State Sen. Brittany Pettersen is counting on the Democrat-controlled legislature to catapult her congressional campaign by passing her fatally flawed fentanyl bill that’s just as bad as the 2019 law that helped create today’s deadly crisis.

Pettersen’s bill fails to close the overdose loophole, which was the entire freaking purpose of pursing a legislative fix of current law that makes possession of less than four grams a misdemeanor. 

That’s because progressives oppose making it a felony to carry small amounts of fentanyl, which can kill thousands in small doses.

Pettersen is showing us she is more interested in keeping her progressive base happy for her congressional run to replace U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter.

Gov. Polis called on the legislature to fix the law he signed in 2019, and now equates fentanyl to poison:

“You have to think of fentanyl more as a poison than a drug. You remember when people were sending around the toxins in the Capitol, the white powder that was killing people, what was that?” he said. “Anthrax, right. So you think of it more like anthrax. You don’t say, ‘OK, you have anthrax. We’re going to send you to a place where we convince you not to have anthrax.’ You say, ‘Do you realize that 1 gram of fentanyl can kill over a thousand people?’ That’s what we’re talking about here. This is not cocaine. This is not even meth.”

Colorado Politics reports that a coalition of law enforcement urged lawmakers this week to kill the language in Pettersen’s bill, which they described as meaningless and useless.

The coalition, composed of the County Sheriffs of Colorado, the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police and the Colorado Fraternal Order of Police, urged legislators to delete language that triggers the felony charge for possession above 1 gram of an illicit substance only if a person knew or should have known the drug contains fentanyl, an attempt to address the drug’s ubiquitous presence in many other illicit substances.

 

That provision, the coalition said, “creates a remarkably high bar for law enforcement and district attorneys to prove and convict, making a felony charge for 1 to 4 grams practically meaningless.”

If Pettersen’s bill doesn’t even fix the problem it was supposed to address, then why did she bother?

Because it comes with a $42.5 million prices tag of spending programs to keep her progressive base happy, and gives her a faux accomplishment on which to campaign for Congress.