Filter

Somewhere between Sam Quinones columns and demolitions of lower-cost housing units, methamphetamine took on the public image of something actually evil. Almost in a supernatural way. Despite the uptake of narrative about meth overdose crisis, on some level the public understands that people who use fentanyl are at risk in a way that doesn’t apply equally to people who use meth, because it’s not quite okay to openly demonize the victims of a mass death situation. With meth users, it’s okay.

Public attention to violence against women tends to surge in response to major events and movements, then recede just as quickly. Official recognition of women who use substances as a key population, however, is relatively new.

Filter is shutting down this week. We were unable to survive an increasingly difficult funding landscape, like too many other harm reduction and independent media organizations in these times. It’s a sad moment for those of us who have cared about the publication. But I don’t think we need to be despondent. A few of us got together to conceive Filter in 2017.

Fentanyl Is in Everything Around 2013, fentanyl started percolating in the United States street opioid supply, which was heroin-based at that time. Over the next few years it steadily pushed heroin out of the East Coast, and once the COVID-19 pandemic hit it rapidly did the same on the West Coast. As crackdowns have pushed the drug supply to evolve more quickly and chaotically, fentanyl has gradually begun showing up with non-opioid drugs.

In my worst moments, reporting on the tobacco harm reduction space, as I’ve been doing for the past four years, can feel hopeless. Eight million people continue to die of diseases related to combustible tobacco use each year. Yet all over the world, the smoking-cessation tools most capable of transforming this situation are banned, restricted and smeared. Considering what I do more closely reveals a kind of paradox, however.

Pennsylvania senators have introduced a bipartisan federal bill aimed at the economic harms of substance use disorder (SUD), while remaining somewhat ambiguous about which kinds of harms it’s referring to. Senators Dave McCormick (R) and John Fetterman (D) introduced the Workforce Recovery and Resilience Act on August 5. Companion legislation was introduced in the House in April. The proposal falls under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

Dueling coalitions of police, military veterans and industry groups are pushing Congress in different directions on whether the planned federal recriminalization of hemp THC products should move forward as scheduled or be delayed. Hemp derivatives with less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis were federally legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill that President Donald Trump signed during his first term in office.

One of the most commonly cited statistics in corrections department promotional materials is the one about how 95 percent of incarcerated people will come home one day. Legislators use it a lot, too, when explaining that we have to invest in rehabilitative programming since most prisoners will rejoin their communities. There is never the slightest suggestion that anyone in custody would be worth investing in if they weren’t going to get out; presumably we can just throw the other 5 percent away.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has released the latest edition of its National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which is the source of most national statistics related to drugs, treatment and mental health. This time the annual-ish behavioral health survey is framed as a five-year trend report covering 2021 to 2025, which somewhat compounds the preexisting barriers to gleaning anything useful from it.

The Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act (MOTAA) is back. An updated version was reintroduced by Senators Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and Rand Paul (R-KY) in June. “For too long, we have kept methadone—an evidence-based, life-saving medication—locked away, far from many of the people who need it,” Markey said.