Fentanyl test strips aren’t paraphernalia. Kansas politicians are hurting drug victims | Opinion

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Mike Pompeo wants the American government to make war in Mexico.

No, really. The former Kansas congressman — who also ran the CIA and State Department under Donald Trump — last week argued that the U.S. government should designate Mexican cartels a foreign terrorist organization and “crush them” with the “full spectrum of American power.”

Why? Fentanyl trafficking is one big reason.

The cartels enable “record numbers of illegal immigrants crossing into our country,” Pomepo wrote in an op-ed for the right-wing American Center for Law and Justice. They also export “record amounts of illicit drugs, like fentanyl” into the United States “with little consequence for those responsible.”

For Pompeo, that means it is time to “declare war.”

But he isn’t the only Kansas Republican concerned with the deadly effects of fentanyl. Sen. Roger Marshall has used the drug as a signature issue, sponsoring the Cooper Davis Act — named after a Johnson County teen who died last year of fentanyl poisoning — that would force social media companies to crack down on illegal transactions on their platforms.

And the state GOP made the case for Derek Schmidt’s doomed gubernatorial campaign last fall by promising he would crack down on fentanyl in the Sunflower State.

“We need a governor who supports law and order, and will keep our families safe, and who gets fentanyl off the streets and out of social media,” Marshall said at an October rally for Schmidt.

Big talk from the Kansas GOP is one thing.

Quietly effective action to save lives is another.

So it’s incredibly frustrating that a few Republicans in the Kansas Senate this week gutted a bill that would legalize fentanyl testing strips, a cheap but effective tool that could help the state’s young people avoid overdose deaths.

Why? It’s tough to say. There was precious little debate Monday in the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, which includes culture war luminaries such as state Sens. Mark Steffen of Hutchinson and Mike Thompson of Shawnee. The bill was quickly gutted and replaced with language to restrict the authority of state and local authorities in public health emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic.

But the moment was astonishing.

After all, the original bill had already passed the Kansas House unanimously, Republicans and Democrats joining together on a bipartisan basis to save Kansas lives. And the effort has the backing of Gov. Laura Kelly. “Fentanyl test strips save lives,” she tweeted this week.

It wasn’t enough.

The problem is that under current law — in Kansas and many other states — fentanyl test strips are treated as drug paraphernalia: Get caught with them and you can get charged with a crime.

Medical experts say the testing strips could prevent a number of overdoses. “Most people who are using fentanyl-contaminated drugs do not know they contain fentanyl,” the American Medical Association reports — it’s usually found surreptitiously laced in other drugs, like cocaine, heroin or any number of pills. Testing strips “may decrease overdose rates,” the AMA concludes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concurs.

That would help in Kansas, where overdose deaths nearly doubled between 2011 and 2020 — thanks in large part to the rise of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

So passing a bill that prevents a few of those deaths ought to be the easiest thing in the world to do, right?

Apparently not. Which makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that while fentanyl makes a big, splashy issue for the GOP — a way to complain about immigrants and Mexico and the Biden administration — concern for the fentanyl’s actual victims might be a secondary consideration.

They are drug users, after all.

“At some point, we have to accept that there are people in the Capitol building who don’t care about some people,” state Rep. Jason Probst, a Hutchinson Democrat, lamented on Substack. “They care about the right people — and that is always, without question, defined by the people in charge.”

Declaring war on cartels gets attention. So does taking on social media. Actually helping Kansans avoid overdose deaths? For a few Republicans in Topeka, that’s clearly not a priority.