Criminalizing xylazine won’t help anyone
Astate bill classifying xylazine, the animal tranquilizer quickly infiltrating Pennsylvania’s illicit drug supply, as a Schedule III Controlled Substance is just days away from being signed into law. While there’s no argument that xylazine is incredibly dangerous and shouldn’t be legal, using criminalization as the first response is a relic of the failed war on drugs — distracting officials when attention should be focused on the numerous proactive ways to treat addiction.
Reclassifying xylazine on the highest rung of controlled substances will do very little to change the current state of affairs. First: Xylazine is already a Schedule III controlled substance. In April of last year, Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order to fast-track the process. Since then, advocates estimate that xylazine went from being detected in a quarter of all Pittsburgh overdose deaths to half.
Second: xylazine is rarely used in isolation. Most often, it’s an additive to heroin or fentanyl. While making those drugs illegal is an important part of attempting to control them — decriminalization attempts in Oregon have been rolled back after massive increases in overdoses — the law has been shown time and again to be insufficient to stem the massive rise in addiction. Why keep emphasizing the criminal framework when it has never led to success?
These time-consuming legislative efforts are also frustrating as other paths forward are available. For example: collecting public health data; making testing widely and cheaply available; and formulating new addiction treatment drugs and protocols.
Testing is especially important as xylazine enters new communities, giving frontline workers the chance to warn people before they become dependent. As a non-opioid, xylazine is also unresponsive to many addiction treatment drugs, from overdose-reversing naloxone to withdrawal-reliever methadone.
But the Allegheny County Health Department is already falling behind. When the city requested 50,000 xylazine and fentanyl testing kits, the county could only provide a total of 10,000. Now, the city is turning to state grants for help.
Fully funding initial data collection and research is an obvious place to start the fight against xylazine — instead of ensuring that the federal government has properly labeled the drug as “dangerous” or making sure that police can press even more charges against addicted people.
Further, while xylazine’s rise, like fentanyl’s, has been overwhelming and meteoric, there are other, newer drugs on the horizon already. What fentanyl is to heroin, medetomidine is to xylazine: It’s an animal sedative 200 times more potent than xylazine found in Philadelphia. Adding medetomidine to the controlled substance list may make sure the list is comprehensive, but it’ll do little to nothing to held the situation on the streets.
Classifying drug additives as dangerous controlled substances is mostly a matter of clerical completeness; it is not a public health or overdose prevention strategy. The focus at the state and local level should and must be on proven approaches, not doubling down on a failed law enforcement-first impulse.