GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo. — As Colorado's legislators discuss a bill that would increase criminal penalties for the distribution of fentanyl, harm reduction advocates say criminalization is a distraction from solutions.
Harm reduction focuses on making life safer for people who use drugs, with the hope they'll be around for the day they decide to start recovery.
Maggie Seldeen is the founder and director of High Rockies Harm Reduction, and she's working toward increasing peer recovery in rural western Colorado.
"We are seeing fentanyl taking over the drug landscape," Seldeen said. "We’ve absolutely been losing people in rural Colorado and also reversing a lot of overdoses in rural Colorado in people as young as 14 and as old as 80, so this is definitely a huge problem all across the state."
Seldeen said they're seeing fentanyl in all drugs, including cocaine, pressed pills, and meth.
But as deaths from fentanyl overdoses increase, Seldeen said criminalization, even for the drug distributors, is not the answer. Peer support is.
"And that's working with a person daily, weekly. Checking in with them all of the time. Connecting them with relevant treatments and services. Connecting them with housing, food, with education, with childcare, with vocational opportunities," she said. "Focusing on creating stability in every aspect of a person's life is way more likely to get them to recovery than criminal punishments and fines and jail time and treatment time will."
Seldeen knows this firsthand. She said when she was a drug and alcohol user, if her drug dealer went to jail, she'd find another. If she was ticketed, she would feel more resentment toward systems that were trying to help.
Seldeen's mom died of a heroin overdose when she was 15. Slowly, she found people who loved her and didn't push her into sobriety. She said that's what eventually helped her into recovery.
"I promote harm reduction as a pathway to recovery because it's what saved my life and I didn't even know that at the time," she said. "And I think that's actually very common for a lot of people. The idea of quitting everything all at once is very difficult to look at. To look at your life and say 'I have to change everything about who I am and everything I'm doing' is hard for anyone."
Seldeen said there has always been a lack of understanding of the mindset of people with substance use disorder. She knows it's difficult because that mind is not a rational one.
“Substance use is a symptom of other behavioral health issues, not the cause,' she said. "So that means that we need behavioral health treatment and not criminalization."
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