Protecting access to life-saving care and substance use services.

New immunity provision (subsection 5) protects peace officers and their employing agencies from liability, including revocation of certification under RCW 43.101.105, for conduct taken in compliance with the overdose protection section, unless the action was taken in bad faith or with deliberate indifference or gross negligence.

New subsection (3) explicitly states that nothing in the section prohibits a peace officer from lawfully detaining a person without making an arrest, preserving detention authority while removing 'detained' from the list of prohibited actions.

Civil forfeiture protection now has an exception: property in plain sight can still be subject to civil forfeiture even when a person is seeking or receiving medical assistance for an overdose.

New subsection (2)(b) limits the civil forfeiture and penalty protections to cases where the property or evidence was actually obtained as a result of the overdose and need for medical assistance, preventing the protections from applying more broadly.

The evidence suppression provision now includes an exception: 'except as provided in subsection (2) of this section,' meaning the forfeiture and penalty protections can serve as a basis for suppressing evidence in those specific contexts.

A new Section 2 amends RCW 10.31.100 (the state arrest authority statute) to add 'Except as provided in RCW 69.50.315' before the mandatory arrest requirement for protection order violations, ensuring the overdose protections override mandatory arrest in those situations.

The entire section amending RCW 69.50.612 (state preemption of local drug paraphernalia regulation) was removed from the bill, meaning this version no longer addresses the relationship between state and local authority over drug paraphernalia laws or the carve-out for harm reduction services.

The drug paraphernalia section (RCW 69.50.4121) removed 'clients and' from the exemption language, so now only public health and syringe service program staff are explicitly exempt from arrest and prosecution when using drug testing equipment, not program clients.