Washington state drug epidemiology

What you will find on this page

We show significant increases in crime lab submissions associated with a given county (or the whole state) testing positive for a given drug. We define a “significant increase” or jump as a quarterly count more than twice as large as seen in the average quarter over the prior 3 years.
Drug-related arrests and resulting evidence testing rapidly decreased in Q1 2021 following a WA State Supreme Court decision and remained at low levels with a stop-gap bill (ESB5476) created in response to that ruling, which mandated diversion for the first two arrests and made possession of illegal drugs a misdemeanor. The state legislature recently passed a 2023 bill (ESB5536) which changed possession laws to a more serious gross misdemeanor. The impact on arrests and evidence submission of this bill, which went into effect 1 July 2023, is unknown at this time.
Over the past few years, the most prominent drug categories—featuring frequent notable jumps in many counties and/or statewide—have been fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, and novel benzodiazepines.
More recently, fentanyl continues to comprise a large share of crime lab cases and fentanyl analogues have increased after becoming less prominent in 2020. Although total crime lab cases have greatly declined since the State v Blake decision, the number of cases testing positive for fentanyls appears to be higher than before Blake.
Fentanyl and fentanyl analogue seizures increased across Washington in the third quarter of 2023, despite the overall depressed count of drug-positive cases. Cowlitz and Lewis Counties, in southwest Washington, had high numbers of cases testing positive for both.
Cases testing positive for xylazine also increased statewide in the third quarter. Two counties saw increases in both the third and fourth quarters of 2023.

Data source, utility, and limitations

Crime lab data are a partial indicator of the supply of illegal drugs or prescription drugs that are controlled substances and suspected of being purchased or sold illegally. The data presented here are the results of the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Lab chemistry testing of samples submitted by law enforcement. While the data provide important insights into the supply of drugs, in part due to the use of precise chemical testing which indicates exactly which substance is present, they also have numerous important limitations that are described at the bottom of this page.

On this page, quarterly data provided by the Forensic Laboratory Services Bureau are used to identify drugs that appear to be increasing in law enforcement seizures in the 2 most recent quarters. (Data are preliminary and will change. For more on the data, see the details at the end of the page). We focus mainly on notable increases versus overall trends.

Emerging drugs in the third quarter of 2023

For the state as a whole, a notable increase in cases positive for one or more fentanyls comprised the vast majority of a parallel increase in both prescription opioids, as technically fentanyl itself and a small number of analogues are legally available, and in non-heroin opioids. In addition to a jump in fentanyls (to 494 cases), the state also saw an increase, to 11 cases, in xylazine. Individual counties saw jumps in several other drug categories.

Emerging drugs in the fourth quarter of 2023

Emerging trends?

In the three years before the Blake decision, and even since then, three drug classes stood out for how often they have had increases: fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, and non-prescription benzodiazepines. Although, as noted, quarter is a rough representation of time, we present time trends by quarter to illustrate the changes in the presence of these substances in Washington state. Click on the Fentanyl series name in the legend to turn that series off and better see the other two. (Note that decreases in the recent quarters may be due to the incompleteness of the testing results, and may become quarter-over-quarter increases after updating.) All three of these drug classes may be sold as themselves, or as imitations of other substances. While Washington sees plenty of "street Xanax", we rarely see fentanyls mixed with black tar heroin or benzodiazepines.

State v. Blake: On February 25, 2021 the WA State Supreme Court essentially struck down the State’s felony drug possession law. Community reports from law enforcement and jails indicated an immediate decline in arrests and incarcerations for drug possession cases. On May 13, 2021 the Governor signed SB 5476, immediately making drug possession for adults a divertible offense for the first two cases with subsequent charges a misdemeanor. Law enforcement agencies are to refer divertible cases to local recovery navigator programs. On 1 July 2023, SB 5536 replaced 5476, now making possession a (more serious) gross misdemeanor but with many diverson opportunities. Click on "Total cases" in the legend to see the statewide effect on crime lab cases positive for any drug.

Changing mix of benzodiazepines

The rise in "street Xanax" does not appear to be associated with an overall increase in all benzodiazepines. Instead, there appears to be a substitution effect: The first case of designer benzodiazepines identified in the state was one of the 268 total benzodiazepine cases in 2017. In 2019, illicit benzodiazepines comprised one quarter of the total, in 2020 the novel benzodiazepines were present in nearly one half, and in 2021 and 2022 they comprised more than half of all benzodiazepine-positive crime lab cases in Washington.

Prior editions of this page:

Data notes

In order to smooth the jumps, we compare the current quarter to the average quarter over the prior 3 years (a rolling 12-quarter comparison period). This means that an unusually low number of cases in the prior year no longer creates what looks like a substantial increase, which is particularly an issue with relatively rare drug categories and/or small counties.

As we describe elsewhere, there are many limitations of the data, including: county being an imperfect geographic unit to report the data; changes in law enforcement policy, practice and resources over time; and often substantial lags between when drugs were seized by law enforcement and when they were submitted to the lab and then further lags due to testing and reporting.

Truly new drugs present a challenge for crime lab testing: the need for a standard to which to compare the lab sample for identification. Cannabimimetics, non-prescription benzodiazepines, and novel psychoactive drugs (e.g., variations of MDMA), for example, are constantly changing. Often when a particular formulation gains enough notoriety--usually, being made illegal or causing a widely reported death--to warrant a standards company producing a chemical standard and a crime lab buying it, the formulation is changed. Thus, time trends in identified crime lab cases do not capture the initial rise of such a novel substance, but at best its peak and decline. Here we just focus on significant counts of new or rarely-before-seen substances.

In addition to the above issues with crime lab case counts, there are difficulties with reliably assigning a case to a particular quarter. First, the date entered as the received date for a particular case may be a few days after when the case actually arrived at the lab, which might put it into the next quarter. This date clearly comes after the actual arrest. Furthermore, testing takes time, and so results may not come until a subsequent quarter. Sometimes the initial request is for only some of the evidence from a case to be tested, and so the other items might be tested later at prosecutor request, adding further delay between submission and result.

In sum, "quarter" does not mean when law enforcement seized the drug, and counts will likely change. All data presented here are preliminary.

New and emerging drugs in state crime lab evidence: Quarter 3 & 4 2023