Washington state is preparing to hand out heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine to addicts. Officials are calling the Washington safer supply plan a breakthrough in harm reduction. Recovery advocates are calling it something else entirely.

Ginny Burton has been clean for 13 years. She knows what real recovery looks like, and this isn’t it.

“This isn’t compassion – it’s a death sentence wrapped in the language of harm reduction,” Burton writes in her opposition to the proposal.

The Path That Actually Worked

Burton’s story cuts through the political rhetoric. Seven months in jail. Eighteen months of treatment focused on getting clean, not staying medicated. Today she has 12.7 years of complete sobriety.

The system that helped her barely exists anymore. We’ve torn it down piece by piece, replacing proven methods with expensive maintenance programmes that keep people dependent forever.

Her recovery began with accountability. It led to freedom. Not managed addiction – actual freedom from drugs.

Following the Money

The numbers behind current “treatment” tell a disturbing story:

Vivitrol injections cost $20,856-$26,352 per year. High-dose Suboxone runs about $12,000 annually. Sublocade injections hit $27,240 per year.

But the financial costs pale next to the human ones. Children grow up without parents who could have recovered. Families shatter because we choose to maintain addiction rather than fight it. Communities collapse under the weight of crime and homelessness.

Someone is getting rich off this misery. Pharmaceutical companies make billions on dependency drugs. Treatment centres secure guaranteed long-term customers. A massive bureaucracy has grown up around addiction, and all these people need addicts to stay addicted to keep their jobs.

Recovery threatens profits. Clean people don’t need expensive drugs forever.

What the Washington Safer Supply Plan Really Means

The proposal tells people they’re powerless to change. The best they can hope for is managed decline funded by taxpayers.

Burton regularly visits homeless camps, talking to people about their lives. When someone says they hate their situation, that signals hope for change. Instead of offering real help, the Washington safer supply plan offers permanent maintenance in misery.

“We have redefined basic words to obscure our failures,” Burton notes. Treatment no longer means recovery – it means lifelong medication. Services don’t build independence – they create permanent dependence.

The Questions Officials Won’t Answer

What happens when states become drug suppliers? How does that relationship with cartels work out? Who decided that giving up on human recovery qualified as progressive policy?

The people making these decisions won’t be using state-supplied heroin. Their children won’t grow up thinking government-issued drugs are normal healthcare.

Burton asks the hard question: “What are the intended outcomes?” If the goal is genuine recovery and independence, current policies are failing spectacularly.

The Real Cost of Giving Up

The Washington safer supply plan represents everything wrong with how we approach addiction. It’s profitable failure marketed as compassion.

Instead of offering hope, we’re telling vulnerable people they can’t get better. The system abandons them to profit from their continued suffering. Rather than helping human beings, officials are creating permanent customers.

Burton’s interviews in homeless camps reveal the truth officials don’t want to hear. When she asks people if they like their lives and they say no, that tells her there’s room for improvement. But instead of offering genuine paths forward, we offer maintenance in misery.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Real treatment programmes used to focus on abstinence and education. They provided tools for independence, not permanent dependence. They worked because they believed people could change.

Burton’s recovery proves it’s possible. Thousands of others have found the same path. But you can’t make money off people who get better and stay better.

The Washington safer supply plan abandons this possibility entirely. It assumes failure from the start and builds a system around managing that failure forever.

The Choice Ahead

Washington faces a decision between enriching the addiction industry and remembering that real recovery remains possible.

The evidence is clear. Abstinence-based approaches work when properly implemented. Burton’s 13 years of freedom prove it. But these approaches threaten the wrong people’s income streams.

The Washington safer supply plan would formalise our surrender to addiction. It would make the state complicit in maintaining human suffering for profit.

The people whose lives hang in the balance deserve better than becoming test subjects in this experiment.

Source: The Center Square