This commentary is by Brenda Siegel, a statewide drug and anti-poverty policy advocate and chair of the Newfane Democratic Committee. She ran for governor in 2018 and is a teacher and proud single mom.
The Senate must take up and pass H.225 this legislative session. This is a lifesaving bill and our families have waited far too long for the tools that they need to survive.
This legislative session, a slate of bills was introduced that all aim at addressing the systemic barriers to surviving opioid use disorder. H.225 was the first of these bills to make it across the House and is desperately needed as right now we are losing an average of three Vermonters a week to this disease.
These deaths are preventable, if only we choose to prevent them. In Vermont it has been four years since any meaningful legislation has been passed and in that time well over 500 people have died preventable deaths as part of the overdose crisis. Public health measures are desperately needed right now.
“For those who have lost someone to an opiate overdose, there is no right or wrong way that the life should have been saved. The right way to save their life would have been the way that worked for them.” These were the words spoken by Rep. Lucy Rogers, D-Waterville, on the virtual House Floor upon passage of H.225.
Far too often, families like mine, who have lost loved ones, know all too well how frustrating it is when we are trying to help them and the public health measures needed for their survival do not exist.
In 2020, the state of Vermont had a 38% increase in opioid-related deaths, according to preliminary numbers from the Vermont Department of Health. By June 2020, it became clear that overdoses across the state were increasing rapidly, yet, we did not include this population in the Covid response. We knew that deaths were increasing and still did nothing to help this very vulnerable population.
What we saw over the last year with Covid was a willingness to respond to a public health emergency with public health measures. We now know what that looks like and it is time to do it with the overdose crisis as well.
Is this increase all due to Covid? The answer is complicated, but to put it simply, no.
Folks struggling with substance use disorder make up a large portion of our population, yet for a long time there has been an unwillingness to put this crisis front and center by the governor, the Legislature and the media. That means that going into the pandemic, we had already left these folks without the tools they needed to survive. Then, once in the pandemic, we simply did not put them anywhere in the plan to mitigate the foreseeable damage that would be caused by further destabilizing a vulnerable population who we already had left behind. It was the perfect storm, but one that anyone could have predicted.
H.225, which passed the House 126-19 in an overwhelmingly tripartisan vote, will put in place a public health measure that will save lives. This bill would need an “exception” to make it through the Senate this legislative session due to parliamentarian rules. There is no adequate reason not to make that exception; the process exists for situations just as this one.
What does H.225 do? It decriminalizes a therapeutic amount of buprenorphine and sends a strong and clear public health message that if you are struggling with opioid use disorder, we want you to survive and we are going to give you the tools you need to do that.
H.225 alone will not solve the whole crisis, but it is the exact right course correction that our state needs to begin to save lives now. Over the last three sessions, this bill received endless testimony and been thoroughly vetted. The House heard testimony from researchers at Johns Hopkins University, University of Vermont Medical Center, multiple doctors and medical professionals, several state’s attorneys, the Attorney General’s Office, the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Health, advocates and most importantly lived experience experts.
In 2020, the original version of the bill passed unanimously out of the House Human Services Committee and on to the House floor but was then “ordered to lie,” which essentially means it was killed without a vote. If hindsight was 2020, and this time it is, we must wonder who would still be with us had we passed this legislation then? Are we really willing to pause this bill and thus allow even more death, death that we could have prevented?
One of the more conservative Republicans expressed his support for the bill on the House floor. He said that after being firmly against it when it first came into his committee, he now strongly supports it because the evidence was overwhelming that this bill will save lives.
Vermont uses a hub-and-spoke model for administration of medically assisted treatment. This model only reaches about three in 10 people. That means that seven out of 10 people are falling through the cracks. What the House heard in testimony is that there are lots of actual barriers to accessing treatment and not only is this step necessary as a public health measure, but also, this step is an important part of the path to sustained recovery for a large majority.
This session, when the numbers of opioid-related deaths came out, House Human Services responded appropriately to the public health emergency and passed this lifesaving legislation. House Speaker Jill Krowinski moved it with the urgency that this moment requires. I ask the Senate to do the same.
Every life lost is another preventable death. Another family experiencing trauma that they did not have to. Another human being who died because our system failed them. Our system is people made and it can be people-fixed.
To sit on this bill until January when we are in the middle of a public health emergency within the overdose crisis would be nothing short of inexcusable. Not a single family who loses a loved one between now and then will accept that decision, nor should they.
It has been just over three years since I received the phone call from my nephew, Kaya’s boss at work, that he had died after a year in recovery. Three years since I fell to the pavement in the middle of a snowstorm on Elliot Street in Brattleboro and three years since my heart and world shattered. He needed a lifeline that our state never offered him.
It is beyond time for us to work to break down the barriers to survival that exist in our state. H.225 is the right place to start and has been vetted with a fine-tooth comb. Let’s finally treat this crisis and loss of life with every bit the urgency we have Covid.
