TOPEKA—In the mid-1990s, Paula Mitchell celebrated a college basketball victory at a party hosted by one of the players.
As the designated driver for her friends, she stuck to Dr. Pepper, but started feeling sick after being given another soda by a basketball player.
“I get halfway through that can and it’s starting to feel funny,” Mitchell said. “I started feeling dizzy, almost like I’d been drinking.”
She was taken to a back bedroom to rest. When Mitchell woke up, she had been raped by four basketball players. Her Dr. Pepper had been laced with her rape drug.
“I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t push them away,” Mitchell said. “I was crippled by that drug.”
Mitchell, now a mother and advocate for victims of sexual assault, said there is still a need for protection against rape drugs. She said her daughter was recently in danger.
Two weeks ago, Mitchell took his daughter and friends to celebrate his 21st birthday at a club in Derby. As his group walked away from the table, Mitchell saw a man drop something into their unattended drinks. He alerted the bouncers, who called the police. All drinks at the table tested positive for date rape drug.
“If I hadn’t seen it, all those girls could have been in the same place I was,” Mitchell said, collapsing during a Wednesday Health and Human Services Committee hearing.
He urged lawmakers to make a proposal to legalize test strips for date date drugs.
“If we had those strips, where we could test them ourselves, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Mitchell said.
Under current state law, test strips for gamma hydroxybutyric acid, known informally as a date rape drug, are classified as drug paraphernalia. House Bill 2390 would legalize test strips for fentanyl, ketamine and gamma hydroxybutyric acid.
The bill would also establish a Kansas Overdose Mortality Review Board to prevent and mitigate drug overdoses in the state.
Other women testified in support of the bill. Mothers Libby Davis and Brandy Harris both lost their sons to fentanyl overdoses, a growing problem in the state.
“I’m here as a mother, a mother who had the worst thing imaginable taken away, a child that I created,” Harris said. “My chance to become a grandmother someday.”
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Legal fentanyl is prescribed for pain relief. Illicit fentanyl is commonly mixed with other drugs as a cheap way to create a more potent high.
Because fentanyl is undetectable without a test strip, people taking fentanyl medications are at a higher risk of overdosing. A September 2022 Kansas Department of Health and Environment report on opioid vulnerability reported a 73.5 percent increase in Kansas drug overdose deaths between 2011 and 2020.
More than half of overdose deaths in 2020 were related to opioids. Of these 254 opioid-related deaths, 64.3% involved synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
Lawmakers voted to pass the bill out of commission, moving the legislation forward.
After giving their testimony, the women, along with Representative Jason Probst, a Democrat from Hutchinson, crammed into the Statehouse elevator and rushed to tell their stories to lawmakers at the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, where a similar legislation was under consideration at the same time.
House Bill 2328 will also remove fentanyl, ketamine, and date rape drug test strips from the state’s drug paraphernalia list.
Probst, who was a driving force behind the legalization of fentanyl test strips, said the concurrent hearings would enhance changes to get one of the bills passed. He said he preferred HB 2390 because it was more expansive, but his goal is just to pass the legislation.
“As we learned about this last year, it seems like you need as many avenues as possible to do some of these things,” Probst said in an interview. “Especially if we try to overcome the reluctance in the Senate.”
While lawmakers have repeatedly raised concerns about rising fentanyl overdose rates in the state, legislation legalizing fentanyl test strips was voted down by Senate Republicans last year.
Sen. Kellie Warren, R-Leawood, said during a Senate GOP caucus meeting last year, “The best cautionary tale about whether your drug might contain fentanyl is, you know, don’t buy illegal drugs. Where is the personal responsibility in this policy?”
Representative Stephen Owens, a Republican from Hesston and chairman of the House Corrections Committee, referred to opposition to the bill during Wednesday’s hearing.
“This is an argument that has come up many times and met with resistance in different ways. And so our goal within the House is to try and approach that from a couple of different angles,” Owens said.
