In Tucson’s public spaces, drug use is a common sight. It is a result of several overlapping factors, including cheap fentanyl, a high homeless population and city officials’ reluctance to resort to mass incarceration.
Over the last several months, city officials have made a renewed push to address public drug use, culminating in a now-tabled proposal that would have criminalized a range of drug-related behaviors. Resulting debates have highlighted several systemic obstacles to addressing the issue — a complex one that ultimately stems from thousands of unique personal crises that leave people on the street and addicted.
“We’re treating a massive problem right now, but we’re treating symptoms,” said Tucson Chief of Police Chad Kasmar.
Recently, the symptoms have become more acute. Tucson police made over 23,000 felony and misdemeanor drug arrests in 2025, up 11% compared to average rates over the last five years, according to the department.
Meanwhile, 54% fewer arrestees chose to enter drug treatment as an alternative to arrest, a program known as deflection. That’s even as the amount of drug offenders eligible for deflection — typically those without prior criminal records — reached almost double the five-year average.
Behind the numbers is increasingly addictive fentanyl, cheap and plentiful in Tucson due to its proximity to Mexican supply routes. With synthetic opioids largely replacing naturally derived ones, hard drugs have become “radically” more accessible for people living on Tucson’s streets, Kasmar said.
“Our community’s resources have not been scaled at that same rate,” he said.
The change has not gone unnoticed by Tucsonans. Many city council members say public drug use is a top complaint brought by constituents. For Republican opponents of local incumbent Democrats, it is a frequent campaign issue. Though many categories of violent crime are declining in Tucson, city officials concede that visible social issues play a large role in perceptions of safety.
“There are tangible issues that people see that possibly don’t make them feel safe,” Mayor Regina Romero told reporters at the November launch of a task force meant to evaluate new public safety policies.
That same month, the city council discussed a proposal that would have criminalized a range of drug-related behaviors, including behaving “in such a manner as to raise a reasonable suspicion that (one is) about to engage” in a drug crime. The ordinance would have given the city attorney’s office the power to prosecute such offenses as misdemeanors and mandated five-day jail sentences for repeat offenders.
At their November discussion, several council members spoke positively of the ordinance, including Tucson Mayor Regina Romero. But earlier this month, AZPM News reported that the proposal was, at least temporarily, off the table. Its sponsor, Ward 5 council member Nikki Lee, said city staff wanted to explore less dramatic steps to address public drug use first.
“My preference is to see these cases handled in the venue that aligns with the seriousness of the offense under state law,” Lee later wrote in a newsletter.
Because use or possession of drugs such as fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine is illegal under Arizona law, the venues for prosecuting drug cases in Tucson are the county court system and the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
“Given the advances that the collaboration between (the Tucson Police Department) and (the Pima County Attorney’s Office) have brought, the consensus of staff is that the City should focus on strengthening the tools currently available,” wrote Kasmar and Tucson City Attorney Roi Lusk in a memo about the tabled ordinance.
Tensions between city, county attorney ease as Tucson police aim to better document social harms stemming from public drug use##
A significant fraction of drug crimes in Tucson are never prosecuted, according to current and past Tucson Police Department officials.
According to John Leavitt, who commanded the department’s narcotics division from 2016 until 2022, people arrested for drug felonies by his officers were not usually criminally charged unless they had committed additional crimes.
“I can’t think of a single case where someone was arrested with a fentanyl pill, or ten fentanyl pills, and actually was prosecuted for that, absent some other aggravating circumstance,” he said.
About two-thirds of felony drug arrests brought by Tucson police to the county attorney are not prosecuted, Kasmar told Tucson city council members in September.
But no agency has the manpower to prosecute every drug crime, according to Pima County Attorney Laura Conover.
“If I stopped prosecuting all violent, victim crime, we could try, and I predict we’d still probably fail to be able to chase every blue pill,” she said in an interview.
Conover, a former criminal defense attorney, was first elected in 2020 as a reform-minded prosecutor promising to roll back War on Drugs-style policies, common in the 1990s and 2000s, that jailed people even for lesser drug crimes. She stands by those values.
“We tried it with heroin, and then crack and then methamphetamine, thinking that you could just sweep the streets and that we could jail our way out of what is a health crisis,” she said. “I think that’s why I’m here, in office.”
In politically liberal Tucson, the city council and police commanders largely agree. But prosecution can offer a path to treatment through court-ordered diversion programs, Leavitt said, when people turn down voluntary treatment.
“There was tension going on between the county attorney and some of the City of Tucson resources,” Kasmar said.
Conover told AZPM News she could not have supported the city’s drug loitering ordinance, citing concerns around individual liberty and profiling.
After a long meeting on the topic earlier this month, Conover and Kasmar both said they found common ground: improving the way police officers communicate arrests to Conover’s office.
At the moment, those communications are often only a few lines long, noting the specific offense with few additional details. Kasmar said officers will start recording more context about the wider social harms they see in drug offenses, including if users act threatening to children playing in a park, if they repeatedly steal from a local business or if they are in known drug use hotspots that cause problems for neighbors.
“There’s a whole other picture painted,” Kasmar said of the new approach.
The new communication efforts will come with new training for officers about how to document those harms, according to Kasmar and Lusk’s memo. It’s not yet clear if the new approach will result in more drug arrests turning into prosecutions, or how many of those prosecutions would result in drug treatment program placements.
Recently, a batch of Pima County’s opioid settlement funds went to several organizations planning to expand drug treatment, detox and transitional housing capacity.
Public policy determines what happens post-arrest, but personal relationships lift struggling people out of crisis##
To one Tucsonan who used drugs while he was homeless, rebuilding his life ultimately hinged on building trust with social workers and treatment providers — a process he said is difficult for police to initiate.
“I personally did not trust any police officer; I didn’t trust anybody to begin with,” said Zion Alderette, a homeless outreach worker and researcher at the University of Arizona.
Raised by his grandmother, Alderette was left without housing after she died during his teenage years. He found periods of stability in brief, intense romantic relationships. When they would end, he’d become homeless.
“I didn’t really know what true love was, what good, healthy relationships were,” he said.
Stuck in Tucson after the end of a marriage, he became isolated. He slept on buses during the day and took methamphetamines to stay awake and alert at night.
“My dogs were the only thing that I had getting me through,” he said.
When he met Justin Hamilton, a homelessness case worker with the City of Tucson, things started to change. Unlike social workers he’d met in the past, Alderette said, Hamilton would follow through on promises of help. Slowly, he began trusting him, and the two men developed a rapport. After a months-long wait, Alderette got a bed in Tucson’s Amazon Motel shelter and got sober.
But anxiety ate at him. He feared he wouldn’t find permanent housing and would return to the streets, where drugs were a survival tool. He relapsed and checked himself out of the shelter. Though drug use wasn’t a cause for expulsion, he felt that he had failed.
“I need to be perfect. I couldn’t make any mistakes and if I made a mistake, everything and everybody was going to leave,” he said of his thoughts at the time.
Hamilton and other case workers didn’t give up. They kept calling Alderette, who had left Tucson, offering him a second chance.
“Just because you messed up doesn’t mean you’re not deserving of a home,” Alderette said they told him.
He returned to Tucson and they helped him find an apartment. He soon found work with the City of Tucson’s Housing First program and formed a new community of friends.
For people like him, who lived on the streets, severed from friends and family, learning to trust others is the first step toward rebuilding a life, Alderette said. He said the criminal justice system, with its threats of punishment, often has the opposite effect.
“It’s hard to build that trust with the police department when they have to be the enforcer and the good guy,” he said.
Alderette said that, in his experience, most police officers did not have good relationships with homeless people in Tucson. To change that, he stressed the importance of proper training and long-term relations between specific homeless people and police officers.
City officials say new solutions are needed, stress accountability for drug crimes##
While Tucson’s Housing First approach — which aims to provide homeless people with housing before addressing potential issues like drug abuse — helped Alderette turn his life around, many city officials now stress that additional solutions are needed.
“People that are breaking the law have to have consequences,” said Tucson Mayor Regina Romero at an October city council discussion about transit safety concerns related to drug use.
“I don’t think that it is humane of us to allow people to continue to suffer out on the streets without doing everything we can to provide as much help as possible,” said Ward 5 council member Nikki Lee, who sponsored the proposed drug loitering ordinance.
According to a Dec. 16 memo, recent police deployments to encampments along the Chuck Huckelberry Loop bike path resulted in 187 arrests. Meanwhile, outreach-focused deployments to encampments across the city reached 169 people in total, with 42 of them accepting shelter or drug treatment placements, according to the memo, while 52 out of 65 people living in the 100-Acre Woods encampment accepted services when the city cleared it in late 2025.
Kasmar, TPD’s chief, said long-term solutions to addiction will require addressing its root causes.
“We need to think about what causes somebody to start smoking fentanyl or using narcotics,” he said. “Mental health issues, the breakdown of education, the lack of resources we have within our systems and that we have more people living in crisis.”
His own uncle died of heroin use in Midtown Tucson while Kasmar was a police officer, he said. While his family never gave up on his uncle, he said, his behavior became so disruptive they couldn’t allow it in their lives.
“Families are forced to make really difficult decisions when someone’s addiction or mental health is untreated,” he said.
For now, no clear solution has emerged to public drug use in Tucson. Its drug loitering ordinance, in draft form, risked overloading the Pima County Jail with detoxing drug users, according to Bradley Bartos, a social scientist at the University of Arizona who specializes in forecasting the effects of criminal justice policies.
But he said the draft’s short, five-day sentencing guideline was an evolution from War on Drugs-era mass incarceration policies. He also said any police-first response to addiction and homelessness must come with significant investments in medical treatment for addicts.
The War on Drugs, Bartos said, was an overzealous response to an emerging social issue.
“The criticism of using law enforcement, severe sanctions and incarceration as the main tools for addressing that social problem, those criticisms are obviously warranted,” he said.
But he said that, since the 1990s climax of tough-on-crime policies, the social and personal costs of drug addiction have only grown.
“There needs to be some mechanism for addressing open-air drug markets and open-air drug use given the severity of recreational drugs that are available right now,” he said. “This is not the 90s anymore.”
