Biden Administration Pushing to Reform State Drug Laws and Cape Cod COVID Outbreak

and reform criminal statutes. Dan Vergano, science reporter at BuzzFeed News, joins us for this and also how a cape cod covid outbreak, mostly in unvaccinated people, prompted the CDC to change its mask wearing guidance. Thanks for joining us Dandy area to talk to you. I want to talk about a couple of interesting things. First off, I wanted to talk about the Biden administration and you know what they're trying to do to reform state drug laws. They're looking

at something called harm reduction measures. This focuses on safe drug use over abstinence and the threat of imprisonment, which is kind of you know what we've been going through with the War on drugs type of thing. This is would be a shift away from that. So tell us a little bit more about what harm reduction is and then what the administration is doing about it. So harm reduction has been around for you know, thirty years or more.

It's basically the idea that you try, instead of throwing people who use a list of drugs in the jail, that you sort of meet them what they're where they're at it. They're going to use drugs, and you try and help them do that as safely as can as you might give them drugs that reverse overdoses, or you might show them how to safely inject, you know, and if it's the risk of an overdose from a drug, or you might you know, give them clean needles to use instead of old ones so that they don't spread

HIV or hepatitis. And you know, the hope is that people you know, eventually at the time will go into recovery, but you don't force it on them. You try and sort of, just as they say, meet them where they are. And so these approaches obviously, you know, I can I can already see a lot of people not happy with them because you're not eliminating that drug use, right, You're still people would say, you're still promoting that drugs, but with some of these programs, is getting into recovery. Is

that part of these programs? Yes and no. If you talk to someone in harm reduction, they say, no, we're not going to force people to do that. You can. It turns out, though, that if you're wise and you just make friends with people essentially show them we're trying to help them, that they're more likely to go into it on their own. It's sort of a person's own personal decision, like when they've decided to do this or not.

And it just turns out that human nature being what it is, that it's better if the person makes a decision for themselves rather than you're putting a gun into their head and saying you've got to do this. That it turns on it just doesn't work. So we've been seeing a lot of numbers recently. More than people died of drug overdoses last year. That's the highest number we've

ever seen. A lot of that has to do with pentomyl, which you and I have talked a lot about forty times more potent than harrow and and it's kind of leaking into other drugs. It's being mixed into other stuff. So what is the administration trying to do. What's the latest action that they're trying to do with all this, Well, what we reported today was that they are trying to promote model laws for states that would enhance the idea of harm reduction. And that is in response to this

increases overdoses. And where what's going on is Fentyl has infiltrated the heroin supply, an illicit drug market west of the Mississippi as well as east of it, so you're, you know, basically doubling the area of which people are

exposed to this. And during the pandemic, it seems clear that more fentyl started coming into the US versus heroin, which you know is dangerous nuff as it is, and so people are going to be using this, they're going to be having more overdoses the and also with the pandemic upsetting essentially the supply chain for this, you're going to have a more variable dose where that is what

might kill people. Instead of going to the same dealer who is giving the same stuff they were using before this, they have to go to a different person or it's a different supply and that change in in potency you know that they're getting from these ships. It might be with leading this increase in overdoses, which is like at increase over twenty nineteen, which was bad enough as it was.

And so the idea is that we're going to enshrine harm reduction ideas into state laws and there's a way to try and knock this down, like, you know, if people are going to use drugs, let's have used as safely as possible, not have hid and appaditis breaks while we're at it. So we're seeing this program is going

to be trying to promote model laws. But we're seeing this come at a time where there's cities across the country, as you noted in your article, that are shutting down things that some of these modelized might do, like needle

exchange sites things like that. Right, Well, what we're seeing in some places, and it's clear most clear, like in Charleston, West Virginia and Atlantic City, is there's this effort post pandemic to spur business, and the city council or their equivalent they're looking around and saying, like why do we want a needle exchange where we're trying to have a shopping mall or a casino or that side of thing. And so there's this and you also have this turnover

of sort of lawmakers who don't understand harm reduction. They didn't go through the last cycle of it. They just look at it, as you say, this sort of stigmatizing view of it is like, oh, you're just helping people do drugs instead of saying like, essentially we're asking about a football helmet while they're doing it, you know, instead of letting them crash into each other on the field.

And so you get the kind of anti drug attitude that you know, opposes all forms of trying to make life better for these folks, and that conspires to shut these things down. At the same time, in the federal level, even the Trump administration and embrace needle exchanges, you see the Body administration moving to sort of more normalize it harm reduction, that is, so that you know, just try and help these people out, you know, and don't want to get sick, to want to die. One of the

other aspects of this is are the punitive damages. You know, a lot of laws treat overdoses as criminal acts, which is kind of interesting. I didn't really realize that too much. I hadn't looked into it, you know, instead of a health event, help this person, you know, get treatment all that other stuff. It's a criminal act. You can face

jail time if you overdose on something. Right, well, some states have had to institute good samarian laws where if you report that somebody are with as an overdose, that you're not going to be arrested. I mean, this is a fear that people have in some states. In other places, like just carrying syringes is enough to get you arrested. You know, people complain about needle litter. It's beIN the reason is in a lot of places because it's illegal to have the needles, so people get rid of them

as fast as they can. That's why they're all over the place. And you know, more important as these very fundamental changes that need to be made to laws, like

you get arrested, you lose your access to medicaid. Then you can't go into recovery because there's nothing to pay for it, and so you might be on like medication assisted treatment, which is the you know, seems to be the best way to help people who are addicted to opioids, but then they get you know, picked up on a bench warrant because they missed a meeting with the prole officer. Because their lives are pretty messy, they lose their medicaid,

they lose the chance to get paid recovery. So there's a whole vast array of like that machinery of the law that needs to be uh fixed to help people, you know, in this situation which is killing a lot of people. It was a problem before the pandemic, it was exacerbated by the pandemic. And you know, we'll have to see what any of this action, uh if it does help improve any of that. And speaking of the pandemic, you know, I've been seeing a lot of this cape

cod COVID outbreak, just headlines about it. This is kind of one of those things that caused the CDC to reverse their guidance on mask wearing. Vaccinated individuals should also we'd be wearing masks in certain high transmission areas. Tell

us about what we saw in that. This has to do with a lot of parties and and things that we're going on around July four, So you know, around July four, the outbreak they're talking about, you know, as in Provincetown and obviously that was a big party time, and so there are a lot of people dancing very close to each other then, which is suspected by some

observers have played a role in the outbreak. And what essentially happened was on Tuesday, last week's CDC came out said whoa, whoa, we're seeing signs that people who are vaccinated are still having levels of virus in them that are equivalent to what people who are unvaccinated are having, and that's worrisome because that might mean they're transmissible. We've told a bunch of people they can't transmit when they're vaccinated, and where if we've given people bad advice, We're worried

about that. So we're going to try and reverse this masking advice to say, like, if you're indoors in an area where there's high transmission, and even if so, even then if you've been vaccinated, you should wear a mask, which was a switch. It turns out that six of the counties in the country and then immediately everybody started asking like, you know, where is this evidence that you're seeing.

You know, we can't talk about it. It's clusters. There was political pushback look into Congress were suspicious of mask mandates were saying it's a case in India that turns out to not be true. They don't seem to be willing to cop to that because the CDC set on Friday. Yes, it was this case in Provincetown. They didn't even name the town in their their mmwre the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly report that described it, but that's where it was, a province town. So what we now know is that

there was a pretty big outbreak. There was probably about eight hundred people, and half of them were out of towners, and the data they have is from the Massachusetts Residence from the Massachusetts Department of Health, and what was really striking was that there about sev of the people vaccinated

were the ones who had gotten infected. The thing is that makes us all uncertain is that most people have vaccinations, and we know the vaccines already aren't perfect, so it might just be that, like, the vaccines aren't perfect, but the hell of a lot of people are vaccinated, so of course there's some back through infections, which is why you know more of the people in the sick crowd were turned out to be vaccinated. But what was alarming

to the CDC was the measures of their illness. There's these genetic tests, you know, where you take a swab from a person and run it through a machine and you see how many cycles of amplification of the genes it takes for them to get to prove positive for the disease. And this is where the MMWR showed it was that they were statistically equivalent in the vaccinated unvaccinated people, which would suggest that they had equal amounts of virus

in them, but not necessarily. So like that's the reason why everybody's cautious about this CDC is essentially staying here. Maybe people have as much virus in them, maybe, but we don't know for sure because it's only these PCR tests and not a really fully functional lab test that's

shown this or you know, an infection change. And that's one of the things that we've had a difficulty with throughout the pandemic, right, everything is constantly changing so much, the guidance change, you know, people getting frustrated with it, but the science were going through it in real time, right, so we still have to see what the delta variant really does. The good thing is that in most of those cases. All these people reported mild symptoms cough, headache,

that sore throat, muscle pain, fever, the normal. Uh. Senator Lindsey Graham just came down with COVID. He said he has mild symptoms, credits that to having the vaccine. So that still seems to be the best way to avoid just getting severely sick. So we'll continue to watch all of this. Dan Vergano, science reporter at BuzzFeed News, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for putting up with me. I do like talking about this with you. Take care of man. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has

been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every money to Friday, So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast