Dear Friends and Neighbors,
Session adjourned almost a month ago now and spring is in the air! 🌸🌼🌻🌞
This week, I’m happy to share the Legislature’s investments in behavioral health and our response to the opioid and fentanyl crisis in our state.
Fentanyl has already taken the lives of too many of our loved ones, neighbors and community members, and an alarming increase in toxic drug poisonings and deaths in children made it critical that we take action. We focused on protecting our youth, expanding our state’s skilled behavioral health workforce, and getting critical care for people living with untreated substance use disorder.
With education, prevention and awareness being a crucial first line of defense against substance use by kids, we passed legislation to create a statewide prevention and awareness campaign for our K-12 schools. We also made sure that colleges, universities, and other higher education institutions will be required to provide fentanyl test strips, naloxone, and education, prevention, and awareness programs so that their communities are prepared to deal with this harmful epidemic.
In terms of recovery and support services, we passed legislation making sure young adults who are discharged from inpatient behavioral health treatment programs have access to crucial support and housing so they don’t risk falling into homelessness. And to support Washington’s behavioral health infrastructure, we passed a bill to streamline the licensing for Indian health providers.
Our supplemental operating budget invests $215 million in opioid and substance use disorder response and prevention, and our capital construction budget invests $82.7 million in behavioral health community capacity grants to build behavioral health care facilities in communities across Washington.
I’m also excited that the UW behavioral health teaching hospital is coming online in June. It will increase available bed capacity and be a boon to training our state’s behavioral health workforce.
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Governor Inslee signs HB 1903Â my bill to require 24-hour reporting of lost of stolen firearms.
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As always, reach out anytime to my Legislative Assistant Sam Tinsley or email me. It’s an honor to serve you in Olympia.
Best wishes,
State Representative Liz Berry
36th Legislative District