Eddie Krumpotich
Appearances
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Yeah, Pearl, you nailed that. Thank you. Pearl's been a member of the collaborative since the very beginning, and we could not have done it without her. So the law was rather simple. We wanted to legitimize syringe service providers. We know that if you visit a syringe service provider, 50% reduction in infectious diseases. Police are relatively supportive. Also increase in treatment.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
But then we saw further opportunity. When we were talking with Dr. Tricolas at the pharmacy board, we knew that those programs many times don't exist in rural Minnesota. So we got rid of the syringe number that could be dispersed by pharmacists. We wanted Minnesota pharmacists to be able to disperse as many syringes as necessary to meet the community needs. Then we went further than that.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And we said, wow, we want to make sure that people can test substances. Because right now with fentanyl and a lot of the other substances that are killing a lot of Minnesotans, what we want is to be able to test those substances to see what's in it. So we opened that up as well. So now you can have fentanyl test strips and xylosine test strips. And the paraphernalia legalization came after.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And Stan, you mentioned something earlier about the hard data. I have that hard data.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
um because we've done the research at the ground level and we also went out and uh and talked to our syringe service providers this is in three and a half months and the reason we've gained national attention here late um and have been a possible voice for national studies is because in three and a half months we have seen a drastic increase at our syringe service providers of not only new clients
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
but we're turnover clients. And those referral systems are not only happening, but that pivot to public health has been amplified immediately. So we know that good things are on the horizon. The next thing is that Minneapolis had a news conference the other day, and this was the police department. And they mentioned that they have not been arresting people at low-level crime.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
But then they went on to discuss how they made large amounts of drug seizures at the sales level. So why is that important? They have acknowledged that less arrests for personal possession, less arrests for paraphernalia does not mean you're not going to stop sales. So we knew that was going to happen. So now we're pivoting there as well. And we're seeing that transition to smoking.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So we have qualitative and quantitative data to back up these initial laws. And so now Minnesota has all of a sudden become the voice of harm reduction across the nation. And we're glad to take and amplify those voices, but we have to do a lot better. And I want to get a little personal here for a second.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
We have to do a lot better job amplifying the voices of our black, brown, indigenous communities. I grew up in a multiracial family. And yesterday I was on the phone with my brother while he called And my brother is black. And he called 911 yesterday. And I listened to him get arrested on the phone. I listened to him get arrested on the phone.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And as he was getting arrested, telling me, Eddie, I'm going to get arrested because I'm black. This is something that I don't have to deal with as a white man. And substance use disorder takes three times as many black people here in the state of Minnesota and 10 times as many indigenous individuals. It's disgusting.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And I say that with with with a lot of emphasis, because that is a lot of our focus this year. And we're just so glad to be a part of this. But we got to do better.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Right around that time. I don't want to get right around that time, Pearl.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Yeah, that's a really good explanation, Pearl, and thanks. The Steve Rumble law doesn't go far enough. We know that. We've known that from across the country. States like Maine have been passing laws that expand those protections with rather simple changes. The Steve Rumble, we know that if... We don't want individuals who call 911 to be prosecuted for substance use.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
That's, you know, that's the basic framework of the law. The language that's coming out currently is being formulated by many organizations here across the state. But we're taking our lead in this one from across the country, from states like Maine and others who realized that things like. calling 911 should be protected, not only for the person there, but for secondary individuals as well.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So when those language changes come out, we'll obviously be just giving those out. But until that point, we just don't know yet exactly what Minnesota is going to do.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Yeah, sure. So it's just to think about like how many people drink, right? I mean, that's the way to really kind of think about it. More people die from alcohol than any other quote drug that exists. Drug substance use disorder affects about 10%, maybe less of people who use substances. So that means that nine out of 10 people who use substances, and I'm not, this is, I'm
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
within a framework of that percentage. And that includes any substance, right? That includes any. So we're talking everything from alcohol to cannabis to methamphetamines. Some of those have higher addictability rates, but the amount of people who will transition over to substance use disorder is rather low.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So we know that substance use disorder causes issues for individuals and communities, but those issues tend to be amplified because of the mental health that goes along with it, and the consequences from those uses from people who unfortunately at those times are in chaotic use. And so what we're really doing is legislating to those individuals.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Yeah, so those are great questions. The first is that you were not protected when you crossed state lines.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Yeah, not protected. We were the first state, unfortunately, even regionally, we don't have those partners yet, right, to form that reciprocity or that legal reciprocity back and forth. What I can say is that nationally, We've been dragging our feet nationally for a long time.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Things like the crack house statute, one of the most racist statutes that exists from the 1980s, are the things that get in the way of transitioning this over. But if we know that if the federal government is not going to do this, we know if the federal government, because remember the federal government speaks for many different communities across this nation, right?
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So Minnesota understood that our communities needed this. Minnesota. So we had bipartisan support. We we knew that it was time for us to make that change. And there weren't national there weren't legal handicaps at the national level to do that. But I want I'm interested to hear what Dr. Chikoulis has to say about this.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Thank you, Dr. Chocolis, and for all of your hard work here across the state of Minnesota. We couldn't have done this without the Pharmacy Board's partnership. My name is Eddie Krumpetich. I'm a person of lived experience. I've been using methamphetamine since the age of 19. I have survived substance use disorder, and I'm also the chair of the Minnesota Harm Reduction Collaborative.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
I just want to take the time to thank each of you for the invitation, which is something that is an honor to me. It's an honor to me to be here. Check us out at the Minnesota Harm Reduction Collaborative.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
What I want to emphasize here is that the law that was written last year by Pearl, myself, and the collaborative, and Dr. Chikoulis and others, this was written by people with lived experience and those who treat them.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Like written by us. And so when I emphasize this, we like I talked about the national attention earlier and how many news articles and things like that we've had done. But it was because the street and those of us who have who have used substances wrote the law. That is incredible in and of itself. You know, absolutely. The law. None of them did. We did it.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And it's just been an honor to work with everybody. Thanks for having me on.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And I also work for other organizations nationally, writing legislation and developing a grassroots mobilization around that. We were the lead writers of the legalization of drug paraphernalia and drug residue, which happened to be the very first provision of its kind in the nation.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So we are very proud of not only our partnerships with the Pharmacy Board, the Minnesota Medical Association and others, Our number one and most important goal here is that we save lives and we represent Black, brown, indigenous communities who are the most disproportionately affected by substance use and the criminalization efforts that have resulted.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So I'll turn this over to Pearl, who is one of my partners and one of those individuals who helped pass this law.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Clarence, that's a good question. So we know that drug use happens. So just say no instilled this ideal that either you say no to drugs or you use drugs and you're a bad person, right? We know that those criminalization efforts have not worked. I'm going to give you a little statistic here, which is just, I mean, incredible.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Since 1970 up to 2015, criminalization has increased in the state of Minnesota 282%. In that time, overdoses increased 342%. So we knew it wasn't working. And so what we had to acknowledge was if people are using substances, how do we keep them alive long enough so they can make good choices in their life for them and their community? So decades of research got put into this.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And they said, wow, we really missed the boat here. And we said, we need to make you safer. We need to make it more accessible to public health initiatives. And so what we did was we redefined what substance use was. You weren't a bad person if you were using substances. You had a chronic or semi-chronic or condition that could be treated.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
But we also wanted to put that onus on the person who was using substances. And what we found was, is that if you tell somebody to use unused supplies, like unused syringes or unused paraphernalia, They were 50 percent less likely to incur an infectious disease like HIV. That's an astronomical number. And otherwise, there was a five times higher likelihood that you would go to treatment.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So, I mean, you really did hear that right. So if just say no, didn't increase treatment, harm reduction, saying drug use is OK, we're going to use safely. increases treatment five times the national average. So harm reduction just meets somebody where they're at in their substance use, how to be safer, how to make communities safer, and get people over to public health.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Yeah, sure. So let's go out to the bar for a second and you have a glass of beer, right? You have your favorite IPA. That glass would be considered paraphernalia. Okay. So you pick up the glass, you use the glass to drink the beer. That glass is paraphernalia. The residue would be like what's left over, the foam, the bubbles, and that little bit of beer at the bottom.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
That's what we define as residue for drugs. So what we decided to do is we said, okay, wait a second. If we want people to use safely and the science says that paraphernalia should be legalized, the reason was is we wanted to lower infectious diseases. We wanted to bring people to syringe service providers. And so we said all paraphernalia
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
no matter what it is, is going to be legal because we didn't want to put stigma on one form or the other. And since we did that, we've seen a transition over to smoking. And so why is that a big deal? Because without legislative handicaps or without barriers,
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
What we've now done is transition from the highest rate of infection, which is the syringe, to smoking, which has a drastically lower rates of infection and also the curbing of drug use. So we wanted to lower stigma. We wanted to make sure that people knew that using substances was neither bad nor good, but it happened.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
And the paraphernalia, things like syringes, using smokables, for example, to smoke your substances, ways to inject cottons, tins, cookers, things like that.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
Well, I'll make it pretty simple. So prohibition in the late 19-teens, Woodrow Wilson's in office, they they get rid of alcohol they wanted to and see if this relates they wanted to remove the scourge of society so they get rid of alcohol in one decade What happened? We had the development of organized crime, gangsters, mobsters, crime went up. We knew that there was a problem.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
So the United States said, wow, that's an issue. And they looked back and they go, hmm, we better legalize alcohol again. So they got rid of that. Let's go to the Nixon administration. Nixon decides to do the same thing with drugs. And we saw organized crime, gangsters, mobs, the exact same result. There was no difference, except now our system has lasted almost three generations.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
We have this is a racist first type policy, which we know has affected so many people in our urban communities, urban and rural communities. And so not only does it not enable drug use, it makes things drastically worse. So we increase people's time in jail where they have a 27 times higher likelihood of dying if released from jail without referral networks and naloxone.
Health Chatter
2023 Decriminalization of Paraphernalia and Residue
We have done a poor job of meeting the science where it's at. And the easiest way to transition that is goes, wow, the same exact thing happened during alcohol that's happening right now.