 You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reid Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reid at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. Wednesday, March 8th, the Kentucky House passed a bill which will decriminalize fentanyl testing strips. The bill seeks to help reduce overdoses and increase the access to these life-saving tools. Anything is going to save lives. We see people, we pull people over or we do interdiction or we arrest people and they have their own Narcan. And that's fine. We'd rather to not use the drugs, but we see people in Narcan and that's probably one of the only smart decisions they've made concerning drugs. So with these test strips for fentanyl, of course officers have been exposed to fentanyl, it's terrible. It is a absolute menace, this drug, this illicit drug. So a test strip for it is considered paraphernalia now, but if this bill goes through it takes the criminal part of it out. I think the strips are just basically another tool that probably will save lives. Officers' lives and citizens, civilians, whoever's associated with that are around that certain drug. I think it'll save lives, so I don't see any reason thought to decriminalize it myself. According to the CDC, over 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021. In addition, the bill states if a fentanyl test strip has residue on it, it will not be a prosecutable offense. I think it'll go along with the needle exchange clean. It keeps the spread of disease that needles exchange do. Like I said before, I wish as an officer that the person would stop using drugs, but I'm smart enough and knowledgeable enough to know that sometimes that's not going to happen. So the needle exchange along with the test strips along with Narcan is basically life-saving tools. It stops spreading disease, the Narcan, the fentanyl strips, test strips can stop, maybe stop the fentanyl from getting on us, them, kids, anything. So I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be decriminalized. The bill will now head to the Senate. If the bill passes, they will have 90 days to conduct a fentanyl education and awareness campaign. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.