Dorothy Davidson was born to Jewish parents in central Romania in 1930. When Dorothy was five her family immigrated to Buffalo, New York, where her father, a rabbi, became the Attica Prison chaplain. Through his care for the incarcerated, Davidson’s father instilled in her what would become a life-long commitment to justice. In 1945, the family relocated to Denver. Davidson graduated from Denver North High School in 1948, began her studies at Denver University, and married that same year.

After university, Davidson turned to the newsroom. Through her sly advertising maneuvers, she oriented the paper against a business collective trying to implement unjust store closure policies. The flame was ignited. Davidson’s political life took her to jails, to protests, and to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

In 1964, a friend of Davidson’s, then director of ACLU of Colorado, was appointed postmaster and suggested Dorothy apply for the vacated position. Davidson took the job. She felt the ACLU was not taking action where it might because “they were saving their money for something important.” Under her oversight, the organization quickly grew as the community learned of the legal representation the ACLU could provide in local matters. Davidson also began the ACLU of Colorado newsletter and published regular news releases in the Rocky Mountain News.

Davidson led the ACLU of Colorado through the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the rise of feminism. When a group of University of Denver students set up an encampment on campus to protest the war and were expelled, ACLU volunteer attorneys represented them in their administrative hearings. On the heels of Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment rights of students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, a group of Latino students wore black berets in conjunction with a school integration and civil rights protest. ACLU of Colorado’s volunteer attorneys represented the students when they were expelled, although they did not prevail with the school board or in federal court. 

Edwin Kahn, who served on the ACLU of Colorado’s legal panel for more than 50 years, described Davidson as “principled, dedicated, effective, hardworking.” David H. Miller, ACLU of Colorado’s first Legal Director, enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Davidson. He said that Davidson, “never apologized for the position of the ACLU; she was clear, direct, even forceful, which inspired others and allowed her to be successful.” Miller recalled Davidson having an essential role in the development of the ACLU’s Mountain States Office, the Indian Rights Committee, and ACLU Policy #313 on the Rights of American Indians.

She had good relations with the press and had been friends with Peter Blake of the Rocky Mountain News since her own reporting days. Her spouse, Charles Carter, was at the Denver Post. Davidson stayed close with Judge Peter Nay and Justice Jean Dubofsky, the first woman on the Colorado Supreme Court.

Davidson, who never became a lawyer, has one case that carries her name: Davidson v. Dill. Local police had begun to use arrests for loitering and jaywalking as excuses to search those labeled “hippies.” Davidson intentionally loitered and was arrested along with her 14-year-old daughter and an unnamed board member, but were released. Davidson successfully sued to have their records expunged. The case set the precedent to expunge records of those not convicted of the crimes they were arrested for.

Amidst the seriousness of her work, Davidson kept a sense of humor. Regarding threats made against her and the ACLU of Colorado, Davidson said, “Anyone who took the trouble to warn you in advance wasn’t going to do anything, so I didn’t worry about it.”

Davidson, a mother of five children, co-authored one book, High Country Lockup: Children in Confinement, published by the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Project in 1997.

At the end of her career in October 1974, the ACLU gave her an award that simply stated, “The ACLU of Colorado confers upon Dorothy Davidson this special award with gratitude for her continued dedication to civil liberties.” It was a fitting summation of the singular passion that defined her life.

With Colorado’s lawmakers considering an increase in penalties for fentanyl possession, one thing is certain: Doing so will hit communities of color hardest — exacerbating the mass incarceration crisis of Black Coloradans; making it more difficult to find employment, housing, and education; and marking another counterproductive chapter in the failed War on Drugs.

While Colorado lawmakers have taken steps in recent years to reverse some of the state’s harshest, most punitive policies and correctly moved towards treating drug use as a public health crisis rather than a carceral issue, the recent legislative proposal to make fentanyl possession a felony threatens to roll-back progress, undermine racial justice, and disproportionately harm Colorado’s communities of color.

Under the proposed bill, which passed the General Assembly last week and is currently up for debate in the Senate, possession of a gram or above of any drug with even a trace amount of fentanyl will be treated as a felony. The bill also ramps up criminal penalties for distributing the drug and sets aside funding to pay for overdose antidotes and testing strips, expand the state’s harm reduction program, and develop protocols for treating withdrawal symptoms at correctional facilities. Providing resources to proven harm-reduction solutions, it’s a proposal that takes a major step forward before erasing that progress by punishing people with a substance use disorder with time behind bars. 

The criminalization approach ignores years of research showing that threatening to punish drug users is not effective. Hours and hours of testimony from medical professionals have shown that the changes to brain chemistry that occur during chronic drug use make users less able to register consequences like legal threats. Simply put, we already know criminalization does not work – so why would we go down that failed road again?

While people across the state use drugs at a similar rate, Black people are twice as likely as white people to be arrested for a drug offense. By the same token, innocent Black people are twelve times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug offenses than innocent white people and serve longer sentences than white people for similar offenses.

Long-term substance abuse recovery depends heavily on stable housing and employment, both of which become substantially more difficult to find with a felony conviction. Increasing punishments is likely to lead to more overdose deaths, more pain, and more suffering across the state as drug users avoid health services and instead resort to riskier drug-using behavior to avoid detection and prosecution. 

Most people recognize the perils of going back to a system that criminalizes drug users rather than providing the supportive systems they need to recover. That’s why in recent polling a majority of voters support decriminalizing the possession of a small amount of drugs, opening overdose prevention centers, and increasing access to medications to reverse opioid overdoses.

Fortunately, we already have evidence about what types of treatment approaches are most effective. Many of these supports are included in the current draft legislation. These include allocating resources to meet the demand for substance abuse treatment rather than trying to imprison our way out of the problem. In addition to funding community-based organizations to help prevent addiction in the first place, we must vastly expand our investments in treatment, recovery, and harm reduction strategies. To solve this public health crisis together, we must treat it with the evidence-based approach it demands. For all Colorado’s families and communities — and particularly for communities of color — reverting to a criminalization model is not only unjust, it’s counterproductive and dangerous.

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Deborah J. Richardson is the Executive Director of ACLU of Colorado, where she works to defend the civil liberties and civil rights of all people in Colorado.