Bill decriminalizing drug test strips in opioid-devastated West Virginia heads to governor
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A bill that would decriminalize all strips used to test deadly drugs in West Virginia, the state with the highest overdose rate in the country, is on Republican Governor Jim Justice’s desk.
Justice has not said publicly whether he supports the bill, which has bipartisan support. The proposal follows a law signed by Justice in 2022 that decriminalized fentanyl test strips.
“As time went on, unfortunately, we have fentanyl, now we have carfentanil, now we have xylazine,” Republican Vice Speaker of the House of Representatives Matthew Rohrbach said on the House floor before the legislation was overwhelmingly passed on Friday.
Rohrbach, who also chairs the chamber’s Substance Abuse Committee, said the bill is intended to ensure that all drug test strips will be available to people who need them, without lawmakers having to pass new legislation every time a new one is developed .
“It just says, ‘test strips for lethal drugs will be exempt from drug paraphernalia,’” Rohrbach said.
Under West Virginia law, drug paraphernalia can include syringes, needles, capsules and balloons. A person found in possession of drug paraphernalia could face a misdemeanor charge, a fine of up to $5,000 and six months to a year in prison.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described drug testing strips as an inexpensive method to help prevent overdoses.
The proportion of drug overdose deaths involving heroin has declined in recent years. Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were involved in 76% of all drug overdose deaths in West Virginia in 2021, up from 58% in 2017. About 75,000 of the nearly 110,000 overdose deaths in 2022 could be linked to fentanyl, according to data from the CDC.
Xylazine is a tranquilizer not approved for use in humans that is increasingly found in the U.S. illicit drug supply, and was declared an emerging threat by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in 2023. Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid that is approximately 10,000 times larger. powerful than morphine and 100 times more powerful than fentanyl.
Legalizing test strips could lower those numbers, advocates say, and save lives by helping more people understand how deadly their drugs can be.