For years, Colorado has tried to find the humane center of its response to addiction. It is a tricky balance to keep people alive, expand treatment, and avoid turning every person with a substance-use disorder into a lifelong felon. Those are worthy aims. Compassion belongs in our drug policy. 

Compassion, though,  must be judged by results, not intentions. Colorado’s results should not be acceptable. 

After falling sharply in 2024, synthetic-opioid overdose deaths in Colorado started climbing again, even as they declined across most of the country. From December 2024 through August 2025, Colorado’s deaths rose 17%. This was the third-fastest increase among the states. Nationally, they fell 21%. Colorado was one of only five states moving in the wrong direction. 

That reversal matters. It follows an already ugly history. State data show fentanyl-related deaths rose from 222 in 2019 to 1,097 in 2023. In 2025, Colorado recorded 931 fentanyl-related emergency department visits, up 15.4% from the previous year.  

Our state has expanded access to naloxone, test strips, education and treatment. The General Assembly also partially reversed its earlier decriminalization approach in 2022 by creating fentanyl-specific crimes and increasing some penalties. 

Some of those changes may have helped produce the 2024 decline. Whatever combination of enforcement, treatment, prevention and drug-supply changes drove that improvement, though, it has not proved durable. Colorado again finds itself splitting away from the national trend, and in the worst possible way. 

This is the context in which voters will consider Proposition 132 this November. 

The measure would make the manufacture, sale, distribution or possession with intent to distribute any amount of fentanyl or certain related synthetic opioids a Level 1 drug felony, punishable by eight to 32 years in prison. It would also increase penalties for possession. Knowing possession of no more than one gram would become a treatment-mandated Level 4 drug felony. If the defendant successfully completes treatment, that conviction would be vacated and replaced with a Level 1 drug misdemeanor. 

Those are consequential changes. Proposition 132 would impose Colorado’s highest drug-felony classification and an eight-year mandatory minimum for distribution involving any detectable amount of a covered substance. Unlike the laws of several neighboring states, that punishment would not rise with the quantity involved. 

The state estimates the measure would increase spending by $68.2 million by its fifth year, with possible additional prison-capacity costs. It provides no dedicated stream of new treatment funding. Voters should weigh those costs and the breadth of the distribution provision seriously. They should also recognize the serious idea at the heart of the measure: in the fentanyl era, the justice system may need enough leverage to interrupt addiction rather than merely record it. 

The most comforting story about treatment is that a person suffering from addiction recognizes the danger, asks for help and enters recovery voluntarily. Sometimes that happens. Often it does not.  

Addiction distorts judgment, narrows the horizon and teaches the mind to protect the very substance that is destroying it. Families, police officers, ER physicians, treatment providers and judges understand this with painful clarity.  

For some people, a looming, meaningful criminal penalty is not the opposite of compassion. It is the event that makes treatment unavoidable. 

That is why the low-level possession provision deserves particular attention. A treatment mandate backed by a felony charge, paired with the opportunity to reduce the conviction after successful completion, combines accountability with a path back. It does not assume that jail by itself cures addiction. It sees that treatment offered without enough leverage can become treatment declined, abandoned or postponed until the next overdose. 

This approach will succeed only if the treatment is real, available and evaluated. Drug courts and mandated-treatment programs need enough capacity, real standards and visible metrics of completion, relapse and long-term recovery. 

This need not be an either/or situation. Colorado should not simply sentence more people and call the problem solved. Neither should lawmakers confuse enrollment with successful treatment. 

At the same time, the state cannot treat fentanyl distribution as ordinary commerce in an illicit product. Fentanyl is extraordinarily potent, frequently mixed into other drugs and sometimes consumed by people who do not know it is there. Dealers do not control the dose after a pill leaves their hands, and users cannot reliably judge it by sight, smell or taste. The public danger is different in degree and, increasingly, in kind. 

Punishment has more than one purpose here. It’s hard to measure deterrence in an illicit market. It is easier to measure capacity, though: a trafficker serving a prison sentence is, for that period, not selling fentanyl in a Colorado neighborhood. The law also declares plainly that distributing a substance this lethal carries added responsibility. 

The costs extend far beyond corrections budgets. Common Sense Institute estimated that fentanyl-related overdose deaths imposed $13.1 billion in economic costs on Colorado in 2024, or about $2,220 per resident. That estimate includes health-care costs, lost productivity and the statistical value of lives lost. No dollar figure captures a human loss, but policymakers use such estimates to compare risks and interventions.  

Fentanyl also damages Colorado’s competitiveness. CSI’s drug-overdose competitiveness index ranked Colorado 30th in 2024, worse than its standing in 2015, as overdose deaths per capita nearly doubled over that period. This comes as the state is already struggling with weakening domestic migration and concerns about affordability and public safety. Employers, workers and families do not experience open drug use, disorder and overdose as separate policy silos. Those issues shape whether a community feels safe, functional and worth investing time and money. 

No sentencing statute can solve all of that. Proposition 132 does not stop fentanyl at the border, fund every needed treatment bed, or guarantee that a frightened person will remain in recovery. Research cannot yet isolate one policy that explains why some states’ deaths are falling while Colorado’s are rising.  

Uncertainty is not a good argument for passivity, though. It is an argument for combining tools and measuring them honestly: interdiction aimed at traffickers; penalties proportionate to fentanyl’s deadliness; education to prevent first use, and treatment strong enough to outlast the moment of crisis. 

Colorado’s debate should not be reduced to punishment versus compassion. Properly designed accountability can serve compassion by getting a person through the door of treatment when addiction will not let him walk through it willingly. Compassion without the resolve to interrupt lethal behavior can simply grow into a way of watching suffering continue while congratulating our good intentions. 

The question before voters is not whether longer sentences are self-evidently sufficient. The questions is whether stronger consequences should be part of a response equal to the crisis. 

Mitch Morrissey served as Denver’s district attorney from 2005 to 2017 and is the Owens-Early Criminal Justice Fellow at the Common Sense Institute.