years since the voters of Wichita approved a local initiative to decriminalize small-time pot possession and six years since Attorney General Derek Schmidt got it struck down on a technicality, that the ordinance voters passed was not properly attached to the petitions submitted to the clerk’s office.

After that exercise in overturning the will of the people, the council passed an ordinance making penalties more lenient.

But still, 750-850 people are convicted of minor pot and paraphernalia charges in Municipal Court every year.

Mayor Brandon Whipple quite rightly points out that’s 750-850 people who can never be hired for any even moderately sensitive jobs in local industry or government. Most of those cases are of the “youthful indiscretion” variety and represent the few who got caught out of the many who did it.

Let me go fully on the record here as saying I am not for the abuse of illegal substances. Not even a little bit.

I often feel like I’m the only member of my generation never to have smoked pot.

During my formative years, my mother was a local officeholder and very active in local and state Republican politics. I knew getting caught with weed would lead to a place that I did not want to go.

So whenever I was offered a hit, I always passed the dutchie to the left hand side without partaking.

But I’m not a prude about it. I really wished I could buy marijuana when my parents were dying of cancer. I can’t help but think their quality of life would have been better during the long decline if they’d had access to a drug that dulls pain and makes a person hungry, instead of heavy narcotics that knock the patient out cold and cause digestive issues that hasten their withering away.

Colorado has some of the most liberal marijuana laws in the nation, allowing medicinal and recreational use, within limits. And so far, I haven’t noticed any mass breakdown in social order in the state next door.

Unfortunately, Kansas lawmakers remain mired in the moralistic attitudes and myths of the “Just Say No” era and there’s not much to be done about it on the state level.

But our city government doesn’t have to be complicit in the deaths of those who are tricked by fake pills, or the prosecution/persecution of small-time marijuana users. That’s what the reforms under discussion at the council Tuesday are trying to achieve.

Here’s hoping they succeed.