By Pepper Fisher

OLYMPIA — Washington’s legislators managed to work together to achieve some major successes during the legislative session that came to a close on Sunday, adopting a bi-partisan $69 billion operating budget for the next two years.

But the 2023 session also ended with a glaring failure. Lawmakers couldn’t reach a deal on criminal penalties for drug possession, voting down a compromise proposal and potentially leaving Washington communities later this year with no law against simple drug possession whatsoever.

State Representative Mike Chapman of Port Angeles is deeply concerned that, if Gov. Inslee doesn’t call a special session in the coming months, towns large and small will have to figure it out for themselves.

“As of right now, on July 1, drug use and possession in Washington state will be legal if the legislature does not go back into a special session and fix that. There is a provision where local governments could put their own rules in place, but that would lead to a patchwork around the state of various rules and laws. And my biggest fear, I don’t believe that small cities like the City of Port Angeles or the City of Sequim or the City of Port Townsend would have the money or the availability to hire the prosecutors to prosecute city cases, and we really are on the cusp.”

Lawmakers announced a tentative deal late Saturday to raise the penalty for drug possession, but critics on the right viewed the compromise version as too weak on illicit behavior and critics on the left said it relied too simply on jailing people with addiction problems.

The House voted down the compromise bill 43-55 Sunday evening.

We got here because the Supreme Court of Washington State declared that the felony charge for drug possession was unconstitutional, but reducing it to a misdemeanor was only a two-year fix.

A July 1 deadline looms. That’s when the fix is set to expire, and no permanent law exists to take its place.

“Believe me, Rep. Tharinger, Senator Van De Wege and I fought tooth and nail to the very last minute last night, but there were not enough votes to put a fix in that would have criminalized drug possession and drug use in public, made it a gross misdemeanor so we could get people into treatment. And if they weren’t going to get treated, they were going to have some jail time. But, with no further action by the legislature, I believe we’d be the first state in the nation where open drug use, in public, would be completely legal. So, now it takes the Governor to call us back into special session. I’m hopeful that he’ll figure out that this probably isn’t a good thing to happen on his watch, but he has been a governor that’s been super reluctant to call the legislature back to fix things.”

Gov. Inslee on Sunday night called the notion of leaving no criminal penalty for drug possession “unacceptable” and indicated lawmakers should find a compromise before July, but he did not immediately call for a special session.