Columbus, Ohio – At the Urban Kutz Barbershop in Cleveland, customers can browse magazines while they wait or use drug tests in a box on the table with a dire message: “Your medication may contain fentanyl.” Please take free test strips with.”
Owner Waverly Willis has been handing out strips at his barber shop for years in hopes of protecting others from unknowing exposure highly potent synthetic opioid ravaging the US. and often secretly involved in other illegal drugs.
“When I take them off, they just fly out the door,” said Willis, who proudly distributes about 30 strips a week as part of the Urban Barber Association, a Cleveland organization that provides community health education through local barbershops.
Willis hasn’t shyed away from providing the strips nearly 18 years after he got off drugs. He reckons he would be dead if fentanyl was so widely available at the time he was using it.
Fentanyl has been the cause of overdose deaths in the US since 2016 that doesn’t change as the cheaper and deadlier synthetic opioid continues to be restricted in the drug supply. About 75,000 of the nearly 110,000 overdose deaths in 2022 could be linked to fentanyl, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Advocates say legalizing test strips could lower those numbers and save lives by helping more people understand how deadly their drugs could be.
Until this spring, use of the stripes was technically illegal in Ohio. It has joined at least 20 other states whose lawmakers have officially decriminalized the stripes since Rhode Island became the first state in 2018. Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Kentucky and Mississippi followed this example again this year.
The CDC recommends Fentanyl Test Strips as a cost-effective means of preventing drug overdoses. You can find fentanyl in cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and many other drugs—be it pills, powders, or injectables.
Still, these little strips of paper are still considered illegal in some states, banned by drug paraphernalia laws from the War on Drugs in the 1970s — long before fentanyl entered the country’s drug supply. By the mid-1980s, all states except Alaska had anti-paraphernalia laws that made the materials used to test and analyze illegal substances illegal.
The strips are now increasingly viewed as potentially life-saving.
Rodney Olinger from Newark, Ohio, has been using methamphetamine for eight years. The 45-year-old receives four to five fentanyl test strips weekly from Newark Homeless Outreach and calls them a “blessing”. He credits the strips with helping keep him and his fiancé, who also uses them, alive.
“It’s very scary,” Olinger said of fentanyl. “Just a little could kill you.”
While the strips may not prevent drug use altogether, they do allow testers to pause if a strip comes back positive, which may encourage them to reconsider drug use and seek help, said Sheila Vakharia of the national nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance , which strives to shape drug policy in the United States.
“You never know if a fentanyl test strip can keep someone alive long enough for them to make that decision for themselves,” she said.
The CDC says any drug that dissolves in water can be tested. The strip is dipped in the solution for about 15 seconds, left for a few minutes and is positive for fentanyl if a single pink line appears. Two pink lines are a negative result.
The strips can often be obtained from advocacy groups, local and state health departments, or purchased online.
Where strips are illegal, the push for a change in the law continues.
In Kansas, lawmakers debated whether to legalize the stripes through April. However, there was never a debate for mom Brandy Harris of Kansas, who lost her 21-year-old son Sebastain Sheahan to a fentanyl overdose in April 2022. He had been an addict since he was 13 and was first prescribed opioids after he was hit by a truck.
Friends and family knew Sheahan as “big hearted” and “goofy” with a thing for abused animals. He was open about his addiction problems and had been clean for three years before dying after a relapse.
Harris believes her son would still be alive if he had had test strips showing what he was consuming. “I believe if those were available, at least one person would be saved,” Harris said. “And that’s the main goal — at least one person.”
The Kansas governor recently signed a bipartisan bill into law that would decriminalize the strip starting July 1.
Montana and other states are considering similar legislation. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently gave up his opposition to decriminalizing the strips, citing a “better understanding” of how they prevent opioid-related deaths.
And in Pennsylvania, Republican Rep. Jim Struzzi lost his brother to a drug overdose in 2014 and spent years lobbying his peers to destigmatize the streaks.
“Fentanyl won’t ask you if you’re a Democrat or Republican before it kills you,” said Struzzi, who in January sponsored state legislation legalizing test strips.
The shift in the way political leaders view the stripes is encouraging optimism among advocacy groups, health officials and outreach programs. Increasing legalization opens doors for more funding, including for strips themselves and for public education campaigns.
The SOAR Initiative, a Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit that fights overdose deaths, distributes about 5,000 strips each month, according to executive director Jessica Warner.
SOAR mails the strips to anonymous recipients, both individuals and larger distributors. Their distribution has never had legal ramifications in Ohio.
According to Jonathan Woodruff of the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, which enforces drug laws nationwide, there appears to be no prosecution anywhere in the US for possession of the strips. He said possession of drug paraphernalia is a petty offense in most states and law enforcement agencies may now be more attuned to the life-saving benefits of strips.
Northeast of Boston, Lieutenant Sarko Gergerian of the Winthrop Police Department has boxes of them stacked in his office.
Legalized in Massachusetts in 2018, the strips go into “survival kits” that his department distributes to people struggling with substance use as part of the Community and Law Enforcement Assisted Recovery Program — as well as to recovery coaches and social workers for distribution.
Gergerian calls it a “win” when a life is saved — rather than the arrest of a person struggling with an addiction.
“Could you imagine your child being addicted to a substance and not willing to give it up?” Gergerian posed. “We have to keep them alive. Anything else is immoral.
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Kantele Franko of Columbus, Ohio, and John Hanna of Topeka, Kansas contributed to this report.
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Samantha Hendrickson is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to cover undercover topics.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, transcribed, or redistributed without permission.
