Or not.
Although Abbott has expressed his support of legalizing fentanyl testing strips, a stance that he and many Republicans have held in the past, this current state legislative session has yet to see the passage of any of the bills pertaining to fentanyl testing strips.
Fentanyl testing strips work by dipping them into a small amount of a drug dissolved in water. Usually within a few minutes, the strip will indicate whether the tested sample contains fentanyl. As of now, the strips are on the state’s list of illegal drug paraphernalia.
Fentanyl is both cheap and extremely powerful, and when laced into an illegally manufactured pill, it is often deadly. Proponents of taking fentanyl testing strips off the illegal drug paraphernalia list say that we’re living in a time when a single, illicitly obtained pill falsely billed as Percocet or Oxycontin could have been made with a lethal amount of fentanyl. North Texas has been a hotbed for juvenile poisonings and deaths, with students in Plano and Carrollton falling victim to pills they believed were other well-known, and typically nonlethal, opioids.
According to a recent Texas Health and Human Services presentation, there were 3,340 "unintentional synthetic opioid deaths related to fentanyl," from 2020 through August 2022.
Opponents of any measure to legalize fentanyl testing strips suggest it would enable and embolden drug users. The Dallas Morning News reported that in April, Democrat Sen. John Whitmire of Houston addressed the opposition in the Senate to legalizing testing strips by saying, “It’s just illogical, but there’s a belief by some members that it might safeguard the use.”
Texas state Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Democrat from Dallas, authored Senate Bill 623, which would legalize testing strips for controlled substances. He told the Observer in January that the bill was one of his top priorities because, as he saw it, the testing strips would save lives. Now? The senator from Dallas isn’t sure what lies ahead for SB 623 since it has not received a hearing.“It's really bothersome to me that we can't find common ground, or that things like this are being held hostage,” – Paula Blackmon, Dallas City Council
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According to a spokesperson, Johnson is encouraged by the progress of a bill similar to his, House Bill 362, authored by Cypress Republican Rep. Tom Oliverson. The House voted overwhelmingly in April, 143-2, to send the bill to the Senate’s Committee on Criminal Justice.
“Overdose deaths continue to skyrocket as fentanyl floods across our southern border, and we need a way to combat the crisis,” Oliverson said on the floor of the House in early April, according to a report from Texas Tribune. “Decriminalizing test strips is one way to do that.”
But at this point, nothing has changed. Dallas City Council District 9 member Paula Blackmon, who was reelected on Saturday, has served on the city’s opioid strike force since its inception last fall. She says state lawmakers are “stuck in a political game of chicken right now.”
When she spoke with the Observer about her priorities for District 9 recently, the increasing problem of fentanyl was high on the list.
“It's really bothersome to me that we can't find common ground or that things like this [fentanyl testing strips] are being held hostage,” Blackmon said. “I probably shouldn't go that far, but I will because we've got kids that are going to do things we don’t want them to. Let's not make a decision that they thought was good at the time, become one that is just catastrophic. If they want to be responsible and say, ‘Hey, let's just get these strips and make sure that we are safe,’ then you know what? We should allow that.”
