The Truth About Olympia's Failure on the Fentanyl Crisis

A Silent Killer in Our Living Rooms

Every parent knows the drill. You watch your toddler's every move. You check the floor for small toys or stray pieces of food. But today, there is a new, silent killer hiding in plain sight. It is not a toy. It is a pill.

The fentanyl crisis has moved off the streets and into our homes. In my district—the 31st Legislative District—unexplained poisoning is now the number one leading cause of death for children ages one to four. Unintentional drug poisoning is the second leading cause of hospitalization for those same babies. They are grabbing pills, putting them in their mouths, and swallowing them.

The Failure of the Majority Party

This is not just a drug problem. It is a massive failure of state government. For the last 35 years, the majority party has been in charge in Olympia. Their policies have created a system that protects a broken bureaucracy over human lives.

Look at the state budget. If you flip a couple hundred pages in, you will find $42.9 million pulled from the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) to pay for excess lawsuits. That is $42.9 million in lawsuits related to dead and dying children. We are spending millions of your tax dollars to pay for mistakes that should never happen, while the root problem only gets worse.

The Human Cost of Bad Policy

Right now, state law treats child safety like a guessing game. Imagine knowing a child is trapped in a burning house, but the law forbids you from rescuing them until the flames actually touch their skin. That is the nightmare Washington caseworkers live under right now.

“Imagine knowing a child is trapped in a burning house, but the law forbids you from rescuing them until the flames actually touch their skin.”

Caseworkers are forced to open "risk-only" cases when they know a child faces extreme danger, but the law makes them leave the child in the home anyway. In one tragic case, a baby was born positive for cocaine and methadone. The state closed the case. That child died.

It does not matter if the state loses 50 children or 90 children a year to this system. We should be crawling out of our skin if we lose one.

Common-Sense Solutions to Protect Kids

We cannot allow state agencies to write their own rules if those rules are written in the blood of our children. We need a plan built on competence, accountability, and common sense.

First, we must change the law to give courts and caseworkers the power to step in early. A judge must be able to evaluate the total danger a child faces before that child ends up in another fatality report. We cannot wait for the fire to burn them before we decide to help.

Second, we must stop budgeting for failure. We need to stop paying out millions in lawsuit settlements and redirect that money into actual prevention. We cannot rely on the myth of "community care" when parents, labor groups, and advocates tell me that care simply does not exist. We need real, measurable support for families in crisis.

Bringing Adult Leadership Back to Olympia

Right now, state government has the inability to build, the inability to budget, and the inability to protect our most vulnerable. For an $80 billion state budget, the people of Washington should expect more.

We can fix this, but we cannot rely on the same people who created the mess to clean it up. It is time to bring adult, competent leadership back to Olympia. We need leaders who will look at the facts, fix the foundation, and put the safety of our children first. It is time to stop managing this crisis and finally solve it.