United States: A bill that would remove criminality for all testing strips used to test deadly drugs in West Virginia, the state with the nation’s highest overdose rate and where a heroin epidemic continues relentlessly, is now on its way to Governor Jim Justice of the Republican party.
Urgent Response to Evolving Drug Landscape
Justice has not declared his public support for the bill that enjoyed bipartisan backing. The proposal is based on a law that was signed by Justice in 2022 and made fentanyl testing strips non-criminal.
“As time has gone, unfortunately, we’ve got fentanyl, now we’ve got carfentanil, now we’ve got xylazine,” Republican Deputy House Speaker Matthew Rohrbach said on the House floor before the legislation passed overwhelmingly Friday.
The goal of the bill, according to Rohrbach, who also chairs the chamber’s substance addiction committee, is to guarantee that everyone in need of drug test strips will have access to them without requiring legislators to enact new laws each time a new one is released.
“It just says, ‘test strips for deadly drugs will be exempted from drug paraphernalia,’” Rohrbach said.
In West Virginia, drug paraphernalia is liable to hypodermic syringes, needles, capsules, and balloons as well. Drug paraphernalia in possession is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to five thousand dollars and six months to one year in jail.
The United Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes drug test strips as a low-cost method to regulate drug overdose.
Reduced in Death rate
In recent years, the share of heroin overdose deaths has reduced. Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were responsible for 76% of all drug overdose causes in West Virginia during 2018, while the statistics from at least a year were just lower by %5 points. Of the almost 110,00 overdose deaths of 2022, data from the CDC reveals that fentanyl caused about seventy-five thousand.
In 2023, xylazine – a tranquilizer that is not approved for use in humans and has made its way prominently into the illegal drug trade within the United States United States– was identified as an emerging national threat by the white house office of National Drug Control Policy.
A synthetic opioid called carfentanil is approximately 10,00 times more potent than morphine and a whopping hundred-plus stronger as compared to fentanyl.
Proponents claim that legalizing test strips might lower those figures and save lives by educating more people about the potential dangers of their medications.