Welch: Local governments did what Olympia wouldnt: protect kids from fentanyl. So why wont our own legislators?

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 24, 2026

This spring, Everett did something the state legislature has refused to do for four straight years. The City Council voted 6-0 to make it a gross misdemeanor to expose a child to fentanyl and other dangerous drugs, punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine. Last week, Snohomish County followed, unanimously, countywide.

Both governments stepped in because Olympia wouldn’t. State law already makes it a felony to expose a child to meth. Fentanyl isn’t covered. For four consecutive sessions, the state Senate passed a fix with overwhelming bipartisan margins: 48-1, then 42-7, then 40-9. And four times, the bill went to the same House committee and died without so much as a hearing.

Here’s the part Snohomish County voters should sit with. Every one of our House Democrats represents communities that just decided this problem was serious enough to act on locally. Some of them sit on committees with real influence over what gets a hearing in Olympia. And yet, four years running, there’s no public record of any of them pushing for a vote, no floor speech, no press release, no public pressure on leadership to move this bill. Just silence, year after year, while their own cities and county were writing the law themselves.

Compare that to how seriously the same caucus treats child endangerment when alcohol is the substance. Bills toughening penalties for driving drunk with a kid in the car move through Olympia without much resistance. Nobody treats that as politically risky.

But a parent letting a toddler crawl through fentanyl residue, or smoking it in the same room as their kids? That’s been waved off as the “failed war on drugs,” with legislators saying they don’t have the votes because their colleagues don’t want to “criminalize parents.”

So which is it? If our delegation agrees with that reasoning, they should say so to the constituents whose city council and county council just voted the opposite way, unanimously. If they don’t agree, they’ve had four years to push back on their own leadership and haven’t.

This year’s bill was rewritten to answer the “criminalizing addiction” objection directly, with treatment and parent support services built in for a first offense. It still didn’t get a hearing.

Everett and Snohomish County just proved this issue has support across the political spectrum when local elected officials actually let it come to a vote. Our state legislators had every opportunity to do the same thing at the state level. Heading into the 2026 election and the 2027 session, voters here deserve an answer for why they didn’t.

Todd Welch is a Herald columnist covering local and state issues.