Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. All around Seattle, families will gather around tables. But for too many of those families, there will be an empty seat.

Not empty because someone is working late or traveling. Empty because of addiction. Because someone they love is lost to drugs, either still alive but unreachable, or gone forever.

If you know this emptiness, you know it’s complicated. Family dynamics that nobody outside can fully understand. Well-meaning friends who enabled instead of confronted. A treatment system that often feels designed to fail. And increasingly, a public policy approach in King County that treats addiction as something to be managed indefinitely rather than overcome.

The harm reduction model dominates here — de facto safe injection sites, free pipes, no pressure to get

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