I live in a place where we have needle exchanges, places to shoot up while supervised by nurses, naloxone kits handed out to whoever wants one, and emergency personnel rushing from the site of one overdose to the next offering judgment free help. So we're kinder, but we aren't solving the problem. For all the mantra of "treatment" I don't think anyone has found one that works much of the time. Many people I know have spent fortunes and enormous amounts of emotional energy only to watch the beloved addict return repeatedly to drugs. Maybe we need to address the question of why so many people make this choice; perhaps the metaphor of disease/treatment is misleading.
7
The money addicts spend on drugs goes STRAIGHT into the coffers of the central American drug cartels and the Taliban. The money of US citizens finances the murderous operations of these terrorist groups.
Thousands of women die each year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels. The guns that shoot them and the bullets that kill them were bought with the money provided by American drug addicts.
The Taliban has been known to kill young girls for nothing more than attending their local schools, because the Taliban believes girls should be uneducated. Americans buying heroin finance these killings.
Yes, drug addicts are "victims" and need medical help to overcome their addictions. But they are also directly complicit in the crimes of some of the worst terrorist groups on the planet.
We cannot go on ignoring that reality.
4
This is a very well written, and educational piece. My comments are on the policies of prosecuting those people who get high with someone who winds up dead. If we are to extrapolate this policy, we are going to have to charge a lot of people for deaths related to alcoholism. My point? It's a flawed approach. Addicts, alkies, we need treatment and recovery, not prosecution and imprisonment. We don't as a society punish people who have cancer, or other deadly diseases, but we punish addicts and alkies? That's right, alcoholism and addiction are diseases. What about in the last part of the article, the father of Nick Klamer? If this line of reasoning holds true, shouldn't he be prosecuted?
The article is good, it shines light on what is happening around the country in prosecutors offices and courts/jails/etc. But it speaks very little about how we are going to solve this problem. The simple fact is that the illegality of drugs or the possible penalties for using have NEVER solved the addiction or alcoholism problem. They are mild deterrents at best.
6
If a people who share drugs with someone else are killers what about the growers, manufacturers and distributors who profit from the sale of drugs in the form of tobacco products that kill millions every year and cost billions in health care dollars. I am sure the different treatment has nothing to do with campaign contributions.
5
Yes. they should be held accountable. they are as equally gulty as if they injected,snorted, smoked or any other means themselves. drugs equals death. these people who provide the drugs deal in death. they are making money off the sale of these deadly drugs.we must stop coddling these parasites that live off of the suffering and misery of others.
1
By this argument society should also be charging all of: the police, elected officials at local, state, and federal levels, and all teachers and caregivers who ever worked with these users! Seriously, this is an enforcement approach which is unreasonable, unfair, and indefensible.
12
I am astonished and disgusted this is going on--on both moral and economic grounds: I don't want my tax dollars paying for $33,000 per year to jail fellow users or addicts. There must be either some type of malice required for these charges or some quantity and distribution minimum so they actually target real drug dealers as originally intended.
Just because prosecutors feel powerful to stop our current addiction crisis, doesn't mean they should simply be looking for someone to throw in jail. Mr. Orput may be an alcoholic who is not drinking but he certainly doesn't sound like someone in recovery.
This article shows how prosecutors and law enforcement still have absolutely no clue what addition is like or about.
14
A policy like this will cause more needless deaths, for those that overdose will have their partners and using buddies abandon them, for fear they will get arrested and charged. You can't scare addicts into changing their habits once they are addicted. If that (fear of the law) was the case, addicts wouldn't use. Life saving narcan can prevent an overdose death but if people are afraid to make the call, the morgue will show up.
Prevention, treatment, and education are the tools that work the best, and are the most cost effective. Prison is the most expensive, and costs us the taxpayers the most. Unless you own stocks or have interests in the Prison Industrial Complex.
11
Addiction is probably to blame for most of the court cases that wind their way through the local courts here. Someone gets drunk or high or both and beats on his girlfriend. A mother smokes meth with her toddler in the house. An addict burglarizes a house to get stuff to sell to buy more oxy. A drug dealer decides to take back drugs and/or money from a client who hasn’t paid off a drug debt. Someone else shoots an associate in the face during a drive by. And that isn’t even counting the drug dealing and drug possession charges or the charges for an overdose death. It may be considered a disease, but cancer patients and diabetics generally do not steal, assault or kill others in the community. Treatment often does not work the first or second time they are sent off to rehab and sentencing is such that they are usually back on the streets within a few months. There is inadequate funding for treatment programs, especially for people who are two or three time losers, I am not sure what the solution is but, as I overheard one lawyer say, “Some of them just need to go to jail.” At least they have a better chance of surviving the night and aren’t stealing from and assaulting their neighbors then.
6
Those that pass on hard drugs that result in deaths as well as drug dealers should go to prison or ideally be executed! "Sharers", be they family members or not, know about the lethal Russian roulette reality of these drugs and they should at least be jailed and their lives ruined just like those that drive recklessly or while drunk and cause the death of innocents. We don't allow people who commit vehicular homicide to whine "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it!" and get away with killing someone when their reckless behaviors are known to be highly dangerous to others. And life in prison or execution is not primarily about revenge or even justice - its about the necessity for a society to make an impossible to misunderstand statement that certain actions are totally unacceptable. Our society needs these kinds of unambiguous statements and standards more than ever to counteract the moral relativism and super individualism, the heck with everyone else, and no moral education taught in schools or anywhere else situation that we have today.
This line from the prosecutor says it all, “You owe me for that dead kid.”
These cases are about revenge and prosecutors gaining/burnishing their reputation of being tough on crime.
One might excuse the family of the deceased for wanting revenge, of course their inaction to stop their family members drug use limits how big a pass they get for demanding revenge.
Prosecutors on the other hand are over-reaching and criminalizing addicts.
I believe that the first of these cases to reach SCOTUS will surprised the crud out of these prosecutors. Intent is an integral part of getting a conviction, and none of these type cases involves the type of intent needed to meet that burden.
The original intent of this type law, to get drug dealers, is one thing, but when two people choose to do drugs together neither is a killer but both are victims of a social structure that made them think that drugs were their best, or only, way to feel good.
40
These prosecutions are beyond stupid. And so are the laws support them. Only one person is responsible for a drug overdose or death: the person who decided to take the drugs, and then acted on that impulse. These garbage prosecutions send the opposite message of personal responsibility and accountability, because of course it must be someone else's fault.
10
Mr. Orput is pretty off-putting. He has dreamed up his own particular evangelism and is inflicting it on other people. I appreciate the detail in this piece regarding Mr. Orputs addiction to cigarettes and Ambien. This frames the argument against his stance perfectly. There is no flow chart for life that clearly marks bifurcations at decision points, showing the moral choice vs the amoral choice. Responsible choice vs reckless choice. His addictions are really only different than those of the "victims" he claims to represent (the addicts who died), because society has legalized his addictions. We all make our own choices in life, and need to accept the consequences. The people who overdosed made their own poor decisions and suffered terrible consequences. To take it to a morbid extreme: when Mr. Orput dies from lung cancer as a consequence of smoking, should the voters in his state be charged because they failed to pass a referendum making smoking illegal?
28
So by extension all prosecutors should be prosecuted for murder as they inflict their sick minds on their community. That this is really happening is a wake up call that citizens better not ignore. The American right has become a place where madmen get away with murder.
7
We need to go after the doctors who over prescribe and pharmaceutical companies who pay these doctors to prescribe these medications. Going after these losers is not going to solve anything.
3
Lock them all up - why not? At least it'll get a few more junkies off the street for a while. (Though the case where the guy who gave his girlfriend what he thought was Adderall makes no sense.)
I have as much sympathy for opioid junkies as I do for methheads, which is to say, none. Why are they viewed differently? Where do any of them get the money for their drugs? Probably by stealing, robbing, etc. Yet first responders will use narcan to revive people FOUR TIMES a day, so they can continue to steal and shoot up.
People like to say that there's some physiological reason why people get addicted, ie to explain why someone like me, who's gotten lots of painkillers (from vicodin to oxy) for different surgeries, is different. I take them, then stop. One time i had to take oxy for almost FOUR WEEKS (gasp!) for a shattered collarbone. Nope, didn't get addicted. So if it's physiological and "can't be helped" in some people, could someone explain to me why out of all the people I've known through, say, business school, none of them have become addicted? Even though statistically these people too would have surgeries or ailments that require painkillers?
Let's at least dispense with that fiction, that they become addicted through absolutely NO fault of their own. They're no different than methheads, looking for a cheap high to help them avoid real life. Too bad.
8
Where do they get the money,you ask? Not all of us come from the streets, you know! Speaking for myself and for most of the opiate (heroin, Dilaudid, etc.) addicts I was friends with during my thirty five years of use, we came from families of the infamous 1%. As for me, at the age of eighteen I was given the income from a multi million dollar trust fund as were most of my addicted friends. One of them was the direct heiress of a founder of one of the world's most famous investment banks. One whose name the world is very familiar with! We graduated from college, had kids, and did all of the things we were "expected" to do, all while addicted to opiates. Most of our children, now young adults, have turned out to be happy and successful. During my years of addiction I didn't once steal a dime from anyone, as I didn't have to. Do you have any idea how many people like me there are out there?? Way too many to count. Even opiate addicts who aren't as wealthy as my friends and I are have lived their lives as high functioning addicts. Before I close, I'd like to thank you very much for the lovely death wish you've sent to all of us. It shows true kindness and caring towards your fellow man.
16
Many people also consume alcohol and don't become addicted, but some will become alcoholics. If you are a person who can consume opioids or alcohol and not become addicted, consider yourself lucky rather than being self-righteous. No one chooses to become an addict, and it's ridiculous to think that anyone would purposely want to live the life of one.
16
And then there are the majority who do not have trust funds who steal from family and friends, burglarize their neighbors’ homes or embezzle from their employers. Some graduate to armed robbery. Others assault their loved ones. Many have utterly destroyed their children’s lives. No, I would not wish harm or death to an addict. Treatment is preferable. But they wreak havoc in communities across the country as well as in their own lives.
2
Addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease of the brain. This includes alcoholism. You can put 100,000 more Americans in prison if you wish to bolster Trump and Sessions's private prison mania, however, you won't save anyone's life. While we're at it, let's put all people, usually family members, who could assist someone in managing their chronic illness, but fail to do so in prison too. (But only if the person dies.) Imagine it! Prisons on every street corner. The money for private industry! Say what? "Personal responsibility"? Trot out for show when the red base needs to be revved up.
6
Just another example of Americas wildly successful scam, The War on Drugs. In this version, Prosecutors looking to make a name for themselves and a merit badge for advancement, as being tough on crime and that scourge of opiate/heroin abuse.
Sociopaths willing to harm others for their own grandiose.
Yes, Prosecutors are a necessary endeavor. This ave. is not one of them.
5
By this logic all overdoses are suicides. They didn't intend death, but intent is now irrelevant, right?
2
In this world death is as inevitable part as life as birth. If every needless death must be prosecuted, so should every needless birth. Let the heavy Hand of the Law do some pounding where it does some good.
1
It's a sad day in America that the best thing that we can think of to do is prosecute more people. How about helping our fellow citizens rise above their addictions and become performing members of society?
4
This policy will cause some to abandon persons and cause an overdose death that is preventable.
This is unbelievable hatred. What ever happened to " Mathew 25;40, KJV "And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.''
4
Why aren't we charging college fraternity members who force alcohol on new pledges and kill them?
5
Actually, we are.
3
Foolish and regressive approach. I can understand going after dealers but users?
The war on drugs was lost years ago. Time to move toward legalization. Then money wasted on enforcement can go toward treatment.
7
Addiction is a disease that, if left untreated, progresses to death. If that is the case, choosing not to treat it might be considered slow suicide. In a model that denies access to treatment in favor of prosecution, is the State then complicit in assisted suicide?
Silly? Well it makes about as much sense as the convoluted logic of the prosecutors quoted in this piece.
5
It occurs to me how barbaric this country is. No one speaks of death by alcohol, which people, particularly the young, die from the overdose. In addition, we simply don’t need more people to fill our private prisons nor do we need to build more for the likes of this. One case stands out. A kid’s mother is cut off of her medications and her son gets her heroin. He’s going to be tried for a type of felony murder and ruin his life? Just what we need: more people in jail. Awful, just an awful idea all the way around. (There are already laws on the books against sharing a drug which is prescribed to YOU.)
2
This is such an American response. Blame the victim. Make the victim a criminal. No doubt none of these people would be in their situation if they had a choice.
2
I doubt many people give a second thought to what's happening to these junkies behind the dumpsters in our cities.
Charge them, don't charge them...ehhh
They'll do themselves in at some point.
1
What role does race play in deciding who is being prosecuted? With the criminal justice system and "the war on drugs" involved it most definitely plays some role. The Times failed in this article by not discussing it.
10
This is a wonderful idea. We can run up the arrest and conviction records, and stuff the jails with these pathetic losers, while ruining their and their families' lives, and leaving the pharmaceutical industry pushers untouched. The arrest, prosecution and conviction rates will go through the roof. There'll be lots of work for lawyers. We're doing something! We're doing something!
The opioid epidemic will rage unchecked.
5
I forgot another great thing about locking up survivors and families. It's free! The taxpayers pay for it!
1
These laws are monstrous. How many people will be left to die as a result? How many of these bills have been written by the lobbyists representing the private prison industry? I would be interested to see whether the stock prices of these houses of horror have gone up in the states that have passed them. How much more barbaric will this country become? I shiver just thinking about it.
3
...because you can’t get enough of criminalizing public health problems.
3
Addicts are pathetic and there is no doubt they are in need of protection, but this tactic actually does not help any addict and makes it much more likely that friends and families will be punished for their efforts at help, however misconceived prosecutors might find them. Prosecutors have way too much discretion in the American system, not to mention, they have zero training in the treatment of addiction. Now that they are turning their unfettered against mostly white middle class Americans rather than poor people of color, maybe someone will actually push back, much as white people were happy to overlook punitive policies for drug users until the users started popping up in their own families and neighborhoods.
1
Fascinating. In the country with highest incarceration rate in the world, progress is measured by prosecutors and politicians conspiring to devise new and ingenuous methods of putting yet more of their fellow citizens behind bars
A justice system prioritising retribution above all other considerations is no doubt a help. Pete "you owe me for that dead kid" Orput makes an excellent exemplar for such a system.
4
What about self responsibility
5
This is just more of the 'low hanging fruit' being held up to prove something is being done about opiates. Last month it was chronic pain patients being told to meditate after they were denied the one medication that enabled them to function. It is time to de-criminalize these drugs, before we make another awful mistake like we did with crack. Doctors and prosecutors are not equiped to deal with this problem. They have filled our prisons and our cemetaries without making any progress toward solving the problem.
2
We have to fill all our for-profit prisons or they won't make money. It's all about the money not people.
7
Yes, addicts are victims and need medical attention.
BUT ... the money they pay for their drugs goes straight into the pockets of the drug cartels who are destroying Central and South America with their campaigns of horrific violence and corruption of police and government.
The money of American drug addicts pays for the guns and ammunition that kill thousands of Mexican women each year.
Then there is the Taliban, killing girls because they want an education, and profiting off the sale of heroin to Europe and the USA.
Knowing, fully understanding the consequences of their actions, will not cure addicts of their addictions. But living in crass ignorance will hurt us all.
I lost a brother to heroin. He was a gentle guy. But it pains me deeply to know how he contributed to the truly horrific violence of groups like the Taliban and the Central American cartels.
http://time.com/5111972/mexico-murder-rate-record-2017/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/03/27/pakistan-attacks-schools-devastate-e...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/world/asia/opium-heroin-afghanistan-t...
3
My problem with this is the severity of the sentence and the limited scope of sentencing. Giving several hundred dollars to addicts is lie giving a gun to a baby, with a hair trigger. I have friends and family who are/were addicts. Taking responsibility for actions is a key phase in defeating addiction. Addicts are a blight on society. We tend to want to sugarcoat addiction, referring to the addiction rather than the people. I was in Zurich's Platzspitz during the enlightened policy of providing a "safe" place to shoot up. There are city's in the US that want to bring that concept here. It was like the worst circles of the Inferno. Addicts will only respond to reality-based policies that create consequences (real consequences) for drug use. This should include charges like this (expanded to enablers who give cash to addicts). Yes, it is cruel, but it may also work where all this compassion has failed. This is not "tough love." This is society taking necessary steps to end this disgusting crime.
7
"Dag nabit, my daughter/son is dead. I never like her/his/boyfriend/girlfriend. They lived, so they will pay, gol darnit."
The poor, blaming their own because they can't blame those really responsible...those who make the rules.
5
Drug addiction is one of the problems we cannot solve because our elites have no new ideas. They get frustrated and take it out on people: those who consume drugs and those who supply drugs. No matter how hard they punish both, the problem does not go away. That's a perfect illustration of the impotence of the dominant elites.
3
As is often the case America gets it wrong yet again. Why is it that the poor and the damaged go to jail and no one from big Pharma ever will? There is a web of people responsible for a drug overdose and only one goes to prison and that person is the most vulnerable amongst the lot. All the money wasted on incarcerating people could be better spent on helping people get off of drugs or be in a program using methadone. But this is not the way in our country; we are a punitive society and it is usually the lowly who are punished. In many ways we are a sick country that needs to rehabilitate itself.
8
Throwing someone into prison, regardless of charges, won't make a dent in the problem. Quite the opposite, in fact. An addict uses because s/he has no choice in the matter. S/he suffers from a brain disease that is well explained in information provided by the National Institute for Drug Abuse. The URL is NIDA.gov. Look for a publication entitled "Drugs, Brains and Behavior: The Science of Addiction." After you read that, then weigh the merits of prison vs treatment. For the money spent in prosecuting one addict for murder, they could go into a top-ntch rehab facility. I speak as a substance abuse counselor who has 32 years of recovery experience.
4
The first time I ever did CPR was on a young woman who had overdosed on injected cocaine in the back of a van with her 'boyfriend'. The boyfriend brought her to the ER in the van. She was completely naked. He was fully clothed. They had been partying several miles away on the lakefront when she arrested. He seemed sober. It must have taken an awfully long time for him to drive such a distance to the hospital. She was revived but was brain dead and was declared officially dead about two months later when life support was withdrawn.
Don't know what happen to the boyfriend. It was probably considered an accident.
8
There's always a need for case by case analysis. Not sure why the DA didn't file charges, but it doesn't mean they should in a more benign fact pattern.
3
It seems we have learned nothing. We will increase an already sizable underclass of ex-felons who are disenfranchised and difficult to employ, leaving them in poverty, exacerbating the issues that drive them to addiction in the first place. We’re reliving the crack epidemic all over again. One does not have to sympathize with addicts to understand the how damaging this is. And it will likely do nothing to solve the drug problem; it will probably make it worse.
6
Why arrest everybody? Why not treat druggies? The prison industry and conserrvatives are behind criminalizing drug addiction. More prisons. More poor people out of sight. Drug treatment costs money. Americans are too cheap to pay..
4
Are the lawmakers who restrict the implementation of harm reduction policies murderers?
Are the pharmaceutical corporations that synthesize and mass market these highly addictive chemicals murderers?
Are the victims of addiction, whose primary fault was having trusted in those who were said to have expertise, also murderers?
When each of us looks in the mirror, do we see a murderer?
1
The prosecutor who “thinks of the grieving family he will meet—and then considers who will pay” is the problem. The grief and loss that the families of dead drug users must face is not at all abated by this approach. This is not justice; it is a terrible attempt at a kind of emotional vengeance. It completely misses the point.
5
How does this relatively new policy of charging the surviving addict square with the idea of eliminating prison terms for so-called non-violent drug crimes? This is a huge contradiction. It also doesn't make sense to imprison someone for a drug problem when study after study has shown that treatment for addictions and mental illnesses are the most effective way to stop drug abuse and recidivism. This sounds like a cheap way to appease angry, distraught relatives by making someone pay, no matter how sick they are.
2
Let me guess. Republican states? Republican prosecutors? Why help people with treatment and programs and counseling when you can punish them? Especially when money for treatment and programs and counseling would waste all that tax money that rightfully belongs to the rich? Besides their Big Pharma contributors and budded are making a mint on opioids. And for Republicsns greed and plunder are much more sacrosanct than human life especially if the human is poor, minority, a woman or disabled.
3
Treating needle exchangers as homicidal criminals will do nothing to solve our critical epidemic of drug overdoses, but it will exact unduly harsh sanctions on people who are more ill than evil.
For everyone who shares a used needle there is someone else who voluntarily accepts its use. Should we treat these folks as suicidal felons?
If the sorry history of our was on drugs teaches us nothing else, it is that punitively draconian measures are woefully counterproductive. But then, we are not exactly a nation of learners.
4
Just in case you missed my first post.))) Drug addiction is one of the problems we cannot solve because our elites have no new ideas. They get frustrated and take it out on people: those who consume drugs and those who supply drugs. No matter how hard they punish both, the problem does not go away. That's a perfect illustration of the impotence of the dominant elites.
2
No prosecutor was ever voted out of office for "doing something" about drugs. A big distraction issue for low information voters.
Meanwhile, the real criminals, who wear suits and ties, are bleeding out our democracy.
6
Unfortunately you can't prosecute the deceased who are almost always criminals in these situations.
1
The killing happens on both sides of the drug transaction.
Yes, people who help their friends overdose, no matter how unintentionally, are partly responsible for the deaths.
But that's just half the story.
People who buy drugs are financing DIRECTLY, with their cash, the death machine that are the central American drug cartels, and the Taliban too for that matter.
In Mexico thousands of women each year are killed by the drug cartels. The guns and ammunition used in these killings were bought with the cash of American drug users.
The Taliban finances much of its operations by the sale of heroin to Europe and the USA. When the Taliban go into a girls school and kill young girls because of their ambition to learn, American heroin users are financing that operation.
It's an ugly truth that never gets discussed in articles like this.
Will understanding these extended consequences help addicts recover? No. That is a medical issue, not an ethical one. But hiding our heads in the sand isn't going to end the horrible violence either. Drug abusers need to KNOW they violence they support with their cash.
3
I fail to understand WHY, in an industrialized, first world country, we cannot accept the same thing that other like countries have: drugs are addictive, especially opioid based drugs. The best way to treat them is with REPLACEMENT, NOT prison!! That means, yes, rehab, and providing medication that replaces the opioid of choice. Prison does NOTHING other than punish someone who is already punishing themself by removing themself from the better life that they deserve the chance to have.
We will never understand the whys of addiction. That isn't the issue. The issue is our archaic response to it. Third world countries still throw human beings with mental health issues into hospitals and chain them to the ground because they do not understand them. This militaristic response to a DISEASE is the same: we don't understand you so we throw you away. Then, when some of you die, we throw THEM away. For WHAT?? To make sure those beds in the prisons are filled. The prison industrial complex LOVES that...... especially when you're throwing away black and brown people, or addicted people, or people with scary mental health issues you don't understand. Those are the BEST.
Guess what: we are ALL human beings. We all have inalienable rights. Our founding documents speak of them. Throwing people away stomps on human beings' rights.
4
The faith in violence and vengeance is impressively imprinted in our American psyche. It appears there is no issue in international relations that cannot be solved with a 500lbs smart bomb and there is no social ill that cannot be solved with incarceration. Where does this, in my opinion, perverse faith come from? Is it the need to appear to be doing something and solving problems, when you know you're not?
4
When Big Pharma execs are consistently prosecuted and jailed for the excessive production, promotion and distribution of the opioid med's involved in the fatal overdose epidemic, I might take some of these laws and the political shills who enact and prosecute them seriously. Until then, I'll remain convinced that the whole charade is just another racket.
3
This subject hits close to home for me. My brother is sitting in federal prison for this exact same thing. There was a group of people hanging out partying. One you lady had meth and she traded some other guy for some heroine, all partied all night. Went to sleep she didn’t wake up. When they did her autopsy report she had meth, heroine, Xanax, cocaine, as well as some barbiturates. But they charged my brother and another man for providing an illegal substance that caused death. She was in & out of rehab for many years (6) my brother had only just turned to that scenario 6 months prior. He went though a tough divorce & his best friend committed suicide. But he is sitting in federal prison for the next 12 years. Crazy if you ask me. My brother had never even had a speeding ticket.
48
No one forces a person to become addicted and stay addicted. As with finding physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and distributors guilty of "drug overdoses" finding those who are sharing drugs "guilty" is shifting the blame. Except for innocent newborns who literally had no choice if their mothers were addicts, no one is responsible for the overdose death of an addict except that addict. America, stop blaming others.
So one can be charged with murder in a drugs case where the “murderer” has no intention and is a possible victim themselves. But giving your kid confiscated weapons (Parkland shooting) or leaving weapons unlocked (Texas/Sandy Hook shootings) results in... what? My American cousin thinks your country needs legislation where parents or spouses who supply or carelessly store weapons used in shootings should be charged as abetting. It won’t solve your mass shooting problems but it might help. This bizarre contradiction - drugs are criminal but guns are fine is truly astonishing.
6
The insane drug laws are merely an extension of the inequality permeating our society. Having spent the majorit6 of my life around enormously wealthy people, I can assure you a different set of rules apply. Drug laws are make money deals for lawyers and for profit prisons. Does anyone think a child or the parent for that matter of privilege would be doing time for the same offense as a poor person? Amply illustrated in this photo is it’s not a question of the color of your skin anymore it’s the amount of your money and influence. This was really horribly on full display when The Times had an article a couple years ago that featured a young woman with a wealthy father plowing her SUV into a crowd injuring or worse several people, very little punishment, the same days paper featured a story of a poor black girl in Georgia sent away for life for an accident that killed someone. Got money, you can literally get away with murder, you don’t have money the system will grind you up for their profit.
5
Ms. Elkins was found guilty of manslaughter. To put things into perspective, the Captain of the Costa Concordia (the cruise ship he 'flipped' in Italy) was also found guilty of manslaughter. For the deaths of 32 passengers he was given a prison term of 16 years.
1
The exponentially increasing use of opiates like heroin, fentanil etc., in the US will soon make America (the US) , Last. not First.
Any organized effort to stop this carnage is fine with me, including criminal charges...
This is why a lot of people hate prosecutors. They are mean and cold and heartless. How can they this to people who have already suffered loss and who, no doubt, have lives that already aren't exactly fair-tale quality? When people do drugs together, they know exactly what the risks are. When a tragedy or a mistake happens, as it often does, they usually understand that it's what they signed-up for when they decided to become junkies. What will it take to stop some of these aggressive prosecutor tactics. They ruin people's lives for sport and personal gain, imho. As we have seen in recent months, prosecutors have an amazing amount of latitude to do whatever they want.
2
Sent this to Mark Rubin County attorney
Dear Mr. Rubin,
After reading this article I felt compelled to write you. Being in recovery for over 12 years and a recovering addict, the idea of prosecuting someone for murder when they are sharing drugs is just plan wrong. I am so saddened by the stories that I just read, and you must have been as well, if you have any compassion. This is a disease and addiction is not a choice, these people obviously didn’t intend to murder the ones they are sharing drugs with, they just happened to survive the dose. It’s probably best if you studied the disease of drug addiction and treatment plans before you send innocent drug victims to jail.
Please do the right thing.
Thank you,
46
What a sad and terrible tale. So painful to read. My heart aches for these people.
Is this because they have empty lives? Are they already people with nowhere to go except places they don't want to be? People who might be able to contribute to society but have no avenue to do that. Easy availability of strong opioids.
Thankfully, I don't know anyone with this kind of drug problem but I know people who are addicted to other things. The list is long. You can be addicted to vacuuming, running, organizing your files, to certain foods, or to beverages, etc.) These things may not be fatal but the suppressed unhappy emotions underneath them certainly are the same. You can die from too much coffee or even water. What then?
Why not send all the partners to AlAnon or DrugAnon meetings so the understand the concept of enabling someone. I question what kind of general education these people get. So much could be done besides prosecution but isn't.
Jail for people who are already broken. Says a lot about who we are as a society.
2
If an insurance company refuses to pay for inpatient treatment beyond 30 days, and a discharged patient overdoses shortly after leaving the facility, shouldn't prosecutors charge the insurance company with murder, just as they are going after friends and family who may have played a role in the overdose?
3
This isn't going to work.
Charging the associates of drug users as accomplices in the user's death may sound good from a political or a "tough-on-crime" point of view. But like so many previous failed efforts on drug addiction crackdowns, this policy was developed by someone(s) with little to no understanding of addiction. So while it might allow prosecutors and sheriffs to publicly state that they're "doing something" about the drug problem, it ultimately does nothing to really address it.
Addiction is a disease that changes the brain completely. Addicts in the throes of cravings and withdrawal lose the capacity to think like a rational person. Most people can't understand this, because most people aren't addicts. This is one of the reasons why only an addict can help another addict.
The compulsion to use; to ingest these substances through any means necessary becomes an all-consuming force more powerful than the will to live. More powerful than any thought of what the consequences might be, to themselves or to others around them. There is no thought of getting caught; or jail; or dying. Addiction pushes the addict far beyond any comprehension of their actions. They literally can't tell the difference between living to use, and using to live.
This is why criminalizing addiction was, is, and always will be a failure. Addiction will never be mitigated (or stopped) for as long as we cling to a societal model of callousness, self-righteousness, vindictiveness, and revenge.
5
Mr. Orput is exceeding his authority and allowing his personal emotions to supercede his professional responsibility to the law.
“I look at it in a real micro way,” said Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County, Minn., of overdose prosecutions. “You owe me for that dead kid.”
Mr. Orput has decided someone must pay for the tragedy of drug addiction, and so rounds up the usual suspects, costing the citizens of Minnesota the price of a jury trial and $33,000 per year for incarceration. As well as the cost of the inevitable appeals.
This money represents resources that could otherwise be used by the state of Minnesota to address the real issues of drug addiction.
2
Taking drugs is a rush apparently. Even rich people do it. The very feeling of the drug in your system is one you want to repeat, because it's instant and intensely pleasurable. I don't use those drugs mentioned in the article and never have but I imagine that's pretty much what it's all about. I do use alcohol on occasion, which is a drug. I doubt anyone can stop this pleasure-process because basically it just feels too good and can be obtained just by an injection or swallowing a pill. Life doesn't offer instant euphoria very often but drugs do. They just like feeling that way and can scarcely resist seeking the next hit.
What is it with America's preoccupation with retribution? "Justice" is somehow served if someone is punished? Point the finger at someone and destroy their lives as well? I can certainly understand prosecuting someone who deals drugs for profit, but throwing some young adult in prison - at taxpayers' expense - simply because they shared the same affliction as the deceased makes no sense whatsoever. Five addicts - people usually guilty of nothing more than making bad choices - could be treated for the price of incarcerating one person for a year. But instead of helping people, we further stigmatize them as felons, making them more likely to have troubled lives. Yup, we're making America great again, that's for sure.
6
I am hoping for the day where we treat drugs and alcohol as a disease and not some crime wave. The money wasted on prosecuting and imprisoning people for drugs could easily be used to address addiction and mental health issues in society. But that day will never come.
"Tough on Crime" DA's and police officers strut their stuff. DA's posturing themselves for a bright political future claiming they are making their town safer. Police bolster their stat's claiming they are making the streets safer. Law makers pass endless minimum sentence laws so they can pat themselves on their back that they too are solving problems. Only to leave Judges bewildered and tie their hands.
When will we learn and accept the truth, that we have created a society thirsty for drugs and alcohol?
How do I know all of this? My ex wife who struggles with addiction was arrested at one point and slapped with over 80 charges? What was the point of that? The DA and police officers did all they can to come up with as many charges as they can to make sure she is "punished" for being an addict. I now have zero respect for DA's and police officers.
An employee of mine is sitting in jail this morning, loosing wages the next couple weeks due to his only drug and alcohol issues. A stand up, reliable, smart guy, who can't control his addictions. The DA only wanted to prove a point. Not sure where that is getting anyone.
1
Are the friends and family who are co-dependent with the opiate user co-dependent? Yes. Are they responsible for their deaths when they overdose? No. The friend or family member can't get through to the drug user no matter how hard they try. In this case, the authorities are being too quick to punish people for actions that are the responsibility of the person who has overdosed. Addiction is a disease that in many ways affects both the user and the co-dependent family members and friends. It requires appropriate intensive treatment for both.
Addictions are a disorder that have psychological, social, cultural, DNA and neural level components.
And at every stage personal responsibility is involved in making choices that enhance or lesson the influences of the component level factors.
And people have known certain choice are evidently risky by observing fellow citizens behaviors and their effects for centuries.
It is a complex problem and obviously there are no easy answers, treatments or cures.
No one changes unless they want to change, but the rest of us can try as best we reasonably can to offer treatment, medications, counseling and so forth.
In the end personal will and self discipline will likely be the deciding factors. Good luck to all who honestly try, and to all that try to help those in need.
As to criminally charging people who give drugs to a friend and they die, it must be decided case by case. There obviously is a place for common sense and compassion. For justice too. The judge and jury whoever they are need a lot of wisdom.
Whenever and wherever there is a problem in our society, you can count on some prosecutor's office to make the problem worse for everybody, while gathering kudos for themselves.
After that they run for office and get elected based on brain-dead slogans, like "he (or she) kept us safe."
Guess the government can't be any smarter than the electorate.
Here we go again with blame rather than trying to fix the problem. Accusations of murder will not deter the addicted. The addicted are processed by their addiction, period. The death penalty has never stopped murder. Furthermore, the addicted wouldn’t be using hard drugs were they emotionally healthy. It is unconscionable how our country treats people with mental health issues. We lock them up and now we accuse them of murder by association. Mental health clinics and addiction clinics for the uninsured have waiting lists a mile long. We disrespect, judge and blame those who are emotionally unstable, have depression, have personality disorders, have PTSD, etc. It’s as if our blaming “them” somehow makes us better than “them”. We feel we can clear our consciences as a society if we just call them junkies and now, murderers. This blame trend is a sign of an immature and sick culture.
1
Once again our unthinking politicians turn to jails to solve all our problems instead of investing the money in treating addiction as a public health problem. We used to lock up users for being users. Now we propose locking up suppliers for supplying the users. Not much difference and no solution to the real problems.
This is just wrong on so many levels. The people who should be prosecuted are Purdue pharma and their ilk, who furiously pushed opiates claiming, falsely as we now know, that they were not addictive to people in pain. Even as the tragic consequences became manifest, they still relentlessly pursued increased sales, with knowledge of, but no concern for the human devastation in the wake of all these opioids. The vast majority of these addictions began with legally over-prescribed opiates that were either over-consumed or diverted.
One has to question the ethics of a prosecutor who fails to make his or her own good Samaritan exception. At the point where the laws keep friends from sharing drugs, they will also keep friends from seeking medical assistance if someone they share drugs with overdoses.
Furthermore, they fail to take into to account the "social contracts" that drug users enter. Many drug users share drugs, connections, and effort procuring drugs because they believe their fellow friends - other drug users - will reciprocate. The act of sharing is done in part becuase it will help ensure they have access to drugs when they are scarce, ensuring that their addiction can be satisfied.
1
Mr. Thistle may have been naive, especially since his son was doing better, but he didn't kill his son. As quoted in the article, "Addiction is a slippery adversary that cannot be held to account." His son was deceptive and wanted to get high. He used his father, but he never imagined the outcome and how his father would be so tormented. I think we have a big problem, a momentous problem, when it comes to addiction and I honestly do not think it is right to prosecute what I will call "secondary" parties - the friend, the boyfriend/girlfriend, the person who drove the car, etc ... Most of these people suffer from addiction themselves. The problem lays with the dealers - the people who are swapping heroin with fentanly or just simply supplying the drugs. All the money spent on prosecution and lawyers would be better spent on rehab followed by intense outpatient and then a change in lifestyle. Undoubtedly, the majority of these defendants have court appointed attorneys - more expense to the system. It almost seems like this is a cheap shot to go after some of these people. It is a lot easier to target the "buddy" than actually catch the dealer. What happened to the days of undercover narcotics cops making their ways into communities and rooting out the drug dealers. So, in conclusion, I like alcohol and at one point I used to drink too much. If I go buy two or three bottles of wine and consume them with my prescribed Klonopin, is the liquor store going to be held accountable?
This makes as much sense (and is about as practical) as incarcerating all drug users, which, to some extent, we’ve already tried. Why do people always think there’s a quick and easy solution to societal problems like drug abuse or mass murder? Time to accept that there’s no quick fix and begin to address these problems at their roots: at home, in the families the offenders grow up in.
Drug use is a choice. My mother suffered from a debilitating end stage form of cancer and refused any pain medication, until the very end. As her primary care giver, I had access to almost every type of "prescription" narcotics, that were delivered around the clock to her home.
After my mom passed away, I discovered that her prescription drugs were not discarded by the hospice nurse. Long story short, I placed all of the prescribed narcotics in a bucket and filled it with bleach and water. I let the drugs dissolve in the bucket and then dumped everything in the sewer.
I'm not sure how you're supposed to discard of that stuff, but I just wanted it out of the home.
Needless to say, I'm in my 30s, and proud that I've never had alcohol for the most part, (except, a little sip of Champagne 10 years ago on New Years). I've also never smoked cigarettes or used any drugs, prescription or otherwise.
I abhor drugs, and it's just strange to me that people use them. Why would you want to take something that alters your mind? I prefer to be in the present and deal head on with my emotions, whether they are good or bad. Also, I enjoy being in control.
At the end of the day, drug users have made a conscious decision to use drugs. They should NOT receive any sympathy whatsoever.
My mother was terminally ill and didn't even want them!
11
If you are ever in a position to discard drugs again, please do not do it in the way you describe. It just puts powerful drugs into the environment. We don't know the consequences of those kinds of actions.
Your mother was a strong woman. But she probably not also genetically predisposed to addiction. Some people will use cocaine once and put it down and never use it again. Other people will use cocaine once and end up never putting it down.
Opiates change nervous systems in powerful profound ways that we only are beginning to understand. You obviously have no idea what it is like to be a person with an addictive disorder, struggling to get or stay sober. If treatment was more available and more affordable, I think situations like the ones described in this article would be a lot less frequent.
I hope you will try to educate yourself about addiction but your mind seems somewhat closed. I would recommend the National Institute of Drug Abuse website.
16
If this law passes muster so to should people be charged with murder anytime they are present when someone dies doing something for pleasure be it gardening, skydiving, or dining.
I’m sorry your relation was so brainwashed by anti drug propaganda that they were unable to receive adequate end of life care.
12
Drug addiction and alcoholism are not choices but are best described as diseases.
7
If as some conservative Republican pundits argue the solution to gun violence is more personal responsibility then these prosecutions are a good thing. I don't agree. Prosecuting an addict for murder when they are literally controlled by the drug is not my idea of justice. A case of temporary insanity induced by drugs. Better to get them treatment than put them in jail. But where do we draw the line if it is OK to act recklessly and irresponsibly with a gun and letting someone who shouldn't have access to guns get their hands on a dangerous weapon and cause harm and death? Shouldn't those individuals be prosecuted too? I say don't prosecute the addicts get them help but put the irresponsible gun owners who are in full control of their capacities in prison for exercising their Second Amendment right in an irresponsible and reckless manner. All rights have rules and limits. No right is absolute. That is what the rule of law is all about and it is the rule of law that guarantees our rights and freedoms.
1
This looks like yet one more insidious way to add to the prison population so that private prisons and the politicians they support can funnel more money from the private trust into the pockets of corporations and the grossly wealthy. The guilty parties in this epidemic are the pharmaceutical companies and politicians who have zero concern for the public good, the health or their constituents or even what's left of our democracy. To point the finger, ever, at the powerless people who are the victims of this scourge seems to me to be the height of immorality.
1
So now the nation with the highest rate of incarceration is putting even more people in jail. I fail to see how this will solve our problems.
Part of me wants to say to the dad who drove his son to Madison is complicit--more complicit than the friend who shot up with the victim. But the other part knows that he didn't mean to facilitate his son's relapse and what he was most guilty of was credulity toward the lies of his son and friend. What the friend appears to be guilty of is being made a scapegoat by a prosecutor who is lashing out because there is nothing he can do to stop addicts from shooting up. Just because a terrible thing happened and someone died doesn't mean you have a murderer in the friend who shared the drug.
Addicts are a headache and a heartache. Putting people in prison for overdose deaths doesn't stop addicts. It only adds to the trauma to these peoples lives. The USA prison system is very harsh. I wish there was a way to assess the person for rehabilitation and the information used to mitigate these long sentences.
So many of the people in prison now have school age children and their lives are totally ruined as well, when a parent goes to prison. I live in the Midwest and it is common now to meet people who have been in prison for a variety of charges. When I was growing up it was rare to hear about people going to prison.
One woman I met had given fentanyl to her brother-in-law and he died from an over dose and she went to prison for 6 years. She just got out. Another lady 2 years and her daughter is 10 now. Another man I met spent so much time he is trying to come to terms with so much wasted time. All these people didn't cause any trouble while in prison.
These horrendous sentences are not just for opoids. Any accidental death is treated as a homicide now. I saw an article here where a young mother was in prison when her child drown in the bathtub while she got up to stir the cooking rice. Young mothers are the new prisoners waiting to happen because of our eagerness to seek convictions.
I read someplace that the USA has as many people in prison as 4 year colleges. So there is a big financial incentives to keep people in prison for private companies.
22
There is too much over-reaction in this painful discussion. Murder charges? Legalize all drugs? Why not lower the rhetoric for a moment. Presence at an overdose is really not murder, but those around the od victim bear some responsibility. Probably sharing, certainly aiding and abetting. But prison time for murder? Way too harsh. Why not a gentler punishment that does what punishment should do--be painful and set an example, but has room for needed rehabilitation? Why not a misdemeanor sentence that demands a few months in a military style boot camp? Lots of exercise. Lectures about health and the law, plenty of time for counseling. Just time to deeply reconsider what drugs does to themselves, society and their loved ones? Those who are not taking it seriously can be sent to a local jail for the duration. Shouldn't cost too much.
3
And let's not forget that putting people in prison makes money for other people in our for-profit legal system. The United States as a whole has no business calling itself a "developed" country. We are a lot more like a 3rd world country when it comes to issues like this.
5
I'd like to see a dozen or so Attorney's General and Prosecutors have one of these happen inside their families. Then let's see if we still hear them saying it's tough but there needs to be accountability. Charge these people for the drug possession or use. But murder? I don't condone drug addiction but these prosecutions do nothing to solve the problem of addiction.
Well, putting more people in prison, especially users, has always worked in the past to curb drug use. That's why there are now so few drug users in the U.S. "The war on drugs" has been a smashing success. As Charlie Sheen would say, "Winning!"
And in privatized prison where the main goal is to maximize profits by cutting costs, inmates will receive the most effective care so that when they leave prison they will be able to function in society. That's what the prison corporations are about: Helping people.
Making America Great Again
3
Wait…so the friend that was with Mr Klamer is charged and in prisoned, but not the father, who supplied the money and the ride to the dealer?
That doesn’t make sense.
1
The urge to hold someone responsible for a death is understandable. But this is wrong. If we're going to hold anyone or anything responsible in these cases it should be our drug laws, the war on drugs, the way money is wasted on interdiction and imprisonment instead of treatment.
While we're fretting about what the opioid "epidemic" is costing our nation, let's discuss America's addiction to high-calorie fast food and the obesity we see all around us.
Last year, about 34,000 of us died from opioid-related overdoses ("related" means the deceased had opioids in their bodies at the time of death, not that the opioids caused their deaths). At the same time, more than one-third of all Americans are obese, according to the CDC, and two in three are considered overweight.
What does that excess weight cost us? More than $150 billion annually (CDC). How many will die of obesity-related causes? More than we’d like.
We’re throwing billions of dollars into punishing drug users and sellers with increasingly skewed interpretations of the law while ignoring a far more deadly plague on our nation.
This is crazy, but par for the course in a revenge and punishment obsessed society.
We should be putting our money and efforts into research, rehabilitation and treatment, not prosecution of fellow addicts.
How much of this is driven by prisons run privately instead of being run by the government? Who is making money from filling prisons, and who is paying for incarceration instead of treatment and prevention?
1
This makes my blood boil. If you were able to read my comments on the NYT, you would quickly see that I most certainly do NOT fall into line with the supposedly "liberal" dogma of most readers. However, you don't need to be a "bleeding heart liberal" or a SJW or a "progressive" to see most of these prosecutions as absurd, counterproductive, unfair, and even abusive.
So a couple of heroin addicts shoot up. One wakes up, the other dies. By coincidence, it was the one who woke up who'd purchased that batch. The one that wakes up goes to prison. Really?!?!?
15
Moral conveyed by Law Enforcement . . . . Don’t wake up. So much for caring about keeping people alive. They’re just mad then because they can’t prosecute you. Poor babies.
For a society that is so reluctant to support or provide treatment as an option, we are now instead saying good bye to even the pretense of treatment in favor of a new legal doctrine that also gets rid of the much promoted "personal responsibility". Now someone else is responsible and treatment options continue to be scarce. Jail is a poor but very expensive treatment option and few come out better than when they went in
7
This latest idea by wealthy legal scholars and politicians to unilaterally make it easier in 11 more states to criminalize the actions of dead addicts enablers almost seems to me like - pure desperation- in light of the fact that they refuse to acknowledge, let alone act on making REAL change to our current and pathological "free-market", hugely unregulated pharmaceutical industry and opaque 'get-anything-you-want here' internet.
But, I also can't blame them. Hard core drug addicts are rarely, if ever able to be easily rehabilitated back to sobriety. I know, personally, of the pain, the despair they create for their loved ones, spiritually, financially. It is true that breaking that 'supply' chain, be it from the murderous pharma/medical industry or their friends' connections (going micro) truly is, 90 percent of the key to beginning the quote unquote rehab process.
Problem is, how many enablers know, are educated to these new legal sanctions that will indeed hold them accountable.
Where are the banners announcing it from the rooftops. Better yet, where are the same banners demanding same from parents of kids who've failed to teach them about responsible gun ownership, who shoot up our schools?
We are one lost mess of a nation when these messages from those we call our 'leaders' are lost in their self-interested translations.
8
It should always be the case that these are investigated as homicides. You don't know that the victims agreed to take these drugs, police have been taking the word of the survivor. This was in fact an easy way to murder someone with little investigation. Look at some of the recent serial killer cases in other countries. Also, as a gay man I know that predatory drugging/ date rape is a very real thing and there are a lot of instances where the victim ends up dead. Police always assume gay men take drugs voluntarily. This is not the case, often they are drugged by rapists in the gay community and their deaths are not investigated in this country.
14
“You don’t know” sounds like the worst basis for a prosecution I can imagine. It’s the antithesis of our basic concept of justice. We don’t prosecute when we “don’t know.” That’s absurd.
1
That is such a rare way for someone to murder someone else, you'll send a thousand innocent of murder junkies to jail for every one murder that would have slipped by. That's the exact opposite way our legal system was designed to work. This is straight up malicious negligence and corruption on the part of these prosecutors who should be receiving decades long sentences for these acts
1
Can you supply some statistics...why would you think this is rare? I knew a guy in the army who was trying to buy cocaine from a dealer and was murdered by the dealer injecting him with cocaine. This is the only person I have ever know that was murdered. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/6/16934054/opioid-epidemi...
This primitive thinking knee jerk reactive solution of persecution is so typical. Just throw another in jail. How effective is that? I don't want to see my tax dollars used so foolishly. I want to see a strategic plan of rehab in place. These people are sick; they need help. Finding a person in a coma with needles nearby could convince a policeman of drug use when actually the individual is a diabetic. The drug user is just as sick as the diabetic.
This country has always had a conflictual approach to drugs where alcohol was at one time illegal. Now marijuana is slowly following the same course as alcohol from illegal to legal. The government is so behind in acknowledging the health benefits of marijuana and keeps it as a schedule A substance. Yet tobacco, which has no health benefits and is so damaging remains legal. How does one make sense of this convoluted thinking? And now incarcerating sick people is one more insane act. Remember the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.
13
So,.. when a race car driver is killed on the track, who is charged?
10
Don't see the connection here. And by using the word "killed" instead of "dies" I think you are assuming someone willfully caused a death. I believe racing is highly regulated, but in the case where there is negligence or malfeasance someone should be held accountable.
Sorry you don't see the connection.
People looking for thrills take chances.
They sometimes get killed by the chances they take and choices they make.
People who earn money selling drugs that have fentanyl or similar drugs cut in that then cause an actual overdose should absolutely face murder/homicide/manslaughter charges--every single time. If you're willing to sell something that can kill someone instantly to put some money in your pocket it's what you deserve.
12
Then doctors who prescribe opiods should also be charged if a patient overdoses later because they became addicted.
Well now - isn't this special? Drug OD was not a problem until it seeped into the white community. This approach is an echo of the tactics of crack vs. coke.
The very same reasoning could be applied to gun owners who have their weapons used by others. Liquor store owners supply a drug that sometimes get people killed.
Just another "tough on crime" move with no basis in reality. After all - who's gonna take the side of some addict who shares and gets their friend dead? No sympathy there but an easy way to appear to be "doing something". Deterrence is a huge myth in all of this.
Looks good though when running for office.
16
And the companies who make, market and sell the drugs... where are they in all this?
22
Some died because they shared the needle for drugging themselves up , here we are wasting time on whom to blame ?
Drug users are wasting our tax payers money to get high.
How many children, all they wanted was to be successful in their lives were killed by gun owners?
Could Republicans for once go after the gun owners and being negligent to keep the guns away for the safely of others ?
14
What about playing Russian Roulette? Should someone be charged for reckless homicide there? Same difference.
4
So our criminal justice system is doing the worst kind of hedging: embracing new, evidence-based approaches in their rhetoric but sticking to the same 1980s, tough-on-crime prosecutions and incarcerations in their actions. An addict will never respond to deterrents nor will his future behavior be impacted by his past consequences. An untreated addict will always use, period. Criminalizing addiction does not result in fewer drug addicts, neither do deaths or incarcerations. Locking up a friend or family member who acts as a pass-through just takes up a cell that should be reserved for someone with true criminal intent and liability. Until there is 100% buy-in by our criminal justice system in evidence-based and data-driven addiction interventions, the problem will only worsen. While an addict is best treated as a sick person rather than a criminal, he must also take complete responsibility for his own recovery; no can recover for him. The role of a just society is to provide treatment to those who seek it, and we are failing.
15
@Mike Bach writes, " An untreated addict will always use, period."
I would agree if you had written, "An addict who truly wants to quit using drugs will find a way to quit - once he/she recognizes that treatment is useless until he/she makes the decision to quit".
I'm a nurse and worked in a residential treatment center. The doorway in was an ordinary door but it was really a revolving door. The majority of addicts come through the door because a judge ordered them into treatment (it's treatment center or jail) or because their desperate families bring them in.
The vast majority of addicts cycle through treatment centers, both government and for-profit, again and again.
We as a society are providing treatment to those who seek it - but believe me, most of the people who come into treatment centers do not seek the treatment. The treatment is forced on them. And when 90% of them leave the treatment center, they return to the same friends/drug users and begin using the same day.
Do I have a suggestion for a better way? No.......I left the job at the treatment center to go into much harder work, taking care of heart patients.
10
John Oliver reported recently how our rehab centers are unregulated, ineffective, yet reaping great profits.
I agree with you; addicts who want to quit and take responsibility for their own recovery will find a way to do so. But you also have to allow for the fact that treatment is highly inconsistent and much of it is not evidence-based. Access to treatment, statistically, is limited to those with insurance and/or EAP programs through employers.
There is only one solid fact about this issue: criminalizing addiction does not work and is alarmingly expensive. Maybe the path to a better way begins with abandoning what doesn't work.
So the pharmacy that sells the Tylenol that results in an overdose death will be prosecuted for murder. That seems to be the logic.
6
The capricious nature of our justice system is simply ridiculous. The kind of authority these prosecutors are executing should not exist. One man (or woman) should not be able to simply decide to destroy someone's life by throwing them in jail for murder when most other prosecutors would order them to go to rehab. For the system itself to not ‘understand’ this simple fact, is crazy. We need to strictly define what prosecutors and judges can and cannot do. They are not Gods. A three year law degree should not give anyone the power we grant these people.
13
Also insane is why the same "crime" merited 4 years incarceration in Wisconsin, but life without parole in Louisiana.
Any prosecutor who thinks "You owe me for that dead kid" is unfit to be a prosecutor. A prosecutor's job isn't to collect pelts, it is to ensure that justice is done. Thinking like this reflects a mindset of someone who doesn't understand his job. Ironic, too, that he begins his prosecution by popping an Ambien and smoking cigarettes.
The notion of charging friends, relatives and nickel-and-dime junkies feeding their own habits for supplying drugs to folks who want drugs is, of course, ludicrous, tragic and counterproductive. Not to mention hypocritical. If we are going to do this, then we also should prosecute executives of pharmaceutical companies and drug distribution companies for creating this mess in the first place. Drug distribution companies knew full well they were supplying way more opioids than could possibly be used in legitimate ways to pharmacies in tiny towns. Why aren't these drug dealers in business suits wearing orange jumpsuits? Unlike the people highlighted here, who are addicts themselves and did what they did as favors, the drug distribution executives did it purely for the money. Same thing for executives at pharmaceutical manufacturers who created markets for addictive painkillers and put money ahead of health and safety. Fines have been issued, sure, but they're still wealthy and free. Why aren't they in jail?
To jail folks at the end of the pipeline while the ones who created the pipeline walk free is ridiculous
19
Many of the people active in creating these pipelines are rich enough because they are willing to support the sales people receiving almost minimal income. Because of their income, they also support the excess, inappropriate sales of these drugs in inappropriate ways. I generally feel the killing of people breaking the law is inappropriate, the current treatment of many people who need help to treat their problems with drug use rather than imprisonment suggests that the people more active in becoming rich because of these sales may be warranted to be treated with death sentence and their wealth that is inappropriate should be used to help treat the people whose problems they caused. People participating in these drug problems by buying into the companies should not be allowed to earn money from reselling their ownership of parts of the companies.
Incarceration and punishment won't work. Placing a prohibition on drugs won't cure the social ills that created the drug users. Remember, prohibition (liquor) didn't work. Placing a prohibition on any item where big money is involved is doomed from the start. The public will find a way to match supply with demand. Street drugs are made in home labs, laced with various additions of other drugs to expand the volume for greater drug dealer profits. Users aren't aware of the various additions to their drug of choice. There's no label on the drugs advising the user what the contents are of the drug(s) they are smoking, snorting, shooting, etc. Basically, they're playing Russian roulette. Homeless users don't have the funds necessary to purchase drugs and take the precautions necessary to protect their health. Hence, syringes are used by a number of different users. Users need to be able to obtain their drugs and syringes free of charge.They also need a safe place to take their drugs. Rather than incarcerating everyone involved in the drug chain users require medical attention and the require the help and guidance of social workers. Users are lost souls with little or no self esteem and no goals. Until we address their medical and social issues drug problems will persist. One other point about supply and demand. There are plenty of drugs being distributed in our jail system. Hence, supply will meet demand.
11
The private corporate prison system needs customers. That's what this is about.
14
We should do it like they do in the Philippines -- death penalty for all illegal drug users and those caught with possession. Now that would be a true American "War on Drugs"!!
1
and how will you feel when that results in the death of a few family members?
Benjamin Greco-
Your contention is legalize drugs so those addicted by pain killers and heroin and whatever else can be happy?
Seriously??
4
Ain’t nothing new about felony murder convictions, folks.
3
At common law, all felonies were punishable by death, so it made no difference if you were convicted of felony-murder or the underlying felony. The felony-murder rule was to deal with attempted felonies, which otherwise were misdemeanors.
Common law felonies were all malum per se, while all drug related felonies are malum prohibitum. Malum per se means you don't need a legislature to pass a law to make it a crime. We all know it's wrong to commit an armed robbery. Malum prohibitum are acts that are crimes only because some legislature has said so. All drug related crimes are malum prohibitum.
There is absolutely no argument for application of the felony-murder rule to malum prohibitum crimes.
Whether or not there is an argument for it, the felony murder rule may well apply as a matter of fact. And as a lawyer you should know the danger of saying “there is absolutely no basis”... for almost anything, outside of your briefs. Additionally your summary of the law isn’t accurate. There were Malum prohibitum crimes, and given the distinctions between law and equity, as well as legislated crimes, your sweeping statements are simply too simplistic.
From Wikipedia: In most jurisdictions, to qualify as an underlying offense for a felony murder charge, the underlying offense must present a foreseeable danger to life, and the link between the offense and the death must not be too remote.
Note: no discussion of per se vs prohibitum
Good lord, this is even worse that the mindless "war on drugs."
6
When the prosecutor who smokes cigarettes dies of lung cancer will the owner of the store that sold them to him be prosecuted for murder? The CEO of the tobacco company?
70
"The boathouse where Nick Klamer died of a drug overdose in Lodi, Wis. The prosecution of his childhood friend, Chase Thistle, has helped the Klamer family cope."
The Law - is about justice.
It is not about helping anyone "cope."
18
What's happened to this country?
(1) The War on Drugs was a disaster. It didn't reduce drug use. It did fill our prisons. Once we had the best university system in the world. Now we have the best-supported lock-ups.
(2) Abroad, the War on Drugs has driven through the roof the returns to trafficking narcotics, as anybody who passed Microeconomics 1A should have expected. Crooks aren't stupid: they have banded together to enjoy the profits of their US-protected monopoly. We call them "Narcos". In Mexico, they've killed 100,000 people for their US-created empires.
(3) Our murderous hysteria about drugs is matched by a barbaric hysteria about punishment. Vindictive, opportunistic prosecutors, who flood our prisons, like those of this article, haven't suddenly sprouted from the ground. Like the loathsome and opportunistic Narcos, they are the beneficiaries of ignorant mean-spirited publics who march under the banner of "Repress. Repress. Repress; Punish. Punish. Punish".
Is there an object of this unseemly roar other than the satisfaction of bloodlust? It certainly does nothing to solve the social problem of which it babbles. Indeed, it makes it many times worse.
(4) Sadly, the otherwise laudable #MeToo movement is implicated, via demanding the doubling, redoubling, etc. of punishment for sexual offenses.
(5) Like sexual hysteria, drug hysteria can in fact victimize consenting adults.
At root, punitive sex and drug demands seek not solutions, but Big Brother.
8
It's a sin - or so it is sold.
America loves her fire and brimstone, and scapegoating, and social darwinism. The punishment model will continue forever, just like the mythical lake of fire.
alyosha - you had me till #4.
1. Its too early to be persecuting, and/or implicating the #metoo movement for doing anything too harsh. the few predators being named in the public square, are not being dealt with too harshly. And they are few in numbers. There is hardly a flood of the accused, being forced to make the Perp-walk.
2. There is no organized #metoo movement, no entity as such, so its silly to blame IT for doing anything. Not when its clear the few predators being seen by the public are clearly gross manipulators of their power and money and resources...
3. You/others cant show any links between these recent #metoo cases, and the ones in this article. which are part of a wholly different problem in this nation; drug addiction.
4. You are doing your #5, to the victims of sexual predation. Creating a counter hysterical claim.
The line by the prosecutor pete orput about being owed for that kid is truly terrifying. Is that how legal professionals view their role in the opioid crisis? Score keepers in the devastation, artificially arranging it on two sides? Revolting and disheartening.
7
Does Not Work. Alameda County CA tried charging Junkies with internal possession way back in the 70s. Then 11550HS, addict under the influence of narcotics with a 3 month mandatory jail sentence. All too expensive, overloaded the system. If anyone has ever walked in on heroin addicts shooting up, it is a form of Junkie ritual to shoot each other up almost like a sexual encounter. Men and women alike. Thanks for trying something, but the antidote for addictions is well known. Now that White folks and their children are over-dosing maybe we'll get there from here. Judging from our American love of gun culture, also an addiction, it's going to be a long road. And addiction to guns and gun culture is psychological and Not physical like opioids.
9
I agree with you that it is not going to work. Although this article is not about opiods, the opioid crisis has been coming to a head for a long time and the majority of those affected have been in rural, White America. But now it seems like opioids are seeping into many communities, almost like the new drug of choice. I am not in favor of making issues black or white, especially since enormous efforts were made during the crack/cocaine epidemic, to help people and treat people. I will, however, state that I recently read a disturbing article on marijuana possession and smoking and it clearly laid out how people of color are targeted for possession at a much higher rate than Whites. At this point, we need solutions and interventions. Drugs are as insidious to our culture as guns (as you mentioned).
We legislate morality in this country. We make hasty decisions on political winds that usually cause more damage. The ones at the top will buy their way out while the rest of us are earmarked for slave work.
2
And so trigger-happy American goes--prosecute those who are already desperate and struggling instead of addressing causes and providing treatment.
10
I am glad that the death of Len Bias and the subsequent laws that sprang up (and sadly, continue to spring up) in the "Just Say No" era of the 80's is mentioned in this article. Brian Tribble, Leonard's friend who supplied him with the cocaine that killed him, was not prosecuted because he was a friend of Bias' but because he was a KNOWN DRUG DEALER! The fact that states passed laws based on the Bias case without having a clear understanding of the facts of why Tribble was prosecuted was ridiculous but understandable for the times. However, the fact that these laws are still on the books or that states like Delaware recently passed laws based on a clear misunderstanding of the reason Tribble was prosecuted here in Maryland is a disservice to the communities and states where these laws exist.
Here in Maryland, where Len Bias was born, raised, died, and is still regarded as the greatest basketball player in the history of the University of Maryland, no such laws exist. In fact, anyone who calls police or 911 to request help for someone who is overdosing is immune from prosecution even if drugs are present in the place where the overdose takes places. That is because it makes far more sense to get help for a dying person that to victim-blame or deem someone guilty by association. The death of Len Bias is still remembered here (the 32nd aniversary is 11 days from today) vividly. Nowhere is the heroin problem worse than in Baltimore. Follow our lead and do the right thing America
10
This is absurd, and I don't understand how rational people could see this as anything but that. The only possible scenario that I could be convinced of someone's guilt is an adult giving drugs to a child.
I speak from personal experience. When a good friend overdosed over a decade ago, we were infuriated with the young man who was with her and didn't want him at the funeral. However, she was a grown adult who made those poor decisions.
Perhaps these convictions are meant to serve as a lesson to others. Is the prospect of death not a good enough warning? Has that been stopping addicts from doing drugs?
28
If you knowingly put something in your body illegally, you are the only one responsible for the outcome.
Those who died were not secretly injected or otherwise tricked. They were full participants in their death regardless of their expectations.
Certainly chase down dealers (criminals) and users (criminals) and friends or family who supplied (criminals), but you can't hang a murder charge on someone for a death that came from a willing participant.
3
At what point will we be able to realize that imprisonment is at too great a cost and not the solution to drug addiction? In the meantime we are feeding another addict, the prison industry.
7
JHACO, which accredits hospitals, found that blaming and punishing individuals for medical 'mistakes' didn't stop them. What does is a blameless environment and Root Cause analysis. The same applies to opioids.
But it's not just about comparing incarceration costs and treatment costs. We must go higher. Illegal drugs are a profit-driven industry. Legalize them. This takes away the profit. Then the legions of importers, dealers, drug lords, crime gangs, etc. go away, the victim base shrinks and gets treatment.
We are still left with abuse of legally prescribed opioids. Regulate prices so pharma makes less of a (pardon the expression) killing off of them. Then give everyone adequate medical care. Increase research on pain control. Make economies fairer -- make the rich pay up; give the non-rich a chance to make a living; take that unnecessary stress out of life.
Politicians cry, "It's too much. These solutions are too expensive". But it's not, they're not. All of these things are done in other countries, and they all SAVE money. (What they DON'T do is pay off lobbies.)
With this approach we come out way ahead, economically and morally.
5
They don’t arrest people who don’t secure guns obtained by perpetrators of school mass shootings, but this? Yes, it’s ridiculous. Besides, has anyone tried to get someone into rehab for drugs or alcohol? In my state, we tried 3 times in three consecutive years, very little support or help and had no success until the 9th time. It takes a lot of what people don’t have, time and family resources.
4
When I started to read this article, I thought about guns and how our most recent school shooter took his father's guns. Is his father being held liable for these shootings? I think I have different opinions when it comes to guns. I think this father is indirectly culpable for these murders as his son had access to his guns. Rehab can be hard to get into, but not if it is court ordered. I don't really know how to weave this into the conversation, but as a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for children in foster care, I watch many parents go through court ordered rehab (both inpatient and outpatient). Maybe when someone overdoses and is revived, they need to enter the legal system, but for court ordered rehab. I recently met a young lady, a recovering heroin addict, and when she overdosed her mother called the police. When the police arrived she had woken up a bit and there was drug paraphernalia by her bed. So, while she went to the hospital, she was also arrested for possession! The last time I saw her, she was on her way to court to deal with this possession arrest.
Gotta keep those prisons full. Corporate profits are at stake.
4
Our jails are already full of Rockfeller offenders. Punishing people for their addiction is not the answer. Addiction is a sickness and needs to be treated as such. Instead we continue to take money away from health related issues and reward businesses with their so-called 'trickle down economics'. I'm not sure when we moved away from our 'up with people' and 'ask not what your country can do for you' into a punishment oriented society. But we've lost our heart and soul. Human rights - what's that? Protection for workers - what's that? Equal opportunity for all - what's that? A nation built on tolerance - a total joke! A nation where being a haven from religious persecution was valued - not any longer! Peace and prosperity - only if you're a one percenters! When our jails are full and privatization is no longer someone's fool hardy answer; then what - will we advocate for lining them all up and shooting them? Our country as we knew it no longer exists. We've morphed into an old, crabby, cantakerous nation. I miss the America that welcomed the huddled masses yearning to be free. I miss the America that strove for opportunity for all. I miss the America that believed in human rights and decency.
7
The failed 'War on Drugs' needs a new generation to fill up the prisons. No surprise since the last generation are finally being released after absurdly long prison sentences that kept prisons full for decades.
I am sorry for anyone who loses a loved one to drug addiction, but they made their choices while alive. Trying to rewrite reality to make them a victim undermines freedom of choice and personal responsibility. My uncle overdosed on heroin in the early 90s. He was in his apartment alone for 3 days until the smell of death alerted a neighbor. It was an awful way to go. I think these prosecutions may lead to the unintended consequence of more overdose deaths. If people are left alone to die, there is no 2nd party to prosecute.
6
Great way to punish the victim. And to what effect? All this will do is put some miserable addicts in prison, at great cost to society and to the addicts and their families.
Mandatory locked facility treatment followed by long-term probation with testing and a return to treatment in case of a violation would be more humane, more productive, and more economical.
7
Once again some law enforcement go off half cocked on a mission to punish people for addictive behavior. My personal experience in the past with these pathetic persons challenged my empathy (people who continued to get high, oblivious to the dying woman in their midst, or those who allowed their children to be used and neglected) - it felt as if they had relinquished their humanity. But assuaging anger doesn't solve anything and costs society more in the end.
Quick reminder: ALCOHOL remains drug #1. Who would they arrest for deaths related to alcohol? Which friends? Which relatives? Store owners?
Most addicts as described will NOT willingly CHOOSE to permanently give up using and CANNOT stick to a long term plan on their own. Law enforcement CAN use criminal charges - criminal negligence? -effectively if this is combined with alternative drug and lifestyle (wraparound) treatment and support suppllied by other community services: mental health, medical, education. The major ills of society cannot all be dumped on police and prosecutors.
The Drug Court approach is compelling. Impose structure via court orders, but allow addicts to opt for treatment with other services designed to help them to rejoin society. Full rehab if they cooperate.
For families: they must be able to call in responsive emergency services in crises. Don't leave them desperate for professional help or fearing repercussions if they call police. If pros cannot solve these issues, how can they do it?
7
We kill people by having drugs illegal, such that dosages and quality control don't exist -- just like prohibition-era moonshine killed people and caused blindness.
We kill people by drug-prohibition with prohibition-profits funding violent criminal enterprises that kill each other's participants and bystanders over market share and productive facilities. (Here in Washington, no winery owners have had any shootouts with each other -- ending alcohol prohibition was the lesser evil.)
We need to legalize and reasonably regulate recreational drugs, as we do with alcohol. We need to only have case-by-case prohibition, as we do with alcohol. And we need to educate against abuse, as we do with alcohol, tobacco, and high-calorie food. (Obesity now becoming our greatest health threat, matching tobacco for life-threatening peril. )
The "war on drugs," is stupid, wrong, dangerous, and it is an assault on civil liberties. The current "moral panic" over drug addiction is a substitute for rational drug policy and is a way to hide systemic economic hopelessness.
It is all wrong, wrong, wrong.
It is time to legalize recreational drugs, minimize harm and crime, and time to let some people use that legalization to kill themselves by abuse (as with alcohol), while we educate people out of that very choice.
And we should we build a country in which opportunity and support give people the hope sufficient to get them to choose participation in a good life over their high.
13
The older I get, the less I like nuance. Give me the single, clear and direct way to go, and the heck with multiple perspectives and waffling.
Yet, on this, I have to say I recognize there are several perspectives of equal merit. Some addictive drugs are so dangerous, like meth, that getting users away to a place of safety, if only prison, helps the culture immensely.
But, putting people in soul deadening prison, long term, only aggravates the problem and increases the number of frightened and abandoned fellow humans sleeping under bridges.
This drug evil is our worst war, and we are fighting it with less than our best efforts. Drug programs work, and recovery is the biggest word in the English language.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
2
Scapegoating so the family can feel that this was *done to* their loved one rather than an outcome of the deceased's own choices.
The companion article notes "Prosecutors often see overdoses from the point of view of the victims’ families ...". That's circular. It means they need to find a perpetrator so they can see the deceased as a victim. They're indulging in denial when *the deceased* was the perpetrator, and the law is enabling them to do that.
10
Isn't the individual responsible for his own actions? Absent force, if you use drugs, you have chosen to deal with the consequences.
15
How refreshing to hear an argument that individual responsibility is part of this dreadful mess. I fear the day when a local police force is sued for not having enough Narcan to save the OD user. Our drug crisis is also a supply and demand issue and not enough attention has been given to those on the demand side.
To answer the headline: Yes, they are all murderers.
6
To answer your comment - No, they're not.
1
Ah. I guess putting white people in prison for a long time for supplying other people with drugs is objectionable? We must only lock up African Americans for doing that. I see.
5
No, we shouldn't be doing that either.
1
Each time his phone rings late at night with word of another death, he takes half an Ambien, smokes a couple of cigarettes in the bathroom, thinks about the grieving family he will soon meet — and then considers who will pay.
Interesting that the prosecutor sending sad, poor addicts to prison is himself a regular user of two drugs.
22
if you take a half an Ambien you are a habitual drug user. Ambien has a carry over effect.
7
I thought that was included - along with smoking - as a pointed observation of Peter Orput's own dependence issues . . . .
1
Hillary! It was Hillary what done it.
3
The "War on Drugs" began as an initiative of the Nixon White House. Before his death in 1999, Nixon consigliere John Ehrlichman revealed that the sole purpose of this initiative was to wage war on blacks and hippies. The War on Drugs, it turns out, was just a straw man for something truly sinister and anti-democratic, and arguably unconstitutional.
Privitization of prisons, and the creation of a "prison industry", began with the Reagan White House, in connection with the still continuing War on Drugs.
Mass incarceration began with the Clinton White House, presumably for the same reason Clinton left the campaign trail and traveled home to Arizona to oversee the execution of a retarded man, Ricky Ray Rector: to buff up his credentials with conservatives.
The combination of these three White House initiatives, each from a different president, is toxic. Today, the US has more of its own citizens locked up than any other country on earth. In fact, we have more people incarcerated than China and Russia <i>combined</i>.
Charging with murder the friends, family, and fellow users of those who die of drug overdose is barbaric, but it's part and parcel of the barbarism preceding it. It didn't arise in a vacuum.
Drugs should be legal and drug addiction treated as what it is, a public health issue. Getting there from where we are today is a very long journey indeed, and it appears we're headed in the opposite direction.
9
The criminal justice system in my native America is broken. It is a machine that works to increase, not decrease, the level of ambient misery.
6
Excellent, and it's about time. Drug addiction is a dirty capitalist cycle of dealer and user with new users being the life blood of the operation. New users are introduced, and introducing a non-user to hard dope is about as immoral an act as there is in a modern society.
You take a healthy normal person who has great potential and you turn them into an empty shell of a person who can't be trusted, won't hold a job or pay taxes, and learns to be a consummate grifter living on the tax dollars of others or theft. There has to be a criminal responsibility for that, and of course some die along the way. The idea that you can get your pal dope and they O.D., and you waltz off to your next fix has to be ended.
You wanna be a junkie, you must be forced do it alone rather than ruining other lives along with your own. Personally I'd allow prescribing hard dope to junkies in exchange for their complete cooperation turning in dealers, and submission to reasonable drug-habit management. But sharing dope, helping with procurement, & especially introducing has to be a serious felony.
5
Half the prison population is there on drug related charges. Hardly anyone leaves prison a “ new person”. This is an expensive and ineffective way to deal with societal issues.
1
Yes part of the theme is that the totality of how drug abuse is handled is a disaster in America. But the vicitm-firsters have ZERO solutions, they don't understand the streets, where life is cheap. I suggest prescribing to addicts. But as for spreaders of the habit, lock'em up and toss the key.
Yes,it does (mean they’re killers) in the throes if their addiction, they couldnt care less if they die, let alone someone else. Treatment fails. Rehab fails. They’re ruined. Prison isn’t the worst. At least they’re alive and fed.
3
hmm...start to go after the war-makers instead (i.e. governments, etc.)...with a similar suggesting of complicit wrongdoing...and then we can start to have a more serious conversation...
5
This is simply insane. The concept of personal responsibility is being eliminated from our mores. I was shocked at this notion when Cathy Evelyn Smith was prosecuted for John Belushi's death 35 years ago. Saying "sure" when someone asks if he can share your stash is entirely different from shooting him in the chest while he pleads "Please don't!"
10
“You owe me for that dead kid” is not a quotation from a prosecutor who doesn’t have a deeply warped view of justice.
If two kids engage in risky behavior, say, jumping off the train tracks at the last possible moment when a train is coming, and one of those kids dies, what does it say about our society if we charge the other kid with murder? It mostly just says we’re simpletons lacking in nuance and utterly incapable of problem solving.
8
"It mostly just says we’re simpletons lacking in nuance and utterly incapable of problem solving."
Agreed. But sadly, that appears to be the case on the whole.
2
"None of these survivors intended to cause a death. In fact, each could easily have been the one who ended up dead. But all were charged with murder."
So Stupid. Just another example of where Trumpian ethics believe problems can be solved simply by blaming the victim.
Cf. the gun control debate; the immigration debate; etc.
5
It is a way to control and police the poor. The Sackler family that owns Perdue Pharmaceuticals knowingly distributed OxyContin to pharmacies engage in fraudulent drug sales. But the “corporation” was responsible, not the individuals involved. If you’ve noticed, as more efforts to punish individuals for opiates have become more severe the overdose rate as increased along with it.
Drugs should be legal, sold over-the-counter like they were prior to 1914. Even though morphine, heroine, and other opiates were sold to anyone from 1870s to 1914, the percentage of people addicted was lower then than today. The “opiate epidemic” is like every other drug scare like the crack epidemic mostly hysteria that could be solved by treating addiction issues as health not criminal issues.
Whenever the media creates drug epidemic narratives the public believes them, they always look ignorant in retrospect which this one certainly will. Opiates are not more dangerous than other drugs like alcohol. If alcohol or tobacco were treated in the media like illegal drugs, we would have endless coverage about all the deaths and the crisis too. If you look through the NYTimes, you’ll notice decade by decade most of their drug coverage look ridiculous today, as will all the “opiate epidemic” stories in the future.
6
We haven’t ever banned cars and trucks, we improved them ( well cars, anyway).
That even cut the rate of deaths in car-truck collisions, in which the car usually comes out the worse anyway.
Death in auto accidents has dropped to the point where a deadly everyday accident has become an event worthy of news coverage, sometimes two days’ worth, that wouldn’t even rate more than 2” 30 yeara ago in the same paper.
Now, how can we cut the number of drug-related deaths?
In a good many places in this divided nation, drug use (in most places, ‘cept alcohol, nicotine and caffeine) is EVIL - and anything except punishing sinners (that’s the difference between bad for you, bad or something similar). And shooting up is particularly EVIL because it’s also ugly.
And politicians and cops/prosecutors/the privatized prison-industrial complex are always looking to capitalize on things that violate our unmentioned National Religion.
EVIL doesn’t get treated, it is PUNISHED. In states where this syndrome can be overcome, we will see progress.
Otherwise, more money wasted on the Drug War. Billions a year spent on programs we know do not work - even pushed by the Times in its connection with the anonymous “Partnership for a Drug-Free America.”
We will get rid of recreational drugs, and drugs as self-medication for physical or psychiatric pain, when we cure the sources of the pain, and change a species that loves recreation.
And eliminate the massive profits involved. For the sellers and system
5
“I look at it in a real micro way,” said Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County outside Minneapolis. “You owe me for that dead kid.
I look at it in a real macro way: mass incarceration as a panacea for poverty, addiction and income inequality to sustain the criminal justice system as a for profit jobs program, and as an excuse for austerity, cutting and starving health care and mental health services. I'm enraged....more enraged.
9
This is madness----as if there are not enough inmates in this Super-Max-Madhouse of a Prison Nation.
Just stop already and think about what you're doing....you want to lock up people who aren't themselves really thinking....and for what? Being incidental to someone else's drug habit.
Has this horror story of a cultural boondoggle not told the tale loudly and clearly over all these years that taking a hard-line stance to drug issues only makes them Worse-
This is one of the few growth industries left in the US. Big Oil & Pharma (both of those for Execs), Tech (for smarties), and Prison-Industrial Complex (for everyone else...)....
6
Garbage and infuriating. How about holding politicians criminally liable for making drugs illegal (for personal and professional gain, of course) which is what requires people to use drugs in an unsafe manner in the first place?
5
Why don't they go after gun manufacturers, and those private equity firms who invest large amounts, and are really the owners. Gun manufacturers are the pushers of death, why aren't they held accountable. Oh, they're rich, in the top 1%, never mind.
1
Today, we prosecute people who possess people who consume but do no create child pornography. Yet, we see their responsibility as a willing participant in a chain of abuse to children to be unacceptable. These same people are often “addicted” to their behaviors. With drugs, we someone ignore what is a far greater culpability in the violence, supply chain, and waves of victims surrounding the abuser. Drug use is not a victimless crime but part of a broad criminal enterprise with real victims from those described in the article to the farmers and producers, victims of crime bosses
1
Given that our vile law enforcement has ONLY made our problems worse this is the logical next step to make things worse. The lame bribe taking prosecutors cannot convict a man of premeditated murder caught on video because the murderer was a cop. NOTE: the lame bribe taking political prosecutors who by the way are above all of our laws including sexual harassment pick on the innocent and the defenseless because going after the real criminals would be to after their own bosses..
"He recognizes the shortcomings of this approach even as he feels compelled to take action. ... [He], thinks about the grieving family he will soon meet — and then considers who will pay."
So Mr Orput understands the futility of prosecuting these people and the irrationality of the policy, but feels compelled to "make someone pay". What we have here is self-righteousness and revenge. Not anything that can be called justice or humanity.
What a nasty, callous and vengeful place this country has become.
7
People who overdose DID IT TO THEMSELVES. No one forced the needle into their arms or made them snort. if they were FORCED or were deliberately given a more potent dosage in order to cause harm, then the person who did these deeds them are culpable.
Drug dealers, family members (enablers) are NOT DELIBERATELY TRYING to kill people who overdose. Drug dealers do not try to kill off their buyers....Dead people cannot come back to buy more. Friends, family and fellow users are not DELIBERATELY trying to kill off their partners.
To blame the people around the person who overdose is about the same as blaming people around the person who jumps from a train platform into the path of an oncoming train. The people around the jumper were present and witnessed what happened, but now they are to be blamed for the jumper's actions?
NO.
5
By the same logic shouldn't those who provided mass shooters access to firearms be held criminally responsible for the deaths they caused?
5
make it legal for personal use, tax it heavily and use some of the revenue to increase information and prevention work in the communities....
1
"aiding and abetting", comes to mind when these drug sharing pals seek to ease their inner demons, play Russian roulette with their lives and expect someone to rescue them when they return to reality.
until some definitive chemical discovery can be concocted that will change that immutable desire to get a fix, this will be a boondoggle for the new industry of 'half way houses', treatment shamans and other "for profit" medical strategy's.
prosecuting may be a 'feel good' approach for the legal industry to seemingly 'do something', yet it merely excuses the dead (and thus beyond the law) individuals from feeling the wrath of legal obligation to the community at large.
escaping the pain, stress, inclusion and benefits that become negated with the plethora of available drugs, even for a few hours (as sleep often does) is a best seller in modern society, with zero job opportunities, shame dished out by the bucketful and the tomfoolery of the Jesus factions, all perpetrating some imaginary la la land of BEAUTIFUL life.
1
Really good idea! Look for the weakest and most vulnerable defendants you can find and throw the full weight of the government at them. Your records will be magnificent and your conviction rate will get you promoted and eligible for elective office. We taxpayers don't mind paying for utterly useless prison sentences, and you will fool the public into thinking you are doing something about the problem -- Instead of bringing your intellects to bear on the problem and actually DOING something about it.
3
This is not a new, the women who was doing heroin with John Belushi when he died was charged with murder. He plead guilty to manslaughter and served 15 months. That was in 1982.
6
I am probably the only person commenting on this article to ever have been homeless and lived under a bridge with addicts. Forgive me if my comments seem harsh compared to the others but I have had enough syringes on the ground for a lifetime.
In all 50 states, if a person commits suicide in front of you and you did nothing to stop it, you can be prosecuted.
States are also starting to prosecute people who convinced others to commit suicide online through their words.
States also go after people like the wife of the Pulse shooter and families will soon sue the foster father of the Parkland Shooter for not having locked the guns up better.
If someone gets drunk at a bar and kills a family driving, the bartender can expect to be held responsible for not cutting off the patron drinking.
But the comments below take a different view when heroin is involved. I do not get it.
If any human knows where heroin is at and does not either destroy it or call the police, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law. That includes American forces in Afghanistan who have not done anything to eradicate opium fields. Notice the uptick in heroin addicts since the U.S. went to Afghanistan? A trillion dollars has been spent guarding opium fields that are the source of revenue for the Taliban and destroy American families and then fill the U.S. prisons with addicts. There has never been a war on drugs. Quite the contrary.
23
Fentanyl is mostly from China... not natural heroin.
Interesting point about ppppy fields....
Like others I wonder about the new users -- age, location, occupation (if) and yes lock up anyone who sells... but the question was if certain co-users should be charged with murder .. what happened to aiding and abetting and to selling (another category -- and yeah, lock em up for a while and make em work even in the fields, growing their own tomatoes.
1
as someone who claims to have lived with homeless drug users under a bridge you certainly show a complete lack of understanding and observation of their behaviors and actions.
To add to that you are calling for the conviction of American Soldiers who are obeying the orders of the top brass, which is bizarre a concept as possible. Bizarre that is except for someone so detached from reality and sense that Trump seems like a good leader. It would take that trumpian level of disassociation and pathology to make the kinds of remarks you just did and actually mean them.
4
does this mean we start Prosecuting people who serve alcohol to alcoholics that results in there death? Cigarettes kill far more people than drug overdoses. Does this mean we begin to finally criminally prosecute the cigarette companies for Furnishing a dangerous commodity known to kill people from Strokes heart attacks and cancer?
5
Serious, long-term treatment and counseling would be a lot more effective and cheaper than jail for these miserable souls.
The American legal system often seems bent on destroying hope.
3
Got to keep those prisons teeming with occupants. Vacancies represent a loss of profit.
OK, call that a conspiracy theory, but it is based on a logical premise- the business of imprisoning people should in no way be related to shareholder profits and corporate influence via lobbying our government.
This in itself is a national scandal. When you include the fact that our prison population began to sky-rocket at the same time as it went private the conspiracy theory gets legs.
2
Addiction is a disease, albeit one for which we do not have a one-shot cure. In cases such as these, where addicts in fact support the death of another, while they may be criminally responsible and accountable, my suggestion would be probation for a cure for their addiction and any fallback a swift and immediate haul off to jail! They have then become a threat to society once again.
1
The common theme in this story; rural communities with get-tough prosecutors going after the lowest hanging fruit : What 'better' way to get reelected. The piece should have examined the fact (and the reasons) these prosecutions are not spread uniformly across the states highlighted.
2
Any chance that executives from the drug manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies that supply the opiod epidemic can be charged with homicide? Their motives and intent are criminal greed and the consequences of their actions are massive overdose deaths. How come prosecutors don’t feel those guys owe them for the drug deaths but a co-addict friend does?
The prosecutors and police are under pressure to 'do something'. So they start putting away the small fry who are also addicts.
The price tag for the rest of us? up to $100,000/yr for each person put behind bars. Money that could be spent on health care or education. Does this make any sense?
3
This is about increasing profits for private prisons and keeping them filled up. Nothing more. If the states had to pay to house these prisoners instead, all the talk would be of prevention and rehabilitation.
Corporations are getting billions of dollars in free labor off the backs of these folks.
Nothing will changed until we abolish private prisons.
Until those in congress, state attorney's prosecuting these "crimes" along with drug companies and border security are held accountable for not doing their jobs, innocents will continue to be the ones held accountable. Yes, someone shares a drug with someone else and one of them overdose. A terrible thing. But what about the drug manufacturer? How about accountability by those in control of allowing fentanyl into the country? Congress can work with the nations and drug companies to reduce access of drugs from other countries. How about the medical community that is responsible for suddenly removing patients from legally prescribed pain medication forcing the patient to hit the streets for pain relief. Should they not be held accountable for their actions which facilitated the move from legally prescribed drugs to street drugs? It appears to me the very same people actually responsible and in better control of the situation are not being considered as a possible culprit in these deaths. Education and help for people usually goes a long way in addressing the problem than does prosecuting the victim. How about criminalizing donations from big pharma to congress? There is no intent to commit crimes by these people, but there is a clear intent by congress to accept donations for re-election by those who are actually creating the situation. Government's answer to everything is usually the "lock em up" scenario. Perhaps they should be locked up for negligence.
It seems dehumanizing to addicts, to say that they had no choice but to take the drugs. Free choice is what makes us human. If we treat them as pure victims, with no free will, we seem to have given up on their humanity.
4
In the cases where someone moved on from prescription drugs to illegal drugs, why not go after the doctors? I had minor surgery late last year and the anesthetist offered me fentanyl as part of the pain drugs administered during surgery. I looked at her like she had lost her mind. Never mind that I have an opiates allergy, there was ZERO need to offer me something that strong for what was not a major operation; I flatly refused and was given only Tramadol (or maybe it was Tylenol) in the IV. I only needed mild, OTC pain killers for about three days after. Docs need to stop and think about whether their patients even need hard drugs in the first place - and patients need to accept that sometimes, pain is just part of life. I have no cartilage left in my knees after 16 years in the Army, and I barely take ibuprofen for it. You learn how to get used to pain, even chronic pain, and unless someone is in so much pain that daily life is affected, there's just no need for the casual handouts of Oxy and the like. Some docs strike me as little more than legalized drug dealers.
2
We've lost our way as a society. Punish the mentally ill, those who suffer from addiction and those who have close proximity to drug related deaths.....but permit and vehemently protect access to weapons of mass destruction like AK-47's ? None of the accused are responsible for the tragic death of their relatives and friends, drugs are. The same logic would
lead to sueing gun manufacturers and I don't see that happening with the same vigor. We need to focus on stemming the flow of illegal drugs into our tcountry, limiting the accessibility to legal narcotics and providing accessible and affordable mental health services to addicts. Villainizing the addict or those nearby is useless and cruel, wastes our legal resources and avoids the root problem. Compassion and care must trump vigilantism and cruelty.
2
As usual, we don't know how to solve the problem. Thus we fall back on primitive punitive measures. I beleive there are measures that can be taken to mitigate drug company/doctor profit motives. However, I can't believe most physicians are doing the best they can for their patients. Quantitative verifiable measures for pain don't exist.
Personally, like pacemakers, until we can provide implants to help people cope either from true pain or emotional/learned behavior, I do not see a solution to this problem.
How about putting some of the prosecution horsepower to work prosecuting bank and securities fraud? How about a universal jobs program tied to mandatory drug testing so we can pick this up early if we want to criminalize drugs.
If drug addiction was treated as a medical, rather than a criminal issue, imagine the positive effects this would have on the US?European nations that have legalised drug use, have seen drug use fall and many other positive results from such a sensible social policy.
The US would immediately save tens of billions in the lower incarceration levels, as the hundreds of thousands of people in jail for drug crimes would be released. The drug cartels would immediately lose their regular cash income from selling drugs. Trump would no longer need his Mexican wall, as drugs could be legally grown in the US. Instead of spending tens of billions on locking drug offenders up, the US could spend tens of billions on drug rehabilitation programs. The government could even earn a little by regulating the sale of drugs. Drug users would know the drugs they are using are of a high quality. Corruption in police forces from illegal drugs would be eliminated.
Despite all the positives from legalising drug use for adults, continuing to lock up drug offenders, instead of treating them for their addiction, is simply aiding the profits of private prisons and not dealing with the issue around drug addiction and how to deal with them effectively.
How is being a gun manufacturer, who gets immunity from Congress for the deaths guns cause, any different than the cases discussed here? If anything gun manufacturers are more despicable because they make a profit off of supplying inherently dangerous products.
How is a car dealer different? They supply a potential instrument of death, too.
How are manufacturers of peanuts different, as they can kill the person behind you on the airplane who is highly allergic to them?
For that matter, why aren't the makers of oxycontin in jail for supplying the drug to the marketplace, as they, just like the people cited here, know that the product they supply can cause death, as can tylenol if you take too much?
What about the prosecutor cited here, who smokes in his bathroom and exposes his family to second hand smoke, a know carcinogen? My sister in law's smoking exposed my brother to tobacco smoke, which is one of two factors that can cause the cancer my brother now has. Should she be prosecuted?
The same can be said for the insurer who gave the woman mentioned only 30 days of rehab.
I cite these examples because I find prosecuting people in the cases you cite troubling. I fully recognize that we have a huge problem with drugs like heroin or oxycontin, but our prisons are full of people convicted of drug offenses, and drugs are just as plentiful as ever and abuse is just as bad, so I am not sure this is the right approach.
Vonnegut claimed that smoking cigarettes was a socially acceptable form of suicide. Recreational opiates are NOT yet an acceptable form of suicide. They should be legalized so people can do themselves-legally. We live in a sick society where, collectively, we choose gun ownership over school children's lives, without blinking an eye. I choose the very modest one-beer-a-day method of escape but I certainly can grok the reasons for wanting to bigly escape twisted reality. Wars, highway mayhem and drug deaths are all just different methods of population control. Life is cruel.
1
Without evidence of malicious intent this kind of prosecution is a gross misuse of taxpayer money and a miscarriage of justice. Prosecutors that pursue this line of prosecution and legislators that write enabling legislation should be removed form office. A far better investment and use of legislation would be for 21st century education and jobs, national health insurance and lowering income inequality that would eliminate the disenfranchisement felt by an increasingly larger proportion of the population.
Prosecutors do this for the easy win. It shows they are tough on crime and are doing something about the problem. Going after large pharmacy's drug companies and doctors may be where the problem starts but that is a harder fight. Users do not have the resources to do that.
4
Western jurisprudence factors in intentionality and culpability. This is regressive beyond going back in time. So perhaps the social reactionaries have won.
2
I tend to believe this new movement is a very good thing. Drug users often suffer from a very diluted sense of agency and responsibility, simply because the pull of addiction is too strong. The drug user will not feel responsible for putting another person's life in danger, and when a tragedy does happen, the addiction is so strong that guilt for having indirectly contributed to someone's death is not powerful enough to stop the addiction. I believe that being prosecuted or doing prison time can give a jolt strong enough to lead someone back to the real world of responsibility and moral priorities (potentially leading to a fanother person's death should be taboo, more urgent than getting high or escaping police). Think of Dostoevsky's heroes: sometimes prison time actually gives a very needed sense of responsibility to lives that are unravelling. Also, we should stop seeing addiction as a tragedy that only involves the user and has nothing in common with other actions that are always caught up in complex webs of responsibility - and liability.
10
Absolutely not! Would you want your child or a relative who has come under the curse of addiction to be left to die because his or her friends are afraid to get help for fear of going to prison? Maranade on that one for a minute and tell me passing laws prosecuting someone for the death of another because they did heroin together makes sense.
1
I should think that in most cases there would be less of a temptation to let a friend OD without interfering, as you know the police will come after you. Hence the impulse to check up on them and see that they have recovered will be stronger. In the case mentioned in the article, the young man was prosecuted for NOT telling the police where his ODing friend was hidden, not for using... The crime here is not doing drugs but letting someone die on your watch. The police would have to make clear what their priorities are. I'm not saying the system is perfect or won't have many negative side effects. But I do think it is a very interesting way to de-isolate drug users. We have a duty to save them until the last minute, and they can no longer be left to die off like miserable lonely dogs, even if they are surrounded by other miserable, lonely dogs. When a death occurs, everyone is responsible.
Prosecutors logic makes sense to me. Enablers/codependents are responsible and consequently guilty of any harm
8
where once upon a time, communities actually looked after their members, now individuals are exploited and squeezed for every cent they earn. Legally spreading the love of one's private value makes plain sense, for those who make (create knee jerk, opportunistic) laws. Drugs are merely another tool in the bring down of 'merica, with a penchant for 'easy painless living", throw care to the wind and don't interfere with the cash flow of the wealthy.
If I lend my car to a fully licensed sober bad driver, and said driver accidentally kills someone, am I CRIMINALLY responsible?
I’m not talking about civil/insurance laws here. I’m talking arrested for murder.
1
this is the legal strategy that should allow us to go after the NRA and the gun manufacturers and sellers
Having grown up incredibly overprivledged and with severe depression and anxiety, at the age of fifteen (in 1972) I smoked opium one night with friends and that led to a thirty five year love affair with opiates. I've not used for twelve years now. My opinion on criminally charging someone for the personal decision of a user to use is that it will not solve any problems whatsoever. Whether a person has a physical addiction or not, using is always a decision, not an accident. I didn't, for example, spend thirty five years having opiates just fall into a syringe by accident. I made the choice and I made it deliberately. No one ever forced me to use opiates, just as no one is forcing any other user. The only people who will make out like bandits if laws like this are passed and enforced are the owners of, and stockholders in, private prisons and /or the companies that supply government operated prisons. In my humble opinion, this type of law is a farce on many, many, levels.
308
The fascinating image that keeps popping up is the insane “try it kid, first one’s free”.
Yeh, right. Dealers can’t keep up with demand. Customers need their supplier Bust one corner and the business moves one block in less than an hour.
Easier now - Cell phone and pager numbers are passed around, and once you’re introduced, you’ve got a reliable guy, until he moves on or gets caught; who will stop by with your favorite flavor, morning or noon, but hey, I know you’re a great customer, let me introduce my friend who does the late shift.
“Hey Joe, can you stop by tonight?”
“Nine, see you then.”
You might even offer him a beer while he waits for the phone to ring. He doesn’t want to make visits too obvious.
I know because I’m a former reporter - in the old days, when Fentanyl was rare, the cops and ER guys who trusted mr called to put out the word that “EMS crews are warning local drug users that Batman brand heroin is so powerful, it’s filling up the Emergency Room with overdose cases, including two dead since a new batch hit the streets in downtown Paterson last week.
And I fought to move the story to Page 3 with an oversized shock hed - because I couldn’t say “Anybody shooting junk out there, keep away from Batman, the new batch with the red label. EMS has picked up 15 ODs - two cold ones - since Tuesday.”
They and their families were our readers too, but a ‘paper’s not supposed to tell advertisers about their nice white customers’ habits.
24
another play on making money off the "sins", already done gratuitously with tax's on alcohol, tobacco and that addiction to consumption of gasoline. lets not forget the addiction to smart fones and the fees, taxes & levies applied to their use.
7
And America's addiction to fast, fattening food, perhaps the primary cause of obesity in this country!
I don't think that stopping the flow of drugs into a community or providing a balm for the victims' families and friends are the real motivations in many prosecutions. I believe that the revulsion and disgust that some people feel for addicts plays a role and that these prosecutions are a way to put a few addicts behind bars, out of sight and out of mind. And if the word balm is used, it should be defined broadly to include responding to vindictiveness and the desire for revenge. Whether this sort of anger and bitterness can be soothed by any means is debatable, but these feelings have been part of crime and punishment for as long as there has been crime and punishment.
But we can only hope that these laws do what they were originally intended to do: prosecute the hell out of the predators who profit from the drug trade. And I hope that the reach of the laws extends back through the supply chain as far as possible, including to those who supply drugs that are sourced through the internet and delivered through the mail and commercial delivery services.
6
Having lost my dear brother to a fentanyl overdose, I’d support prosecuting the dealer who likely knew my brother and what he had been getting.
Still, using punitive measures for a public health crisis will only drive it further under ground when shining a light is what is needed...
24
supporting prosecuting the DEALER is the original intent of these type laws.
Tell us how you feel about the situation if he and a friend were both doing fentanyl and only your brother died. Would champ at the bit for another addict to be turned into a criminal with a murder conviction following them for the rest of their life? or would you realize they both chose to do what they did?
1
I survived a massive physical trauma with the benefit of powerful narcotic pain relievers. That said, I oppose the use of Oxycodone for non-specific pains (e.g. back pain). This is one of the main drivers beyond the problem we have created for ourselves. Criminalizing drug users even more than they currently are amounts to kicking someone when they are down. The solution to this problem is multi-faceted and likely doesn't involve punishing more people (unless they take drugs while pregnant--then they need to have their parental rights terminated immediately). The solution is to make it very difficult to prescribe narcotics unless there is a pressing medical need, create more recovery options, and ncrease public awareness that like Mordor-- you can't just walk away from drugs--the choice to use heroin means you are 15% likely to develop a dependency.
5
Criminalizing drug users also criminalizies pain patients and they are suffering terribly not being able to ge the medication that helps then tolerate one more day. I was crushed under nearly a quart of a ton of merchandise in 1999 and bedridden now. I cannot get the medicine I need to make it through a day with the amount of pain I have in every part of my body every single day. Those legitimate pain patients are the ones being severely hurt and the suicide rate among pain patients is beginning to skyrocket. We are not doing anything wrong but we are criminals because we need pain medication.
2
What a country we live in! Let’s just keep punishing people for their horrible situations and ignoring the real causes
This won’t solve the problem of addiction:
“A free-market society is magnificently productive, but it subjects people to irresistible pressures toward individualism and competition, tearing rich and poor alike from the close social and spiritual ties that normally constitute human life. People adapt to their dislocation by finding the best substitutes for a sustaining social and spiritual life that they can, and addiction serves this function all too well,” — Bruce K Alexander, the Globalization of Addiction
17
legalize it all, tax it like crazy. test it all, and let people make informed decisions like they have to know with tons of over the counter drugs that kill, i.e. alcohol, guns guns guns.
... treat addiction and all diseases of the mind and body equally, give people reasons to love life on this planet, give money to everyone who needs it, and food and shelter. increase the tax on luxury goods. make capitalism go away. make it illegal to steal millions from people and not just illegal to steal a purse because you are starving. stop the mindless brainwashing of Americans that it's important for America to have WMDs and also not allow other countries too. We all get rid of them together. stop being AFRAID of everything. people are born and people die, it's part of it. stop trying to blame
20
While I totally understand why a dealer selling bad drugs should be held responsible for an overdose, I'm struggling to see how a co-drug user should be punished for the death of someone who willingly used and shared drugs with them. These people seem like easy scapegoats used to deny the reality that in the USA we are neglecting our own. We aren't investing in our kids and their educations, we leave families to splinter under the pressure of raising children in virtual vacuums with no support systems and our shared culture revolves around media consumption and other passive activities that actively contribute to depression and poor health. Our healthcare system is so profit-motivated and short sighted that doctors practically shove unneeded medications down our throats (as someone with unfilled and unwanted prescriptions of pain relief narcotics I can attest to this) and when our own people fall into horrible cycles of addition and co-dependency our answer is to throw them in jail. It's pathetic and simply not worthy of our nation. WE MUST DO BETTER AMERICA.
17
This is all about lawyers being lawyers and not about them being people.
Drug rehab is often a high priced racket too.
2
For my tax dollars, I would rather pay for rehab for addicts than see them sent into an already clogged prison system. Treat addiction as the illness that it is. And given the cost of prison upkeep, doesn't cost of rehab come to about the same? Yet as a tax payer I cannot choose where my money will go.
31
I have not known any drug addicts intimately but I have experienced alcoholism at its worse. People who are into getting high really don’t stop to think about their friend(s) dying from some recreational drug or alcohol use. None of these people anticipated dying and then think about the consequences of them being held responsible. The alcoholics I knew wanted their next drink and as such gave no thought of how they got it. While I don’t think the two are equal in their withdrawal symptoms the drug addict quickly becomes physically ill and needs that drug to quell their sickness. No thought is being given to the consequences of using that drug with someone else could result in jail time. Are you sure this just isn’t another scheme to keep prisons full for corporations while doing little to nothing for those who addiction lead to their incarceration?
21
Prosecution over drug offenses has never worked. It pays the salaries of law enforcement and profits the private prison racket. It’s a paycheck for the lobbyists and a balm for the Old Testament punishment enthusiasts. It’s not now or ever been particularly effective but in era where conservatives make government more mediocre, it is to be expected.
16
This is so stupid and so cruel. If there is legislation to stop this, I would help it to pass in any way I can.
6
Haven't these AGs enough - bone fide- fish to fry???
What happened to the so-called recent revelations in law enforcement that said, "you can't arrest your way out of drug addiction"!? PLEASE stop wasting taxpayer dollars and go on UP the food chain.
7
Drug addiction is a contagious disease. Addictive drugs are an especially heinous and effective way to drain people of their money, damn the consequences.
Sending someone to prison because they are involved in the same drug trap as an overdosed friend or family member is barbaric.
Our best shot at controlling this crisis is to focus on the supply chain that profits from dangerous and addictive drug use. Criminal penalties are an appropriate disincentive for those whose chief interest is profit. Pharmaceutical manufacturers who fail to take responsibility for how the opioids they produce are used, join the ranks of drug cartels and the smugglers of fentanyl as profiting from the addiction conflagration.
But upping the prosecution of suppliers will not work unless there is decriminalization of drug use, and treatment is available for users, cutting into demand, and thus profits.
The crimes committed by drug users, of course, cannot be dismissed. But our focus must be on rehabilitation. Punishment is ineffective in preventing out-of-control behavior by addicted people. And we have seen that mass incarceration of drug offenders is a costly dead end for everyone.
Despair leads to addiction. This growing epidemic is a manifestation of social disintegration. The best that we can offer now is counseling, community support, and medical assistance. It will help. But, unless we acknowledge the deeper malaise, we will still only be applying bandaids.
79
I disagree with Bernard Tuchman's comment that "Drug addiction is a contagious disease." Drug use is a personal choice, and addiction is a well-known consequence of opiate use. While it's true that 'environment' and peers play a part in the difficultly of getting off drugs, there is no "contagion" involved, only *personal choices and responsibility*.
More examples of a horribly flawed and incredibly expensive war on drugs. These are the ideas/policies of Nixon and Reagan, that others were too cowardly to repeal. Why not let adults make their own decisions and take responsibility for the outcomes? If someone is foolish enough to destroy their bodies and lives with narcotics, why should the taxpayers be held hostage. "Natural consequences" should be the policy.
4
I decide to do drugs ... but it's not my fault it's yours ...
7
I lost my step son to addiction. His friend gave him the drugs; she is being charged with second degree manslater. He would not want that for her. Maybe my stepson’s parents are to be charged too. Where does this blaming and charging people with crimes end? It is not the solution, it adds fuel to the fire. We need to treat addiction like we treat cancer. Period. Jail is not the answer.
40
That's not even close to being a valid comparison. Most cancer patients want to get well, most drug addicts just want more drugs. Recovery is useless unless the person wants to recover, and that's only possible if addiction becomes more miserable to an addict than sobriety appears. That's a pretty tall order compared to the high achieved with opiates - a high literally worth the risk of death. People will do what they want to do.
5
The problem is that, unlike people with cancer - who generally WANT to get better - addicts often don’t (at least in my experience with alcoholics and opioid addicts). I don’t have the answer, but I don’t think treating addiction like any other medical “disease” necessarily works.
4
It is actually a pretty good comparison (cancer and addiction). You obviously have not talked to a lot of addicts or alcoholics. Many want to get better but cannot figure out how and/or have limited or no access to treatment. It's not like snapping fingers or flipping a light switch. Substances of abuse cause profound changes in the nervous system. Many opioid dependence people continue to feel terrible event months (or years) after achieving abstinence. Medication assisted treatment (methadone, buprenorphine) can be life-saving. But many people are told they are "switching one addiction for another".
Horrible. So much to money to jail people, so many more lives ruined -- why not put that same money towards rehabitliataion and education and good jobs?
10
Because to an addict, the life of drug use is far more attractive than any of that. Took me 20 years of hell before I finally decided to stop drinking. There was a time I would rather have been dead than have to live without alcohol. You can't just offer it or persuade people - that doesn't work - most don't want recovery and never will. Only the lucky few ever beat it.
13
As the parent of a heroin addict, I'm shocked by this approach. Only people with no understanding of the heroin epidemic could think this is a good idea. Arrogant DA's looking to put a notch on their belts, claiming they're owed? What? Addiction is a disease! Non-addict dealers need to go to jail; growers need to go to jail; greedy Pharma CEO's need to go to jail. DA's need to be educated on drug addiction. Addicts need to go to rehab. Friends and family need to keep supporting their loved ones...it's a long battle. Shame on us if prosecuting sick people and their loved ones is the way we deal with this drug epidemic .
30
What you describe as support is really called 'enabling'. It does more harm than good.
1
Dealers need to go to prison....period. I no longer care if they are non-addicts or not.
Things have gotten so bad out here in Seattle that now a toddler has stepped on a needle at the playground. Homeless people are camping out anywhere and everywhere and petty crime is on the rise. My landlady has found two needles thrown over the fence into our yard where the kids play and the dogs run.
One can go downtown to the "open air drug market" which is basically a couple of streets run by black street gangs that deal drugs out in the open all day long. They stand in front of the bus stops and make it look like they are, well, sitting at a Starbucks. The police do nothing out of fear of being brandished racists and I have walked by and seen people with their syringes out with a palm full of white crystals passing them back and forth. The police ignore it and look the other way. But every addict in town knows you can just go downtown to 3rd ave and buy some heroin or some meth.
Ever since our troops landed in Afghanistan where 90% of the world's opium crop is grown, our heroin problem has grown. Too bad our soldiers don't burn the damn fields down, put the Taliban out of business, and make it harder to become an addict in the first place. But for some reason, our officials look the other way at the source of the problem.
3
enabling is giving them money to buy drugs, telling them it is okay to do drugs, spending money on defense lawyers when the drug addict commits a crime, giving public speeches about how "good" their little boy, girl, friend, or relative is.
That is enabling. Being supportive means helping them get to meetings, keep on their methadone or what ever, getting them to eat, bathe, and find hope instead of continuing to use.
your views are an example of the revenge thinking these prosecutors use to justify going after the addict that lived.
First, we need a legal way for acknowledged addicts to buy and take drugs in a safe environment. This way, we avoid fentanyl being taken when they think they are taking heroin.
Secondly, while prisons are for punishment, they are also for the protection of the public at large. Why we are wasting taxpayer money to prosecute and house friends and relatives for these overdose deaths is beyond me. Those being prosecuted are not a danger to the public as far as I can tell. We need to take the money we are spending prosecuting them and instead use it to provide treatment.
6
“I look at it in a real micro way,” said Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County outside Minneapolis. “You owe me for that dead kid.”
The purpose of our criminal justice system is to ensure and promote public safety by getting people who harm others off the street. In that regard, someone who shares drugs, whether someone dies or not, is distributing drugs and should be prosecuted for that. That seems like a legitimate use of laws against distributing or selling illegal drugs.
Prosecuting someone for murder, as described by Mr. Orput above, is simply just old fashioned retribution, which really has no place in our criminal system. It does not achieve the goal of ensuring public safety any further than using laws against distribution of drugs. Mr. Orput and others who take that tactic are pandering for political gain.
6
This is what should be expected from the American prosecutorial mentality. Prosectors seem to have an evisceral need to find and blame someone; anyone. I've suffered from varying levels of pain for almost 40 years. I've never succumbed to street drugs but I have stuggled with opiod use, once putting myself through hospital detox and most recetly ending use without medical assistance. My last period of use lasted 8 years, and I halted intake when proper medicinal use nearly killed me. No one would have been at fault for my death but me. People with chronic pain often accept that they are responsible for their personal drug use and they are the only ones who can end it. those who fail to accept this dictum and depend on their physicans to control use often suffer the consequences. Here were see an ineffectual government once again trying to affect behavior through law. Legal avenues have never effectively controlled behavior in the past so why would anyone believe that they will work today? They will not. People use and or abuse drugs for many reasons but prosecutors don't care about causality because many of them are little more than tinhorn politicians simply looking to gain cheap notoriety at the expense of people already under emotional duress and who are suffering. people with drug abuse issues are sick and they are often physically and mentally hurting: Treat the underlying cause of drug use not the symptoms.
7
This is yet another example of a society not owning up to its failings. The US has become so superficial and selfish that it no longer helps the vulnerable, but just writes them off, whilst positively drooling over tax cuts. Yes, Europe may have high taxes, but it looks after its weakest members, whilst the US just kicks them callously to the curb.
The saddest part of this is that an administration has just been voted in that vows to exacerbate the heartlessness yet further. Where did we get so bitter and resentful?
7
Pretty soon the bartender and the owner will be held liable for the actions of a drunk driver. Wait, they already are and nobody thinks they shouldn’t be.
3
But they are not criminally liable, and certainly not for manslaughter or murder. So, bad analogy.
1
My city just came up with new gun laws that basically state that if someone uses your gun for a crime, you are responsible because you did not properly lock it up.
The same city has prosecuted property owners for not fencing/locking unused buildings that homeless people break into and start fires.
It seems to be a similar kind of thinking.
p.s. former bartender here:)
The only person responsible is the person who put the drugs in their own body. Enough of the victim game.
7
Ridiculous unless they were forcing the victims to take drugs or were dealers. Why not go further and charge the families who knew their loved ones were using
4
why not indeed? It would probably put a stop to it pretty quickly ;)
Personal Responsibility.
I too, have lost friends and relatives... so many in just the last few years, from ODs.
At every wake and funeral my mind was NOT thinking "a drug dealer killed my friend" or "his friends doing drugs with him killed him!".
No, my thought was "why did you not love life enough to want to stay in reality?".
Just as it was 1 question, there was only ONE person I was blaming for the agonizing suffering occuring in the hearts of every one around me during those awful funerals, the person in that casket, always someone I loved "forever" as short as it was.
Though no longer in this world, they STILL continued to destroy the lives, hearts, and souls of their loved ones, and would tear a hole in us forever, much longer to those of us still left in this mortal coil.
I cannot, and will not, blame ANYONE, dealer, friend, family, or both, who supplied the drugs to an adult. IF THEY CHOOSE TO USE DRUGS, IT WAS THEIR CHOICE!
Accidental overdoses do happen, which is why we need OTC naloxone kits available w/o prescription in every single pharmacy.
No Good Samaritan who calls 911 or administers naloxone, should ever have to choose between saving a life, or the possibility of going to jail for murder. All that will do is escalate this further, and there will be very few Good Samaritans left.
Advocate for legalization, and safe havens for users. Proven everywhere it's been used, it gets addicts connected to medical services, and if they are ready, rehab.
7
I am so opposed to the average Joe walking around with Naxolone for overdoses. I remember the time I had blacked out in a park from one of my grand-mal seizures. A park official thought I had o.d. and called the EMT's who recognized me from my frequent trips to the ER. Thank God no one shot me up with the wrong drug.
I remember another time during a grand-mal that the EMT's stood over my seizing body arguing with my roommate that they were going to test me for diabetes even though he told them I did not have diabetes and I was wearing medical alert bracelets.
4
This article dismayed me. The dysfunction of drug abuse is complex- how does charging the other friend-addict, spouse-addict with murder help society? These people are so damaged; what a waste of public dollars to satisfy some prosecutor's personal rigid moral code. I wish these prosecutors would be zealous about mandatory rehab, and paying for it.
6
--------- nobody should be charged. all drugs should be legalized . . .
3
Another horrid development, damaging the social fabric, by the con. To think these prosecutions help solve the drug crisis is ludicrous.
2
In our corrupt quid pro quo political climate what does an addict have to offer to a prosecutor who needs to get reelected? Only the prospect of jail time, or maybe death, if it helps.
1
The best politicians with the very best honorable intentions have gotten this wrong. Maybe with the cries of 'Do Something' and the pressures from the loved ones left behind, lawmakers have moved precipitiously close to what is unreasonable and what indeed are unasnwered constitutional questions. You note local county prosecutors. But what happens when these cases find their way to higher courts and ultimately to the supreme court. Am I guilty of murder for watching you shoot up and die? There is no legal requirement that I stop you. The fact that I may have also done drugs is immaterial. What these cases are actually good for are drug courts and criminal diversion into rehab situations where the choice is help or incarceration. I thought we had long ago begun to liberalize the drug conviction situation, but it looks like it has come back under another name.
41
I don't think they have the best intentions in heart at all when they campaign as being tough on any sort of crime. That's just a way to pose as being some kind of righteous moral authority, at the cost of the stupid misery inflicted by their policies.
They know exactly what they're doing. They just don't care.
2
This is absurd. These people should only be charged with Murder if there is concrete evidence that the person giving the drugs INTENDED to kill the recipient. You can maybe argue for Manslaughter or Criminal Negligence, but there's really no good, logical argument here for a Murder charges in cases like these. It seems like this sort of thing is motivated by emotion, by a sense of helplessness and anger in the face of a crisis.
The answers are pretty simple if people stop looking at addiction as a moral failing. Addicts need treatment, sometimes multiple stints of treatment, not jail.
7
This is utterly illogical & stems from an irrational treatment toward drugs. Heroin=illegal. Alcohol=legal. Oxycontin=legal. Barbituates=legal. Tobacco=legal. Marijuana=illegal. I could go on.
Explain, scientifically, the difference between a heroin death from overdose and a death from alcohol overdose. Here is one stat: "Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths & 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2006 – 2010, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years"
Alcohol is arguably one of the most dangerous drugs on the planet. Yet we all drink it like fish. No one in their right mind would propose treating a tragic death from alcohol poisoning, asphixiation, etc as homocide (unless underage), & certainly no one would 'go after' the people who sell alcohol or their own friends & family! What would be the purpose except to create a whole criminal underclass & viciously damage the lives of people who simply need help.
That this is considered in seriousness speaks to how off kilter we are, how irrational & counterproductive our laws.
Make all drugs legal.
Treat addicts with love & compassion & support.
Make mental health counseling less onerous, less expensive.
Make mental illness as little a stigma as any other illness, so people don't have to hide it with drugs to begin with.
85
Excellent example is cited in the article itself where the prosecutor, Pete Orput "Each time his phone rings with report of another death, he takes half an Ambien, smokes cigarettes in the bathroom,...." Addictive behavior that in the case of smoking may lead to an expensive, painful for him and his relatives, cancer-related death. Should someone close to him be held responsible and prosecuted for his death, for allowing him to smoke and possibly buying his cigarettes for him?
Prosecuting associated addicts makes zero sense unless the person forced the deceased or ignored trying to help a person in obvious distress.
4
Nearly everywhere, bar tenders are responsible for cutting off -- not serving-- visibly intoxicated patrons. Bar tenders can be prosecuted for serving someone who then dies of alcohol poisoning or who drives drunk and causes a collision.
2
d writes of alcohol, "Yet we all drink it like fish."
No, we don't all drink it - and certainly we all don't drink it like fish. There are plenty of people who don't drink alcohol, use nicotine products, use legal or illegal opiates or other narcotics, tranquilizers, etc.
And you write, "No one in their right mind would propose treating a tragic death from alcohol poisoning, asphyxiation, etc as homicide (unless underage)". But fraternities where alcohol binge drinking caused deaths have been prosecuted - successfully - for the death of a participant.
"Make all drugs legal"..........and promote more overdoses, more addicts - although it could help to reduce the number of illegal drug pushers. It would also help to make the newly-legal sources wealthy.
But the cost to taxpayers would zoom......because treatment for addicts is futile until/unless the addict has made the decision to stop using. The inconvenient truth about treatment centers is they have revolving-doors: addicts are ordered there by the courts or brought by desperate families but no one will give up drugs or alcohol until he/she has made the decision to quit.
4
"In one Pennsylvania case, a woman was headed for detox, but knew she would not be admitted unless she tested positive for drugs."
Seen this many times.....how is this okay? We can do better than this. Someone wants help, you have to get them in that moment. Telling them they have to test positive first?!
2
I am not sure that going to jail is a bad thing for an addict. They certainly can't do opioids in Prison, so why not. Oh, or do you mean just because these criminals are white they shouldn't be locked up? Fine, they can choose caskets over cells.
2
People access all kinds of drugs in prison. So, if keeping them away from drugs is your rationale for imprisoning addicts, you need to look for another.
Are you really naive enough to think prisons have no drugs? And that people will be rehabilitated in a cell?
Im just speechless. Its sad enough that these lifes are lost because of an overdose, but instead of tackleing the root of it the addiction or prosecute the dealers...the people who could be still rescued and lifes turned around are put into prison?
When I was a child I thaught of America as a dream of freedom and oppertunity. Nowdays its sadly a country where you can get away with murder as long as it is commited with a weapon, but if you and a friend are taking drugs you could serve the rest of your life in prison.
I really hope that the US is getting back on track but as every single day passes by reading such news this hope fades away a little bit...
1
Fentanyl is deadly, so it seems to me that those lacing other drug with fentanyl should be targeted, not those taking/providing what they think is something else entirely.
3
I made this point the other day when someone pointed out that only 20% of drug arrests were nonviolent. I would not call giving someone drugs a violent crime. Manslaughter and Murder are violent crimes. I can't say none of them are violent, but how many of them are actually likely to start physical fights or abuse anyone but themselves? It definitely skews the numbers on people who are actually violent. And sending them to prison might make them violent. Is our goal vengeance or to make the community safer? Because I mean, you really want to reduce drug use and overdoses, legalize them all and make our healthcare not for profit. If you legalize them without that other caveat, you'll have doctors being drug dealers... which some are already with the drugs that are already legal, let's be real. But how likely are overdoses in countries where doctors are handing out the more dangerous drugs?
1
This type of law is perfect for prosecutors the defendents(victims) are poor, despised,usually distraught, and (likely high at arrest)- "human trash". Their ability to defend themselves is almost non-existent. Nearly a sure win (and election season notch) for the DA.
Just a perfect tool and a set of perfect patsies drug distributers are so much harder to catch and convict.
1
what about all the doctors overprescribing fentanyl because of kickbacks from pharma companies? or the pill mills churning out oxys to addicts??
if there's lax regulation of pain meds encouraging people to become addicted, who actually bares responsibility for their death?
2
I wept when I read this.
What a waste of human lives caused by society's need for retribution. What a waste of resources. Instead of spending money on rehab, or job programs, or things that might actually help people and give them hope, we spend it on prosecution and prison.
"You owe me for that dead kid!", says the maybe well intentioned prosecutor, as he takes another Ambien and inhales his cigarettes. Are we reverting to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?
4
More war on drugs idiocy perpetrated by those who make a living from catching and caging the sick and mentally infirm. With pot being legalized, all those cops and private prisons want to keep the gravy train rolling somehow.
1
This is a classic example of how our system -- which miscategorizes drug issues under the purview of law enforcement, the legal-judicial process and the (pubic and private) prison system, rather than as issues of public and private health -- spends an overabundance of money on a process that solves exactly nothing.
The time for a new, more effective approach to these issues is long overdue.
3
I had a 30 y/o patient who got out of rehab for drug addiction but met a woman there who later gave him heroin - first time - when they got out. After that, he was hooked. A year later he was dead from a heroin/fentanyl overdose after 4 months of rehab again. No one knew who sold him the “bad” heroin but there was a near-death from another person who OD from the same batch in a nearby apartment. He was lucky to be found in time. Addicts are very secretive about giving a fellow addict their drug of choice even though they know they are in rehab, just got out of rehab, know the parents are broke from helping their child, know the family is heart broken, and so on, but the “friend” will ignore all these tragic conditions and give their friend a potentially deadly substance. If these lethal friends begin to hear that they could go to jail for murder, maybe they will think again about giving a friend or relative dangerous drugs.
6
To what end? It is just adding tragedy upon tragedy. I have worked in harm reduction and if anyone thinks you or one of your loved ones couldn’t go down this road, think again.
Aren’t American prisons full enough?
1
Hey.
This is a brutal brutal application of law!
Apportioning blame can be a Gordian Knot of intractable options in such desperate circumstances.
What gives here?
What do I know to comment too?
Well, killing isn't the option I believe is upper most in users minds. Not as being a murderous intent.
Would the term, 'drag net' be correct for my use here? I can't see any other cause really but to sweep up as many associated users with the death, as possible! To process and prosecute then.
I'm just horrified.
Geeze!
1
We really need to stop asking the criminal justice system to fix public health problems.
3
"Overdose prosecutions, they say, are simply one tool in a box that should include prevention and treatment"
Of course THEY dont adequetly FUND those, they prefer to fund more prisons instead
4
If you have a steak knife in your home, demonstrate its effectiveness during dinner, and then someone else uses it for suicide are you guilty of murder?
2
Well, for-profit prisons are profitable and you don't have to worry about your business getting sued if you release people from rehab if there is a pattern showing your for-profit rehab center doesn't actually help people with addiction.
They should not be charged with murder! They committed an illegal act with another consenting adult. The drug user is responsible for their own actions. They made a bad decision, took a gamble on a dangerous drug that apparently is often doctored or mistaken for something more lethal, and died. If an adult persuaded an underaged person or a person with mental insuficiencias to take a drug, or secretly slipped a drug to another non-consenting adult that would possibly fit the charge of murder.
1
This is the absurdist end point of the war on drugs. Immoral and ineffective but a dream come true for the prison lobby. Follow the money....nothing this stupid happens without someone is making a pile from it.
3
This course of action would probably be even more effective if prisons were actually environments free of drugs....too bad they're actually not.
2
We need to look for ways to lock fewer people up, not more.
1
maybe if people are held responsible they will act responsibly.
2
I’ll second that..!
To think that this kind of exploding drug misuse can only be solved with incrimination and jail sentences is a real funny idea for an European. I could only wonder while reading this article.
Could it be that other factors are much stronger influencing this drug use: job and/or homelessness, broken up family relations and a general fear of tomorrow?
I find this punishment laughable and solving nothing.
2
"On a Saturday in December 2015, Ms. Elkins tore off a piece of patch, and Mr. Rost tucked it in his mouth as he left the house to go hunting. "
Really?!
She helped him to get high so he could drive off to go hunting with a deadly weapon and somehow what happened to them was too harsh? I think she got off easy and she will return to the same reckless behavior.
2
Is this a joke.
Whole communities of hard working non criminal black people have endured stop and frisk, police brutality, having their homes trashed, falsely arrested, falsely accused, had their culture and/or families demonized, called predators and used as fodder for prisons for profits for minor infractions like smoking a joint. All because of the criminal behavior of a small percentage of hardcore drug addicts and dealers in their communities.
So now that rural/ suburban/white communities are just getting a small taste of that there is suddenly a call to defend them? We're all suppose to cry a river over them? Oh please.
At least the the arrests and prosecutions in white communities are more targeted than treating everyone in the community like criminals.
8
Considering how ineffective the prosecution of drug addicts for their own actions have been, I fail to understand how punishing them for the choices of other drug users will prove to be a more successful deterrent. These stories are heartbreaking, and I'm sure there are many surrounding these victims who question if they could have done more. I think those questions are appropriate on a societal level, considering we have created a culture of fear and shame around addiction and failed to make rehab accessible or affordable. That's not even including the economic problems and lack of proper health care that often leads to addiction in the first place. Pegging one person of questionable culpability with all the guilt and pain, allows us as a society to feel like "we got the bad guy" and absolve ourselves of responsibility to push for the necessary changes.
37
I would say yes. Anyone involved should be accountable. But I respect people's opinion, I don't have experience dealing with drugs, so my opinion wouldn't have much validation.
So I explain to my kids that they have to be responsible and take the medicine prescribed to them and not share or misuse their meds.
Them we read articles that appear to solicit pity for others who are not responsible, share their dangerous drugs and have criminal charges and jail sentences as a consequence.
As a parent I have to say NO. You do not get to misuse your prescription and then claim you have no criminal responsibility because that misuse caused you to have poor judgement.
Does anyone really think that being incapacitated as a result of drug use should get a pass when being incapacitated as a result of alcohol use is eligible for criminal charges?
11
>>> "Does anyone really think that being incapacitated as a result of drug use should get a pass when being incapacitated as a result of alcohol use is eligible for criminal charges?"
Where, in the United States, is being incapacitated by alcohol treated as a crime?
I'll answer that for you: Nowhere.
Alcohol addicts face serious charges and jail time when they kill people. Even when they don’t kill people they loose their license to drive, crippling their ability to earn a living. Rehab is just as expensive for those addicted to alcohol as it is for those addicted to narcotics.
1
The first step is to educate people that opiate-type drugs are illegal to take, unless prescribed for a specific medical condition, and with a good reason. One can become addicted fast and such an addiction can last life time. People who take heroin and related street drugs need to understand that they are breaking the law. This is the first step, and various legal actions should be taken against them. Once they are addicted, their addiction can be kept under control with e.g. methadone. However, methadone needs to be dispensed by professionals. This is the reality. The culture of taking recreational drugs may lead some people to think about heroin and related street drugs as "recreational". This is a huge mistake, often paid by ruined lives and loss of life. Further, many people believe that there are quick and easy treatments and cures for just about any medical problem. For opiate addiction this is not a case. Prevention via education is critical. As for the legal responsibility, it is a separate problem, which is quite complex. Do not break the law should be the first message, but if somebody breaks the law, even at the level of taking illegal drugs, there ought to be some legal consequences.
The killers in these cases are the prohibitionists. No modern society with an understanding of the history, psychology and sociology of drug use/abuse/addiction/overdose risk has the slightest excuse for treating the issue as a matter of crime and punishment.
The obvious and essentially dispositive example is Portugal, where turning sharply away from criminalization of all drugs and dealing with the related problems as a public health issue has resulted, over a decade and a half, in a reduction in heroin use of about 75% and a reduction in overdose deaths of about 80%.
Portugal's rate of drug-related deaths is now about *one fiftieth* of ours in the United States.
None of this is breaking news. The sad reality is that our society prefers demonization and punishment to understanding, compassion and treatment.
49
You didn't mention to the nice people that pills such as Oxycodone are not available outside of the United States except in a palliative care context and even then, under strictly limited circumstances. Much of this problem is due to the "prohibitionists" not taking a harder stance against drugs and creating the pharmacological infrastructure to expand that lets the ordinary person become addicted fairly quickly. From then, its cheaper to switch to heroin. By not including all the facts, you run the risk of creating the false impression that if we adopt the regulatory structure of Portugal, all would be well. For shame.
This story is maddening shocking and sad. While the law enforcement community, social scientists, and medical professionals, repeatedly declare that addiction is a public health issue, we are still not treating it as such.
Every state in the country should have a Good Samaritan law. Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to people who give reasonable assistance to those who are, or who they believe to be, injured, ill, in peril, or otherwise incapacitated and need help. That legal protection would encourage people to call 911.
Charging these folks with murder is like charging an auto maker with a crime because an automobile was involved in an accident. It makes no sense. Prosecutors know full well that they're not helping to solve the problem, and only making it worse.
Orput said "You owe me for that dead kid." The failed 'WAR ON DRUGS' is responsible for that dead kid. Our inability to treat addiction as a public health issue is responsible for that dead kid. Lack of access to and a failure to adequately fund treatment programs is responsible for that dead kid. Society is responsible for that dead kid.
How many people have to die before we get this right?
28
you r absolutely right!
Sure, since it is well known that US prison systems can treat addiction and turn drug offenders around and point them in the right direction so they'll be released as enlightened, more educated and physically and mentally healthy individuals ready to contribute to their communities and move forward with a clear mind.
Why didn't we think of this earlier ?
25
Treatment needs to be readily available and easy to access and it needs to be long term, three months rehab, six months sober living. Where are the public service announcements on TV helping families do an intervention and helping them step by step to find a treatment program for their family members who are addicts? Jailing drug sellers will not bring back the dead.
8
well put
The potential to be prosecuted for being the "survivor" in an illicit drug usage situation wherein death may occur, will only lead to more overdoses and deaths, not less.
Applying this "logic" as a means of prevention via threat of losing your freedom to prison for an unpredictable outcome (overdose of another in your presence), shows an utter lack of understanding how addiction works. Kind of like saying the death penalty is a murder deterrent. We all know that's not the case.
Doesn't work, never will.
We can do better...
11
on a different matter, why do many people in recovery get their insurance to cover their opioid antagonists for little or no charge, but the copays for epipens, also an emergency life saving drug, can cost the patient hundreds of dollars?
6
The tough on drugs stance is all political. People want someone to be punished for their loved one's death and it's much easier to crack down on an addict than a pharmaceutical company. Drug prohibition is taboo and counterproductive, as was alcohol prohibition. When a consumer product is legal, it is easier to regulate. Legal heroin would mean no fentanyl in heroin. It would mean ID checks so it's harder for kids to get a hold of it. It would mean that if someone wants to start, he or she would have to buy the product from a pharmacy and face normal everyday people whose judgements could sway their opinions. Most importantly, it would mean creating harm-reduction centers and lifting the taboo do people aren't embarrassed to seek help.
Prohibition is nonsense. 50,000 dead each year and all we do is beat our heads against the wall harder.
16
The current epidemic started with a legal, regulated drug.
I love this new America of mine! Life can be very cruel and sad and difficult to navigate. But we resourceful Americans continuously find new and innovative ways to add to people's suffering. I'm so proud to be an American!
23
Not a legal expert here.
But the causality of death is incredibly murky. How about the doctor that prescribed a painkiller that lead to addiction? How about the manufacturer of the drug? Since intent must not be shown they all could be charged!
Actually perhaps America and it's people should be charged. They created the socioeconomic environment that makes drug use flourish.
I do not mean this sarcastic. Something is terribly wrong with the legal system. The way it chooses erratically whom to prosecute.
144
"Something is terribly wrong with the legal system. The way it chooses erratically whom to prosecute."
There is nothing 'erratic' in the choice of whom to prosecute. Pill-pushing doctors and pharmaceutical companies have lawyers, professional organizations, and lobbyists to protect them. Broken, addled street addicts have nothing. Since they are disgusting to most jurors, they are easily convicted, and useful for racking up prosecutorial 'wins'. They are also more easily managed than violent criminals. States and municipalities can fulfill their contractual obligations to fill prisons by incarcerating these comparatively docile, damaged people.
12
I recommend prosecution of the companies that manufactured and pushed these addictive drugs for years.
Corporations are people. Shut them down, lock THEM up.
3
No one should be charged in accidental overdose, at least. Furthermore this approach will have adverse effects like increasing deaths when 911 is not dialed out of fear and after the death charges have no effect on accidents.
16
Don’t charge people who hand people a loaded gun. Don’t charge people who give people dangerous drugs. Don’t charge people who give people poison. Yea, that makes sense.
2
Who should be charged? The poppy grower, the international drug cartel, the kingpin, the mule, the pharmaceutical company who lied about addictive properties of its legal product, the pharmaceutical companies investors who made a pretty profit, the internet site that lied about the contents of its product, the local dealer, or the person who handed the final dose to the user at his or her request?
107
No one should be charged. Drugs should be legal. Treatment on demand and narc-an should be ubiquitous and we should empty out the jails.
This country's drug policies are insane and only getting worse. Busting the addicts addicts hang out with is the stupidest idea in long line of stupid ideas.
I got an new idea for you, lets create a society where people are happy instead of one where 1% live like kings and the rest of us work ourselves to death by the time we are 50.
97
Let’s see, who is the easiest target? No question, the poor person who might have also died but by the grace of God didn’t, only to be charged with murder. I think, only in America. The richest country with basically no medical care!
18
Wonderful idea. I would love to see it happen. You need a plan to kick all the Conservatives out of office and dismantle the Republican party for good. It has shown its true colors, and that Conservatives have no intention of doing anything to benefit anyone other than themselves and their rich donor-overlords.
That is the ONE positive thing that has come from the Trump Administration. The Republicans are no longer pretending. They are coming out and saying matter of fact that they are for the rich and corporations. The left knew that. Hopefully, everyone else is getting the message, too.
3
Can you imagine if prosecutors went after the mass shooters - okay, too broad - school shooter's family members who gave their kids guns or allowed their kids access to THEIR guns? Or what about gun manufacturers? Aren't they "dealers"? Yes, guns are legal. So are prescription opiates. But not if they are abused or given away or borrowed. All of those are crimes. And if they result in a death, why not arrest them for murder? Think of Sandy Hook. Why isn't the murderer's mother being prosecuted?
178
... Because AL murdered his mother prior to the massacre at Sandy Hook...
15
The NRA is there to protect rights. No one is protecting the rights of a drug user.
5
Answer to the question posed in the headline: Yes. Play with the devil, be ready to pay. Drug dealer should get scorched, too.
10
But didn’t Obama pardon some who were selling heroin and other hard drugs?
Persons who directly and knowingly contribute to the death of someone dying from an overdose should be charged at minimum with aiding and abetting of man slaughter.
Proving this may not be as easy and convincing a jury in today’s world when many people want to legalize other illicit drug use will be equally difficult.
Collectively society on certain issues cannot see or think beyond one or two steps ahead of them, but only think something is right for all from what they feel is only good for their needs.
1
Very true, society cannot think beyond two steps ahead nor can American society break out of the punishment model. To get really creative, we would prevent doctors from dispensing Oxycodone outside of palliative-end of life situations. But that would infringe on Americans' right to take whatever drugs they want to help their pain (real or imagined).
You can’t force someone to take drugs. Nor can you force another person to help you take drugs. A lot of comments suggest that the drug taker is the only one making a choice. The enabler is also making a choice. I cannot imagine helping anyone, let alone someone I love, obtain/use illegal drugs. I love them for chris’sake! I’m not sure a murder charge is the right response but I can certainly see a criminal charge such as dealing.
18
In the case of Sandy Hook, the shooter's mother was the first person he murdered.
Sorry, only a person without personal experience in this arena can make that comment. I use to be you...before my child became an addict. I got a wake-up call and an education I would not wish on my worst enemy.
I’m sorry for what you’re going through and very sorry for what your child is going through. But I’m not sure why that gives you exclusive rights to weigh in on public policy. You don’t know my experience with or exposure to illegal drugs or addiction. You’re making an assumption that your experience is more relevant than mine and that therefore your opinion is more valuable.
It was their decision to take the drugs, so the folks who illegally acquired and supplied them should not be held accountable...sounds like the war on drugs is over. Can't that be the rationale of every drug dealer? Will that thinking apply equally to all races and national origins?
7
Herein lies the problem with a national epidemic that lacks national leadership and adequate health care. States take desperate measures with limited resources. The net effect of charging friends and relatives as drug dealers - who themselves would be imprisoned for drug use - will simply be to keep them in prison longer. It's relatively expensive solution that becomes totally ineffective after the users leave prison.
26
So the meth/heroin users now get to experience what is like, what it has always been like, for people of color. We do not a criminal “justice system.” We have a system of mass incarceration made worse by the privatization of prisons (thanks for bringing them back #45 - great work!).
61
These kinds of deaths are ultimately caused by the prohibitionists. Where there is darkness there is death. By definition the black market has no quality control or oversight. What is sold on the street as LSD (which has an effective-to-fatal dose ratio far less than caffeine) could be tainted by other chemicals that are truly toxic. If LSD were sold legally in dispensaries it could be quality-controlled, as with marijuana, and lives would be saved.
Over the decades prohibitionists have ruined millions of lives, and caused tens of thousands of deaths, all while failing utterly to keep drugs off the streets. Their only "success" has been to destroy quality control.
23
The other success of the war on drugs has been to make the criminal organizations that run the rings immensely rich and powerful. As for LSD overdose deaths, there have been none, no documented overdoses, to overdose on cannabis you are looking at ingesting around 24-25kg in one sitting to overdose.
1
Um, the makers of OxyContin are legal and regulated drug makers. The epidemic was literally created by legal industry, the antithesis of Prohibition.
3
Interesting uproar when the victims of over-zealous prosecution are white.
47
In the meantime there are still black people who have faced harsh treatment for a bag of weed.
6
Will the generous thoughts of leniency apply equally to all races and national origins?
16
The war on drugs takes another bow.
New, creative inroads into ruining lives for reasons that are neither rational nor moral.
No one is served, no one profits, from caging addicts over decades.
The ones from whom we need protection, those who are truly dangerous, are those who implement this policy.
What are they thinking?
58
These prosecutors are out of control. What good comes from this kind of prosecution? Really? Wow. All I can say is, wow.
55
Couldn't agree more. Overly zealous and hard to rein in. AG Holder had to tell them to back off because they were using strong-arm tactics to make drug offenders take their offers. If defendants didn't, the prosecutors would hit them with even harsher charges. It was a "no win" situation.
3
These policies might not help addicts but they will definitely help the for-profit prisons who need to meet their lockup quotas.
112
Mass incarceration is not the answer. The ‘War on Drugs’ has failed. We have 30 years of proof.
The threat of criminal prosecution is irrelevant when a person is sick and needs to score to get normal. It’s not about getting high anymore.
The person in recovery needs support mechanisms and other tools to stay clean. It does works.
44
If someone dies as a result of your actions, there should be consequences. Arguably, the person who takes the drugs is most to blame, but the person who shares them or sells them is most definitely also culpable. Drug addiction is complex and I don’t think it is as simple as treating it as a disease. Treatment is generally a better option than prison, including for drug pushers, but at some point a lot of these people chose to take these drugs and became addicted and others chose to steal and sell to their buddies to fund a drug habit.
7
Just when it seemed like our country's drug policy was becoming more sensible and moving towards a more pragmatic approach I.e. treating the epidemic as a public health problem rather than a moral failing, investing in rehabilitation rather than incarceration of addicts, we get this punitive, mean-spirited approach which does nothing to fight the actual provlems of addiction while wasting taxpayer dollars.
34
They illegally purchased and supplied drugs to others and those others died as a result. They should not be prosecuted...does this rationale also apply to Mexican drug dealers? I see little difference.
3
This is utterly ridiculous. Just looking for someone to blame. Just like suing drug companies for people who overdosed on painkillers. That’s NOT the drug companies problem. That’s the problem of the person who overdosed. I’ve been prescribed the same said painkillers. Did I overdose? No. Did I get addicted? No. I have a prescription for other drugs that some people have had problems with. Am I addicted? No. Do I have a problem with it? No. I take it when I need it, and only when I need it. Stop looking for scapegoats. Perhaps, if anything, maybe America should look inward, and blame ITSELF, what with elected officials and goverment agencies passing deregulation of pharmaceutical advertising direct to consumers, etc, in the name of business profits.
15
This does not solve anything. It is illogical.
18
It doesn't solve anything because it likely won't deter the behavior. It does, however, hold someone accountable for a death, and that seems to be the impetus for many of these situations. Someone has to pay, so to speak. Prosecutor logic.
3
So why are bartenders/liquor stores not culpable when someone dies in a DUI car crash?
Terribly short sighted
16
in some states the bartenders/servers have been held culpable for over-serving... not that I agree... it is all really stupid.
6
“You owe me for that dead kid.”
Pretty sure that’s not how it works. Disgusting.
35
Our justice system. Cannot resist the opportunity to go after the weakest of all links. That's what a cowardly bully does. Guilty buddies go to jail and BigPharma doesn't even get a slap on the wrist.
48
Holding persons surrounding the dead addict with some responsibility certainly gives a poke to the "blind eye" .
7
This is beyond ridiculous as an idea.
Drug addiction is an illness with a good risk of death and an addict will get drugs no matter what. That's the illness. Criminalizing it has proven to be a complete failure.
May as well arrest every bartender and fast food
worker for causing death due to cirrosis of the liver and clogged arteries.
And while we are at it, what about parents who buy their kids guns , who then go out and shoot
their classmates?
50
I agree - ridiculous idea. I don't agree that addiction is an illness. That's still a highly debatable designation among neurologists.
It is their own responsibility to drug up and when they die no one is to blame but themselves.
Was anyone holding a gun to their head ?
I guess not !
11
As long as they are prosecuting white users as strenuously as black and Hispanic users it seems fair.
8
Will the gun-owner parents of the school shooters also be brought up on murder charges? Oh wait...
42
It's just the good old fashioned American model of kick 'em while they're down. Business as usual. Nothing new to see here. If you're poor, addicted, and just generally unlucky, oh well! See you in jail!
20
Perfect! All this is going to lead to is the logical but cold conclusion that if someone is overdosing leave them be and cover your ass lest you get charged with murder.
Good job, law enforcement.
35
“You owe me for that dead kid.” A quote that illustrates prosecutors just don't get it, that authorities still view the opioid problem as something that can be contained or defeated with punishment, as if that's going to dissuade an addict three days into the nightmare of withdrawal who can make it all go away with a dose. Absolutely no one is thinking of some self-important prosecutor when they're in the depths of misery, suffering crushing depression and the shakes, sweating through a change of clothes every 30 minutes, tormented by restless leg syndrome, unable to keep even the most bland food down. They're thinking of opioids and nothing else.
Besides, haven't we seen enough of the righteous prosecutor? While Eric Schneiderman was making it impossible for addicts to get pain pills -- sending them rushing to heroin dealers -- he was in his penthouse apartment, smacking women in the face and abusing prescription medications himself, according to the New Yorker story. Show me a prosecutor who's an angel and I'll show you a pig with wings.
If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then how should we refer to authorities and politicians who continue to insist punishment is the cure instead of making treatment more widely available? Enough already.
25
When people who stop taking personal responsibility meet an overly aggressive law enforcement machine that has to find someone to blame.
14
Laws that were probably originally designed to protect now being used exclusively to prosecute? That says a lot about those responsible for supposedly administering "justice" and what such assumed power has done to them. It also shows why real justice is beyond the reach of flawed humans, as hard as we may still try. Intellect is a cruel irony.
7
No, they were designed to incarcerate black people and there are politicians who openly said this. They never thought Biffy and Buff would get caught in the net.
While the president and his cabinet shred the rule of law, the brunt of the law's force is applied even more vengefully to people who are ill and need treatment.
This is America.
21
We should constantly be aware of how bad laws are made. Nationwide we continue to make terrible criminal justice policy because so many of our legislators are lazy, willfully ignorant, attention hounds. The reason we are having this conversation is because the original "victim" of this invented crime was a celebrity. A privileged white man pounced on the case for attention. That prosecutor, Robert Bonsib, is now a criminal defense lawyer and goes on TV to talk about criminal defense issues. He has vanity plaques (awards you pay for) on his website.
6
These laws have been on the books since the late 1980’s and have been used to put many people of color behind bars as part of the inner city War on Drugs. Now as this article points out those same laws are being applied to suburban and rural Caucasian people and there is a sudden outrage and demand for treatment (addiction is a disease) rather than incarceration (addition is a moral weakness). So which is it?
If drug addiction is a disease deserving of treatment, then what do we do about all the people of color wrongfully incarcerated under these laws for their disease? Don’t they deserve to be set free, compensated for their morally wrong incarceration, and given the same treatment for addiction that is now being advocated for?
If drug addiction is a moral weakness worthy of punishment, then lock this current crop of criminals up and throw away the key just like was done in the past.
Justice is (color) blind, right?
Are some people (because of the color of their skin) more worthy of “equal justice under the law” than others?
36
Maybe "sharing" your guns, ie not locking them up should be treated similarly.
18
Prosecutors like easy targets to notch another conviction and sentence on their belt. These offenses are crafted so they are not terribly difficult to prove. The government routinely forces plea bargains because the maximum penalties are draconian and everyone knows if you put the state to the trouble of a trial (heaven forbid the exercise of a right) you will receive extremely harsh treatment if convicted. Do you roll the dice?
Although perhaps well intentioned, the rhetoric surrounding drug abuse encourages this type of inflated sentencing because it makes for excellent press coverage. You aren't just sending away a person utterly lacking in criminal intent, you are battling the epidemic, the war, the crisis. There has to be a better response to this problem. I have seen many, many sex offenders and violent criminals walk away from court with less severe punishment.
7
Portugal dramatically reduced opioid deaths by decriminalizing drug use across the board. Treating drug use and abuse as a population health challenge helped them drop from the worst in drug abuse to the best on those social indicators in Europe.
This approach in the US - expand the drug war to lock everybody up - may enrich Jeff Sessions' friends in the private prison business, but it only ensure the social safety net that could help an addict recover is itself instead shredded. Amplifying the utter stupidity and futility of the US "war on drugs". It's a war on our own citizens. Let's demilitarize that war, try treating fellow citizens with addictions as people who need health care. Because they do.
14
Every possible excuse is used to bypass the real reason for drug use and suicide, which is the poverty and hopelessness of lives in our present society and culture.
19
If you’re hooked on heroin and seek it out because of addiction, you should be treated for the awful disease that it is. If you sell it by occupation, particularly if you’re not a user, you should be prosecuted for first degree murder.
7
Well, of course, because our society cannot be backward enough, our prisons cannot be full enough, and prosecutors cannot have enough scalps to hang on their walls. We must ask ourselves: Why is America always so determined to afflict the afflicted? Have we no shame?
19
Just because you kill in San Francisco does not mean you will be successfully prosecuted by our insane jurors! I was a juror on the Wolfie Golden Gate Park trial and the victim who had a marijuana debt also had a bad heart condition. The savage attack on the victim was not sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was murdered since he ran away and died took several minutes to expire. We in SF don’t accept smoking guns as acceptable evidence. The victim must die instantaneously on the spot and with no illnesses nor drug debts.
5
If someone gives their partner what they know is an illict drug (the off the internet "Adderall" that turned out to be Fentanyl) or used what may (we aren't told by the reporter) have been a prescribed Fentanyl patch so their partner could "tuck it in their mouth" and chew it - and the person dies...guess what? They have acted recklessly in a way that caused the other person's death. They clearly didn't intend it and the penalties are much less for that reason.
But prosecutors have many valid reasons other than trying to act as a general deterrent when someone's extreme recklessness causes another's death, whether it is handing them a bootleg opiate or giving them a ride while loaded on legal booze. When I file charges for animal abuse, domestic violence or molesting a child, I do so because they are serious violations of the social contract that is criminal alw, not because I think that particular prosecution will deter some other anti-social abuser from acting in a similar fashion at some future date. Eventually, I would hope it would have an effect, but that cannot and should not be the motivating factor for a prosecutor.
Using the Drug Policy Alliance as major information source is the first clue. That group beleives ALL drug use should be legal and prosecutors like me have no buiness in ever trying to regulate the possession of heroin or methamphetamine, both of which are ripping my community part.
9
No one forces you to take drugs. The responsibility lies with the individual. Once people understand that the better off they'll be.
11
A statement as ignorant as it is wrong. Many opioid addicts became physically dependent under the "care" of doctors. Whether those doctors didn't understand how addictive those medications are, or simply viewed it as the patient's problem, it hardly matters. Those people are in that situation because they trusted the clinical judgement of medical professionals.
Make no mistake -- neither you, nor I, nor anyone else is so powerful and strong-willed that we'd be impervious to the pull of opioids once physical dependence kicks in. It's easy to judge from afar and quite another thing to experience it yourself or see it first hand.
4
I was prescribed opioids twice after surgeries for a broken ankle. In both cases, I stopped taking them before the pill bottle was empty and when I still had pain. I did not want to risk becoming addicted. Maybe I had more will power or a higher pain tolerance than most, but I also think people have to take some responsibility for what they take, even if a doctor has prescribed it.
2
So there’s no hope for addicts? Once addicted no one has the ability to ever overcome it? What point is there in sending anyone to rehab then?
Your sentence of addicts is far harsher than any prosecutor’s.
1
Might as well arrest every driver on the highway when a drunk driver causes an accident.
Seriously, this is a cruel and unnecessary punishment.
13
Once I had a party at my house. I was young and dumb. One of the couples I invited had serious problems with alcohol that I just didn't tune into. We all just wanted to party. So I got some vodka, some overproof rum, normal legal stuff that young people with healthy livers can handle.
But it turned out the alcoholic guest just grabbed the overproof rum I had bought and guzzled it until a medical emergency ensued.
Drinkers handle things like this without anyone going to prison.
Why are the OTHER dangerous addictive substances not treated the same? Why can't we treat all of these things like they are the same?
Alcohol users think they have the right to push all the other users of dangerous drugs around. It's simply amazing. While not ever mentioning themselves and their dangerous habits in the same context.
16
Silly. Everyone is responsible for themselves.
Or if anyone is to blame it is politicians and prosecutors who keep drugs illegal and therefore unknown (don't know what you are getting --which causes overdoses) and keeps folks from medical treatment -- and away from the light of day, where they might be better protected.
Money goes to courts and cops and attorneys and jailers and jail that would better be spent on quality treatment. (Cartels and gangs and shootings and deaths dry up.)
We should have "safe houses" --like they do with abandoned children -- where drug users can go to get quality (Betty Ford-Type) treatment and help.
14
All I want to add is that this is another blatant example of reactive policing. Proactive policy making and policing is something would be less straining on the country; economically and socially.
10
As long as there are users, there will be dealers. The difficult work most be done to 1.) Stop from starting. 2.) Try to get addicts off the drugs. Both very difficult - but
the only way to address the situation.
2
We know that treating addiction as a disease has been the most successful way to address the problem . We also know that the vast majority of addicts have experienced unbearable trauma. And we know that our mass incarceration of drug users has little to no impact except to cost taxpayers billions upon billions. But having scapegoats to dehumanize and blame is a quick and dirty way to redirect our attention while others make money or gain power at our expense. We need to demand honest, effective, and long term cost saving methods already shown to work.
9
sadly, the unintended consequence of this will be that people accompanying an overdosing individual will flee the scene instead of calling for help out of fear of being prosecuted. this will likely lead to more deaths, not fewer.
25
Did the reporter ask for a comment from Purdue Pharma?
22
Prosecuting those who share drugs is up there with throwing the guy in jail who buys a round for his buddies at the bar -- it's ridiculous.
Did the friend have a gun to the head of the one who OD'ed, forcing him/her to take the drug? No. Did the person sell the drug to the friend for profit? No.
Where we need to look is within the realm of behavioral health. We need to consider what life circumstances brought them to drugs in the first place, not how we can charge them for murders they didn't commit.
27
Sarah, yes, alcohol users allow themselves to get away with just about anything. I am starting to think the War on Drugs is partly a giant act of projection. Alcohol users projecting on other drug users that they need to be in jail, probably because of all the guilt that alcohol users carry around over the things they've said and the nights they can't remember.
5
And the parents of mass shooting offspring who had free access to their guns?
20
So the DA takes half an Ambien and then files an indictment. Who is the addict?
44
And calls himself a recovering alcoholic on top of that. Not sure how much recovery we're seeing there.
3
If prosecutors are charging acquaintances with homicide for accidental deaths caused by drugs, they should do the same with gun-owners whose negligence enables children to die in accidental discharges and school shootings.
29
We do.
Frequently.
5
And you should be prevented from doing so at least much of the time. You prosecutors are out of control, at ALL levels, and need to be checked.
I'm of two minds on this. One one side, it may discourage users from sharing drugs -assuming they are shared LEGAL drugs (where the person's name on the script is not the one who died) . That's good. But on the other, is it really fair if an illegal drug was obtained by both persons? I understand the need to control illegal drug use, but this seems like scapegoating.
9
What on earth is the point of prosecuting users for unintentional deaths of someone who happens to be using in their presence? If we accept that addiction is an illness (I do) then both parties are ill with a disease that happened to kill one of them and not the other.
14
During the same time the onwers of oxycotin have their names in the MET, but sure it is important to arrest the wife who share the pain killer with her husband. Poor America
36
This is good. All parties from the dealers down to the moronic
fellow user who's standing next to the OD'ed person need to be held responsible. Get them all off the street.
3
I'm not sure it makes sense to hold one person with a substance use disorder responsible (addiction) for another person with a substance use disorder when they're both using together. It's luck of the draw which one might live and which might die.
9
What would actually be GOOD and SALUTOGENIC would be understanding why people are in such pain that they believe they need these drugs.
7
How well did that work with alcohol in the 1920s?
2
Perdue Pharma is the guilty party.
7
In NYC, where such prosecutions were rare-and are very hard to prosecute, they became a part of the urban mythos of addiction:"If you are near a person when they die of an OD, you may be arrested and sent to jail for murder". It caused entire blocks to clear out as dozens of addicts literally ran to escape, usually leaving a still alive OD sufferrer, who might have easily been saved, or who woke up in a few minutes. These arrests and the threat of them probably cause more overdose deaths, and encourage risky behavior as addicts use dangerous drugs alone-as none will aid them. Naloxone makes the situation worse-as it is expected toinstantly solve the problem. As a result, no one learns how to give Mouth to Mouth or other resuscitation, a set of techniques far more efficacious then naloxone at keeping OD victims alive-they are too scared of going to prison, forever.
22
The "felony murder rule," i.e., anyone who engages in a felony is liable for murder if someone dies during the commission of the felony, serves an important public purpose.
It discourages citizens from engaging in felonies.
3
Who told you that - a box of cracker jacks? That stupid rule is a purely American thing. No other civilized country engages in that nonsense. Sort of like charging 8 year-olds as adults, etc.
Or seeking emergency help to possibly avoid a death.
Welcome to the American justice system and the people who run it. "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
32
I know I'm supposed to feel compassion, not just with reports like this, but to not be judgmental to the drug users, and to provide ample findings narcan to revive them whenever they overdose, etc etc. Yet I'm feel exhausted just hearing these reports. What's the point, really? In fact I don't even see the point of prosecuting them. Why, if they want to kill themselves with drugs. I won't be standing in their way.
So, there's also the assertion that this drug addiction can happen to anyone. I'm sorry to say, but I just can't accept that. It's a personal choice, not just in taking the pills, but in the lack of will power to say "I can't live like this, I'm going to kick this addiction."
From a society perspective, I see far better and more productive use of the fundings in, say, education which grow the society. Sustaining drug addiction, for the sake of the boilerplate of having compassion, is simply not good enough to me.
Long story short, if they want to die, let them. Why prosecute them and waste police time and tie them up in judicial system? Police should have gone after real crimes, rather than drug overdose due to share drug use.
20
I consider myself a compassionate person, but also one who believes in self-responsibility. And I consider drug use, or alcohol or even food intake for that matter, as a personal choice. I'm sorry for drug addicts but feel ultimately it's their own responsibility.
7
@mariah, I totally hear ya. Consider the amount of funding: $33k, per inmate, for these murder-by-OD convictions, or even $5k-$7k per addict in rehab treatment. How much good that would do, if that kind of money is spent on education, rather than on these addicts whose sole purpose in life is to get another high. It's all wasted money down the drain. Compassion comes at a steep price indeed. Priority of our society is so out of whack, no wonder we are lagging behind countries like China.
1
“I look at it in a real micro way,” said Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County outside Minneapolis. “You owe me for that dead kid.”
Mr. Orput represents the State and he is owed nothing.
Sounds like something Joe Arpaio would say.
115
This sounds like a good strategy for scaring people from calling medics when an overdose occurs until the victim is dead.
48
Mr Orput’s obvious and raging narcissism is what fueled his alcoholism initially and now the sanctimonious, righteous zeal of the reformed alcoholic. “You owe ME for that dead kid.” Not God. Not the state. Not society. Not the family. ME. People like this who think they have a monopoly on virtue now that they are sober are misguided and dangerous. Need I remind you of one George W Bush and the havoc he wreaked? He, too, was better than you and never wrong. The good people of Minnesota need to get rid of this guy. Fast.
40
Just another scary grandiose man using vengeful power against those he disdains. There seems to be an epidemic of them: mass shooters, rapists & sexual harassers, the Freedom Caucus, right wing media creeps, Evangelicals, 45 & his cabinet, most members of the Republican Congress. They would rather take ineffective action based on their emotions than use reason and evidence to find constructive solutions. God forbid they contemplate their ugly psyches and reckon with their destructive urges. They are the true public health problem.
9
If you are going to arrest suppliers of death dealing chemicals you need to hit companies that pour toxic waste into our environment. Coal sludge, pig slurry and pesticides kill people. The companies that provided opioids and assured us all that they were safe should be prosecuted. So should enablers like Pruitt who weaken laws that protect the public from harm. Gun companies should be prosecuted. We protect corporations who peddle death but go after individual addicts. Why is the idea of individual responsibility pushed by Republicans but corporate greed and guilt is okay?
33
As a reporter, I covered city, state & federal courts for years.
I never met a prosecutor who didn't live to punish as many addicts as he (or she) could. If he (or she) couldn't find a way to bring the highest number of inflated charges, he (or she) would find a twist in an old law so it could do work it was never meant to do. (Or he would hound legislators to write news laws to give him more & fiercer ways to punish.)
Unsurprisingly, these sadistic & draconian tactics are confined to either addicts of color, or addicts without means. You rarely see prosecutors rounding up the enabling families & friends of rich or upper-middle-class users.
Nor, of course, do prosecutors arrest suburbanites whose children drive drunk & kill pedestrians. (And, naturally, no relation of a mass shooter is ever criminally accused, because, after all, it's perfectly legal to buy an AR-15 and give it to your homicidal child as a birthday present.)
Prosecutors have two modes of speech: threats or lies. Assume they wish you maximum harm.
52
It is time to put a check on their authority and power - including an elimination of their immunity for malicious acts.
4
...You rarely see prosecutors rounding up the enabling families & friends of rich or upper-middle-class users. ..
---------- that's because wealthy people can afford to buy themselves off . . .
6
I'm irate that I, as a taxpayer, have to pay money to put these people in prison.
We are continually told that we can't afford Social Security, Medicare, Social programs...
And yet we can always somehow afford millions of dollars to put someone in prison.
273
There are factories in prison that make billions go multinational corporations. Prisons are an extension of slavery. They are not shutting down any time soon...
9
Just wait, once we privatize Social Security and eliminate the Medicare program we will be able to afford it. VOTE. 11.6.18.
5
The private prisons that are springing up around the country are massive money makers for the owners. A disgrace on many fronts.
3
I guess if you're in a prison guard union or a prosecuting attorney, this is manna from heaven. Useless. If the death of a person is the issue, why not go after enablers of alcoholics? If you have a family member going out and buying booze for you, and you die from it (slower motion death I will admit) are you not just as liable for that death? And as others have mentioned, how about guns?
Retribution and revenge is behind so much of the criminal justice system at this point. We've lost our way.
14
In Gabor Mate’s book, he said something like 80% of female heroin addicts have been sexually abused. This approach punishes the victims, while the perpetrators that cause the trauma that leads to these addictions live free? No, charging the victims is not the answer.
7
So go arrest the Sackler family.
17
Yes, America. That’s the answer - just put more people on your hell-on-earth prisons, and make them even worse people. It’s clearly working.
170
Where was all this concern for treatment and not jail when it was blacks overdosing?
37
This is a good thing.
2
Prosecutors need to get a grip and go after drug companies, who provide millions of pills to small, vulnerable communities, and doctors, who over prescribe. Oh, BTW, MEXICANS are not bringing opioids into our country, and most of the border crossers are NOT MS-13 members. As usual, trying to distract from the REAL problems/sources.
8
"The opioid crisis has also become a national security concern. Most of the heroin coming into the United States is cultivated on poppy farms in Mexico, with eight cartels controlling production and operating distribution hubs in major U.S. cities."
Council on Foreign Relations 2017:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-opioid-epidemic
3
Where was all this outrage and sympathy when prosecutors and police were destroying black communities with these same tactics? Nowhere to be seen. And these same working class and middle class white communities were demanding and cheering that devastation. I completely understand why a lot of people have difficulty engendering much sympathy for these white drug addicts.
16
Once again out of control DAs helping to ruin society. Sure let's put more junkies in jail because that has worked so well.
13
Every circumstance is different. Certainly, there can be no guilt by association. But if you supply the poor slob with the drugs that contributed to his death, and the police can prove that, certainly you will feel the pinch of the law.
4
How about gun owners? When a kid picks up a parent’s gun and shoots another kid should the parents or the gun owner, and the kid, be charged with a crime? Come on NYT, let’s see some reporting on that.
13
So happy to hear your question, albeit it is probably rhetorical.
And I would say yes, and I would like to see parents who allow children to bring unattended guns to school(and of course those who use daddy's gun to kill) face some stiff fines or maybe some time in the pen.
So I guess I agree. Let's see more reporting on parents who allow their guns to get into the wrong hands.
6
Charging a friend with murder simply because he scored the drugs they shared is about as heartless and archaic as you can get! Not to mention stupid. The user who chose to shoot-up has sole responsibility which is the first thing they teach you in rehab. Choices. When two desperate people do heroin together to stave off withdrawal the LAST thing they are thinking about is dying. They simply want to take the pain away. The knowledge that your best friend died while using together is suffering enough without adding a prison sentence. I can guarantee you that this line of thinking is straight out of the heartless-holier then thou republican playbook.
13
"They owe me for that one dead kid." Are you kidding me? This is what passes for justice today?
You know what would be a better "payment"? Sentence them to rehab, plus a year's stay in a sober halfway house and have them work part time that year and volunteer in the community as well. They can get back on their feet (or try to) and give back. And hey it's also solution that's cheaper than a trial and 11 years in jail.
113
While these prosecutions may make grieving families and friends make sense of a tragic death, I don't think it does much to prevent overdose deaths, given the lengths addicts will go to feed their addiction.
2
This is one of many examples of our incoherent national criminal justice policy. We are having parallel but contradictory conversations. One is that anyone who commits x or y crimes should be thrown in prison forever (opiate peddling, Weinstein, Madoff, etc etc) Throw’em all in jail to rot, liberals and conservatives alike say. See? Problem solved! The other discussion is of concern over mass incarceration. That societal dialogue seems informed by the increasingly dubious proposition that our prisons are filled not with opiate dealers, Weinsteins or Madoffs, but with aspiring poets, artists and writers convicted of minor marijuana offenses and such. But long ago most such folks were either released or benefited from increasingly popular pretrial diversion programs. So then who are all those people still crowding our prisons? Oh, right.
1
The "War on Drugs" is being won in European countries where safe, reliable needle exchanges and Methadone and other drug treatment programs are standard.
Here in the backward U.S.A., the issue is still being treated like a moral issue rather than a practical one - a huge mistake.
30
Having returned to the US after many years in the military while serving overseas ..I find the narcotic issue in the US something I could not ever imagine. The true life stories of drug addiction to include meth and heroin..plus other mix of drugs are astounding. I ask the question of why, since most know and realize these types of addictions will eventually cause death, aside from the impact on family and friends.
Two important points: Anyone who furnishes narcotics causing death or other must be incarcerated. The selling of narcotics at any level must suffer mandatory incarceration.
As for the "big time" drug dealers who trade in kilos...my stand on this is that the death penalty shall prevail.
American must address this national addiction epidemic with measures which are outside the "realm" of normal reason..otherwise, many more will die...
3
it's seems that the prosecutors understand that there is a problem in our society with drugs but they do not know what to do about it. this new strategy is an intelligeny lazy approach to the problem. incarceration is not the solution.
4
I disagree with some of the sentiment expressed in the comments section here.
A few years ago, a particularly nasty batch of heroin came through my city. It claimed at least 5 lives that I know of, and there was a new 20-something obituary in the paper every day for a week.
Someone needs to be held accountable for that. The dealer, who knowingly gave bad drugs to an addicted population, should be punished. These dealers know what they're doing. They know their method of making money is malicious.
There is, of course, a gray area here when the dealers are ALSO addicted to the drugs they are selling. In that case, they still need to be held responsible. They are still committing a crime, regardless of their addiction.
That being said, it seems foolish to take it down to this granular level. Just because someone is present for an overdose does not make them responsible. Addicts hang out with other addicts - there is no need to prosecute that specific connection.
6
Tatum**** you act as if the street dealer is bringing drugs into the country. The illegal drug business could not function unless it was funded and controlled by very powerful forces here and around the world. In many cases these are 'legitimate' people. Businessmen and politicians. This a multi - multi billion dollar business, maybe even in the trillions. The coordination from beginning to end is not done by low level dealers. It really is so hypocritical beyond belief.
1
More of the failed war on drugs mentality,
Tobacco and gun executives get a pass, people at the bottom, get blasted. Addiction is an illness exacerbated by poverty and poor education. Hiring a corps of mental health professionals would be a more cohesive approach. We will not jail our way out of the opioid crisis.
16
Drug addition is a medical problem and should be treated as such. We need more diversion and treatment programs.
9
MAO--And, also stop targeting people of color. There are just as many whites who abuse drugs, but don't go to jail. Why IS that?
3
Prosecutors bring these charges to help further their own careers. Sending drug addicts to prison has never helped stop or even lessen the flow of drugs into the country.
8
Gotta get those numbers up. These are low hanging fruit for their win column.
1
Fentanyl or heroin overdose starts with doctor-prescribed oxycodone or other similar drugs.
I can live with these laws if they also include doctors that prescribe these opioids, big pharma and their executives that profit from the drugs, and perhaps even their shareholders.
6
These ridiculous sort of prosecutions are just going to cause more overdoses, because the people who are using with the victim will be too scared to call for any emergency intervention. The decision to use opiates is made by the addict and they should know that the possibility of an overdose is a substantial risk that is only getting worse. If the US wanted to attempt to actually deal with the opiate problem, rather than just turn it into profits for the privatized prisons, they would give addicts a safer place to use them under supervision with the possibility of getting into treatment. Not many heroin addicts have the almost 2000 dollars a day that it costs to go into a treatment center and the Republican’s have gutted most the funding for the state run programs. I fear they are using the opiate crisis as a means to target and prosecute for their blood money from the prison lobby, rather than doing anything to actually help the situation.
9
For all their claims to serving the noble cause of the law, prosecutors bring these cases for one reason -- to help them get re-elected.
As the article noted, even prosecutors who give lip service to the pointlessness of the war on drugs - using the law to attempt to solve what is essentially a medical problem - engage in this practice.
They are simply flailing about.
None of the rest of the war has gone well. Might as well target the helpless, hopeless, companions of those who the war obviously failed. Like shooting fish in a barrel, it makes a lot of noise, but mostly splashes about aimlessly.
Further ruining the lives of the survivors does nothing useful.
Certainly re-electing those who only have a hammer so every problem looks like a nail does nothing to save anyone from anything -- except maybe political defeat in the next election. They don't care about the dead, only how that suffering can be channeled to benefit their political aspirations.
60
"For all their claims to serving the noble cause of the law, prosecutors bring these cases for one reason -- to help them get re-elected. " While this may be true in some cases, it is just a cheap shot to make such a general accusation. Sometimes with an incorrigible problem, all possible legal solutions need to be tried. Making everyone a victim is the overwhelming current tendency in our society. Sitting in a prison cell gives time for reflection.
1
If this was 1960, I might buy that argument. Expecting an improvement in the repeated failure of such policies, accompanied by an absence of change in the results, is, as they say, usually considered to be insanity. I suppose we could try this for another half century or so, just in case, but we should face facts.
Trying to enforce legal moralism by state edict has been a decided failure. It enriches the cartels, re-elects "tough on crime" politicians even as it ironically ensures the profitability of the drug trade, and wastes precious resources on punishment that should go towards treatment.
Want to make the drug problem WORSE? Then just keep on keeping on with the naive belief that the police can sort this out if they just arrest enough of us. Filling the prisons has worked so well, don't you know?
These deaths are not homicides; they're accidental suicides. Due to the illegal nature of the drug there will always be a chain of suppliers who are easy targets for accountability, and these prosecutors are looking for this low hanging fruit. But in reality most drug overdoses are a direct result of a personal choice and an awareness of the risk involved.
22
Will prosecutors go after the people who run government sponsored needle exchange facilities?
Is there a moral difference between a needle exchange facility and assisting a "friend" or relative in obtaining illegal, potentially lethal, drugs?
Society needs to make up its mind.
131
This is America. You are free to do whatever you want ... until someone winds up dead.
The lessons learned may be hard, but perhaps necessary.
Still, more attention needs to be focused on the drug companies and medical professionals who also contribute to the drug epidemic sweeping the land.
And hold them accountable for the rising trend of prescription drug abuse, and over medicating patients.
4
"You owe me for that dead kid" is ridiculous. Nearly all addicts choose to continue drug use. Nobody's fault but their own if they die.
37
Once an addict the choice is gone. That's the definition of addiction - it makes you unable to choose.
5
Not true. There is always choice, it just doesn't feel that way to someone medicating their pain.
It's also ridiculous, Suzy, because if someone is owed something, it's certainly not the prosecutor!
3
This is Prosecutorial overreach, and Hubris. When will the Big Pharma drug dealers be prosecuted ???? Yeah, thought so. Go after the little people, because you CAN. Shameful and ridiculous.
65
Vote these prosecutors out! If they do not run f o r office, vote those who appoint them out of office. The War on Drugs, initially started by Nixon against the hippies, is probably the most expensive government initiative ever!
7
When will all the parents who have guns in the house be prosecuted when their child takes the gun to school or elsewhere and kills people?
1
So the prosecutor takes half an ambien ( addictive substance) then smokes two cigarettes ( addictive substance that eventually kills) but sees no parallels in his own addictive behaviors and shows no empathy. Huh.
276
I think he takes the Ambien rather than the 2 - 3 shots of bourbon he has learned are a far worse challenge...
3
Yes. It does make them killers.
4
It does not. Personal responsibility.
5
while addiction continues to be a problem, turning people into criminals is the American way of funneling tax payer dollars to the elite. and that prosecutor orput is on drugs (ambien prescribed or not) and permitted to prosecute. unbelievable!! recovering alcoholic....unacceptable!! nobody owes YOU a darn thing! this story reeks of the prison system trying to keep up their average daily inmate count.
21
“In one Pennsylvania case, a woman was headed for detox, but knew she would not be admitted unless she tested positive for drugs.”
This is obviously an apocryphal story - made up to make someone feel better. All of the indicia of urban myth. I seriously doubt that the reporter got story first hand. Editors and fact-check.
7
Though I don't know about this exact story, this actually DOES happen. The woman in the story was going into heroin withdrawal. Heroin and other opiates have horrible withdrawal symptoms that can be treated with a blocker called Suboxone or Subutex/buprenorphine. It takes away all withdrawal symptoms and helps users get and stay clean. But, and I know this firsthand, a user is not admitted into a detox or Suboxone program without first testing positive for an opiate. This is because of the high instances of abuse of this drug, including selling it on the street, and because doctors who prescribe this life-saving drug for addiction, are for some reason, only allowed to take a limited number of patients. The reporter may not have gotten that story first hand, but it does happen.
9
Actually, that account sounds very likely. Most detox centers require that someone has used within a certain timeframe (commonly 48 hours) in order to be admitted for treatment. What sometimes happens and I know this from personal experience with a family member, is that all the beds are full in the detox facility when the substance abuser is ready to try and quit. They keep calling back and by the time a bed is available they have been clean too long. The only way for them to get into detox at that point is to drink or use drugs.
4
This is true. Just happened with my niece this week in Nashville. While she wasn’t a daily user, she was a frequent user. She has no insurance, so she was on daily standby to enter a detox rehab. Therefore she had to use daily all week so she could test positive.
10
No one can control another person's actions so no one should be held responsible for another person's actions. Unless, of course, you're physically forcing a person to do something against their will or you're threatening to harm them unless they do something against their will. The only person who is responsible for taking the drugs are the people who took the drugs. I think that enablers are bad people but I don't see what good it's doing by putting them in an already overcrowded prison system that cost tax payers a lot more money than it would to put them on a rehabilitation program. Also, a drug addict isn't going to care that a loved one might go to jail for homicide if they overdose--I'm not sure what the point of charging someone who was at the scene of the crime when an overdose happened with homicide is.
205
I don't agree with this at all. The user is making the choice to take the drug and the consequences fall under personal responsibility. What a waste of a 2nd life and millions of dollars to try and incarcerate these people.
51
How about if we say that the death was the consequence of a personal choice? We seem to have lost the idea of Responsibility and Consequences. We are always trying to make it someone else's fault when a decision we made turns out bad.
Decisions have consequences. It is your responsibility to accept the consequences of your decisions. Some decisions have small consequences: Buying the wrong Peanut Butter. Some decisions have lethal consequences: Crossing a busy street against the light, or using Heroin. Your decision, your responsibility, your consequences.
371
Wouldn’t personal responsibility also apply to someone who helps their loved one obtain lethally dangerous toxic substances?
3
Unless they forced said loved one to ingest the substances, no it doesn't fit the definition of personally responsible.
Let's just say because the Right is very selective, conveniently so, in which actions are held accountable to 'personal responsibility'.
5
The view taken in most of these comments (that these prosecutions are terrible policy) is predictable, at least for NY Times readers. But let's change the facts a little. Defendant encourages his friend, who has never used drugs before, to share heroin that defendant supplies, but the heroin turns out to have been laced with fentanyl and the friend dies.
Is prosecution justified?
3
Still, no.
10
"Defendant encourages his friend, who has never used drugs before ...." - Joel
Pure speculation. I can't imagine someone who is ignorant of the dangers of injecting drugs; and who would do this solely on the basis of someone's recommendation? And how would you prove that this recommendation caused them to overdose?
3
Definitely not. The only way it should be prosecutable is if there was clear intent to poison.
2
More bodies for our expanding prison-industrial complex. State agreements with private prisons are at least partly to blame. We have created a monster— a society that scorns the poor and cares nothing for its children, which leads to wasted lives such as these.
15
Not to discount the tragedies of this scourge, but I don't remember any tobacco scientists or executives or shareholders being charged with homicide. The addictive nature of these products are similar; the users willingly use them because of these addictive properties. The manufacturers know these products are lethal. In the case of tobacco, the companies altered their product to be more addictive. Why then no murder charges being brought against tobacco companies? Are the lives of junkies more valuable than the lives of smokers? Although instant death is not a particular result with smokers, is the slow death any less horrible? The irony boggles the mind and speaks volumes about the nature of American empathies and attitudes and approaches to "justice". If one wears a suit, it is justified. Half of Wall Street is hyped up on amphetamines but no one blinks an eye.
511
Well, typically, the only 'justice' being served is for a small group -- the Just USers.
For everyone else? Well: Good luck!
The problem being that alcohol and pharmaceuticals are legal. Let's outlaw painkillers and then explain to cancer patients and burn patients that we are dong so to be fair to drug addicts.
1
How is this any different than selling ciggarettes? There is a time factor, but that is it. No one doubts the toxicity and damage they do. I don't see a significant difference.
10
The difference is that selling, possessing and using tobacco isn't illegal.
1
Using your flawed theory all sellers or those sharing cigarettes are just as guilty. It's a drug, pure and simple. Codiene is also a legal drug. Should we arrest doctors who overprescribed to a patient in pain?
And this from a " NY Times" reader.
Better by far to explore the many, indeed innumerable, reasons why people resort to illicit drug use than to persecute and prosecute these associations between those who know one another and partake of substances together. Bourgeois America is a stultifying world and drugs are one reaction to this.
7
The goal of prosecutors is to have every American arrested at least once in their lives "Welcome to the system" We all know about the for profit privatized prison system in the US.
"In America, as long as the right people are making money, it doesn't matter how many other have to suffer and die."-Me.
Lets not blame the real culprits here. Doctors, and Big Pharma. They know how addictive this stuff was but there was just too much money to be made.
17
"the real culprits here. Doctors, and Big Pharma." - Comment by Rick
No, Rick, the only real "culprit" here is the person who made the PERSONAL CHOICE to use dangerous drugs.
3
An unfortunate aspect of the justice system is that it is based on retribution and, frequently, vengeance is blind. The state assumes the role of persecutor of a crime rather than a manager of civil order. Nominally, the intent is to dissuade the perpetrators of crime and their accomplices. However, such as these instances, the law begins to overreach where an illegal act may have occurred and there is a hapless material witness who can be rebranded as a suspect regardless of actual role or intent. In terms of successful crime detection and prosecution, it leads to usefully expedient statistics to charge and incarcerate at least someone. To prosecute a peripherally involved person with a grave crime is a form of repugnant indolence that allows for the maintenance of prosecution rates in lieu of other costlier and more complex investigations.
But, is this justice? In my mind, it is not. The law becomes a bludgeon against the individual rather than a balanced, sage of overseer of society. Police and prosecutors are permitted to give vent to their most subjective and vindictive instincts where someone may present as a viable focal point for wrath. The result is the degradation of justice that manifests in miscarriages of justice and, probably, in the lowering of the overall moral standard of the law enforcement community. As Black Lives will attest, this has led to appalling atrocities in the name of justice.
11
Once again the USA shows it can destroy people like no other nation. Imagine the outrage if this was happening in Iran.
14
If one of the people who share drugs with another one dies of overdose and the one who shares the drug that has killed the other one is accused of homicide, then all the drug dealers should be accused of multiple homicides.
100
So the Sackler family (oxycontin) would have to go to prison? Seems awfully harsh but ok lock those billionaires up.
Out of 82 deaths, half had no relationship with the person other than being the dealer.
I'm not sure what to make of many of these stories about friends, partners, etc.
But I have no trouble at all charging a dealer whose product killed someone.
8
If at all possible, incarcerate. This is America's preferred path to social justice.
15
What good does it do to incarcerate them? Make an example? It's a waste of money and ruins a 2nd life. What's next, execute anyone that tests positive for Marijuana since it's a Schedule 1 drug.
13
This expensive exercise in judgemental futility highlights why we have an opiode epidemic. The time, money and resources would be better spent addressing the failures of our for- profit health insurance and accompanying dismal access to health care. The true criminal behavior lies in excesses of the pharmaceutical industry in pushing the drugs to doctors to prescribe. We should focus resources on making rehab and job training priorities, not to mention improving opportunity for our communities nationwide through affordable education. Prosecute those becoming billionaires from the misery caused by their products and hold those profiting responsible for the financial and human losses they are wreaking on our country.
69
In the last two school shootings, the murderer got the guns from his father. Why aren't prosecutors going after gun sharing instead of drug sharing?
555
Because the guns were taken without permission in the shootings.
In this story, the drugs weren't stolen, they were intentionally given.
3
So because you deplore one failing of American society, you think the same mistake should be applied to more areas of legislation? Good thinking.
3
@sf,
If a gun owner fails to secure their weapon then they are responsible for the theft- and the crimes that were committed with their gun.
11
"A Long Island woman whose best friend texted her from a business trip asking for heroin was sentenced to six years after he died taking the drugs she sent him." This is a less ambiguous case than some of the others in the article. She supplied her friend with drugs that killed him and the absence of profit (assuming that to be the case) shouldn't excuse her from the same responsibility we would impose on a dealer.
7
If this is the case, go after every single gun owner whose weapon was used in a murder.
632
Yes!
According to the Bureau of Justice, some 240,000 firearms are stolen from homes each year. According to the FBI 80% of guns used in crimes were either stolen or bought in straw sales.
I have been promoting the policy that the right of gun ownership comes with the responsibility of storing those guns securely, away from potential thieves, children, suicidal family members, etc.
Gun owners who do not report stolen firearms within 24 hours should be considered complicit in any crimes committed with those guns.
Guns should be required to be kept in gun safes, with access ONLY by the registered owner, no other family members or friends.
28
Is this an honest counterargument, or simply subterfuge being used to distract others from the current danger to lives by use of illegal drugs? Yes, carelessly used guns and better control of their availability are also problems, but that is not the subject of this article.
5
Won't happen. Now that we know the Russians have infiltrated and are a big part of America's NRA, we'd have to go through them first to get any legislation changed. And it seems they love seeing the role that guns perform in creating havoc in American society (if they actually loved them so much, there would be more lenient guns laws in Russia).
15
Horrible policy. As someone who’s family member struggled with addiction, I’ve seen how chaotic and pathetic his life and his friends’ could be, as much as they might trash talk and act tough. No one in the family could afford to pay for his treatment. Why on earth spend tens of thousands prosecuting people like them for overdoses of friends? They’re already in vicious circle of self loathing and hopelessness. They need medical care, practical support, and mental health care that appeals to their good nature and recovers self-worth.
312
My sister-in-law has been a heroin addict since she was 16 and is now hooked on opioids, bouncing from doctor to doctor, somehow managing to put herself into different ERs for emergency painkillers at least 3-4 times a year. Her husband died of an overdose 10 years ago, her son grew up with his grandparents and moved away from NYC. She’s white, grew up in a middle-class family and had many opportunities to change her life, improve her health, but she drains productive society by living off of disability ($1200/month) and her guilt-ridden elderly mother who pays all her bills. Jail time? She’s spent time at Rikers Island years ago. Nothing changes. Nothing will change until she changes her selfish attitude and decides to be a blessing instead of a burden to this world. What was the root cause that led to her drug addiction? Probably a traumatic childhood or unbearable family life. You have pain and emotional drama you want to escape from? Boohoo. Rise up and overcome it. Especially since you are lucky to live in the USA and not the Philippines (where you can be murdered by government militias for just smoking pot). Addicts in the USA are selfish people and don’t deserve incarceration or treatment unless they can cough up the $$$ to pay for it themselves. - A disgusted U.S. taxpayer
18
Will, try not to advocate public policy based on your pathetic case of a sister-in-law. It will only lead to more harm to other people and it won't help your sister-in-law one bit.
@Will Lee: what you said. Ignore the lefty haters. My nephew died at 29 last year of a drug overdose. He'd been addict all his life. His family was wealthy, he grew up with every privilege. There was money for college, vacations, new cars. At 17, he totaled his new car and nearly killed his best friend, who sustained permanent injuries. The next day, his parents went out and bought him a new car! His mom cleverly got him put on SSI on his 18th birthday -- why? he was a drug addict. He never worked a day in his life. He got $800 a month, free food from SNAP, a free phone, a subsidized apartment for $40 a month. He sold drugs out of the apartment and got kicked off Section 8, so his parents rented him a weekly motel room. They provided him with all his food, as he sold the food stamps for money for drugs. They enabled him every step of the way, made every excuse for him -- paid for FIVE failed rehabs -- bought him big screen HDTVs, XBoxes and the like so he wouldn't be "bored & lonely". He never had to face the music for his bad behavior. Tough love is the only solution to this. You want to die? goodbye.
It sounds like the prosecutor uses Ambien for a purpose other than the one for which it is normally prescribed, sleep.
Is he a drug abuser, present or potential?
“But Mr. Orput still prosecutes in overdose cases…
…Each time his phone rings late at night with word of another death, he takes half an Ambien, smokes a couple of cigarettes in the bathroom, thinks about the grieving family he will soon meet — and then considers who will pay.”
24
While Purdue Pharma executives walk around free, lets put clueless addicts in jail. Incarceration is an industry, and this keeps the “customers” coming!
197
If people took drugs together it would be impossible to show necessary intent or reckless disregard for life to get a conviction.
4
What a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money and drain on the court system. It's also another way to place blame on someone else, rather than face the unfortunate reality and fact that the person taking the drugs chose to take those drugs. Someone taking drugs and overdosing from them is not a homicide. It's a sad and unfortunate accident. Trying to treat an overdose death as a crime isn't going to do anything to stop the spread of the opiate crisis either. We need to find a way to get to the root of the problem and better understand the causes of addiction and how to help treat it.
If someone is in the depths of addiction, they aren't even thinking that it could land them in jail for the rest of their lives. For most heroin addicts, once they are addicts the only thing they think about is their next fix. People throw their lives away to get high, they know it and they'll tell you as much but it doesn't stop them.
Taxpayer dollars are going to fund this ridiculousness. If we're going to throw more money away, why don't we at least do it in a way that is productive to help prevent and treat it.
23
"Overdose prosecutions, they say, are simply one tool in a box that should include prevention and treatment. But there is no consensus on their purpose. Some believe they will reduce the flow of drugs into their communities, deter drug use or help those with addiction “hit bottom.” To others, the cases are not meant to achieve public policy goals, but as a balm for grieving families or punishment for a callous act."
Or perhaps their main purpose is to increase prosecutors' conviction rates regardless of the collateral damage? Draconian sentences for drug possession have failed; increasing the number of people subject to prosecution seems all too obviously destined to fail as well.
55
As an elected DA for 24 years and have been part of the national leadership for a very diverse group of elected DAs across America, the idea that we, as a profession, are "conviction counters" is frankly ludicrous. Just like the rare bad egg in journalism, more interested in clicks than accuracy, there are some prosecutors who've confused conviction rates with justice.
I NEVER keep track of anything more than our activity load - how many cases we file or try, NOT what our "win/loss" rate is and any DA who tells you they have a 95-100% conviction rate is either not telling the truth or isn't trying enough hard cases.
DAs very rarely run or are elected to higher office - about 1% of Congress were ever elected prosecutors (Leahy, McGaskill, Klobuchar and a similar number in the House)
1
Another absurd reason to place people behind bars in the United States. Always looking to place blame and punish. There is a fundamental lack of empathy that permeates through the continuously eroding social fabric of this country. It’s ironic really, just like throwing narcotics at pain instead of treating the underlying cause (this coming from a physician), incarcerating people for drugs or their mere association with them represents much of the same...
149
This sounds like a great way for states to meet their commitments to for-profit prisons, to fill x number of cells. MAGA!!
230
Peter Orput's prosecution of these users is a trauma response to the grieving families he encounters. His failure to understand this -- and to get help himself -- is as much a problem as the underlying drug abuse that leads to overdose deaths.
And while, yes, users who share their drugs with another user can be held responsible for that user's death under a theory of criminally negligent homicide, decades of research and experience show that these prosecutions do not deter substance abuse. If prosecution or prison deterred substance abuse or cured addiction, the United State wouldn't have an addiction problem.
The better path to dealing with substance abuse -- and this includes aerosols, meth, crack, opioids, and alcohol, among others -- is divert the user, pre-arrest, to treatment. In other words, address the underlying problem and avoid the criminal justice system because that system only has a hammer and trauma-afflicted prosecutors like Mr. Orput view everything as a nail.
13
Rather amazing that authorities can use tenuous connections of liability to hold addicts accountable when there was no intent to harm, and yet, when a child accesses an unsecured gun and shoots someone, no one is held accountable.
Drug users and dealers need to find a benefactor like the National Rifle Association.
441
Bill Randle - Maybe the Pharmaceuticals Researchers and Manufacturers Association can step in to fill the gap. This would be the trade association for the opioid manufacturers that are getting so many people addicted these days.
11
Politicians are too beholden to Big Pharma for huge donations for their elections and re-elections. This simply isn't going to happen!
It appears that Mr, Orput’s prosecutorial zeal is affected by his own addiction issues. Nicotine and Ambien were noted, as well as continued recovery from alcohol addiction.
Thank you.
96
You would accomplish a lot more if you put the cigarette and alcohol manufacturers, the drugmakers, the politicians who allow it, and the officials who do nothing about it in jail instead of these people.
10
While cigarettes are always bad for you....moderate consumption of alcohol is not. And even though cigarettes are harmful, it normally takes 55-60 years or more to kill the smoker. As we see here, heroin and opioids kill very young people very quickly. Nobody is "allowing" this -- everyone here was using/abusing drugs ILLEGALLY and buying them from dealers.
1
Will these prosecutors go after someone's drinking buddies after he drives drunk and kills someone?
I know the War on (some) Drugs is immensely profitable for many interested parties, but perhaps someday common sense will prevail and drug use will be treated as a condition requiring treatment, not prison.
115
That is an often prosecuted crime, usually manslaughter.
2
Treatment costs $7000. Jail costs $33,000. But first round treatment isn't regularly effective - and we should add job training and education to help break the cycle of hopelessness after treatment - so multiply that $7000 by 5 to get to a humane solution.
The math isn't hard.
As a society, though, we need to WANT to save our people - and our President is a slavering fan of Philippines' addict-killer Duterte. And Democrats, the party of decency today, are fighting over who's progressive enough instead of uniting, with laser focus, to unseat Trump and the GOP.
Change will be a long time coming.
39
As a pain management physician, I am glad that at least this may finally get us to face some of the reality behind the opioid epidemic in this country.
By far the most common sources of prescription opiods for those who use them for non-medical reasons are family members and friends. I've always found it fascinating when politicians and law enforcement officers talk about cracking down on drug dealers, the image they wish to draw is that of a dealer on the street, not these people.
Oh, and by the way, there are no studies of which I am aware regarding how those family members and friends obtained the medications in the first place. Apparently most received them by legitimate doctors' prescriptions but no one knows whether they received them for legitimate pain complaints or if they scammed the doctors.
6
Charging people for murder in cases where a person shared drugs with someone who overdosed is one of the most ridiculous laws I've ever heard. There absolutely no intent to murder someone when getting high together. Even if that were actually the case, a further investigation would need to be conducted. That investigation would be pretty much paradoxical to solving the problem of a drug epidemic, as the resources should be used for getting drugs off the street.
Another case of the law turning a blind eye to the fact that people actually need help. Why not charge the police who allowed the drugs to be sold in their town? Or how about we charge the person passing by who saw the drug deal happen? At the end of the day, it's just a lazy way of taking action in an area that needs a lot more attention.
Humanity vs. Politics........
42
As a physician, what influence would you say Perdue Pharma’s marketing campaign had on you?
14
To Carl,
If you read what I wrote, you'd see I didn't say the policy was right or wrong. What I wanted to point out was that perhaps it will get those making and enforcing our laws to begin to get a better handle on the reality of the situation.
I noted the many comments criticizing the policy as they feel using drugs is a matter of personal responsibility. Let me ask you: do you believe you would see as many such comments if the article was about street drug dealers selling these drugs or unethical doctors selling prescriptions for these drugs? If we feel we should punish people who supply drugs to addicts, where do we draw the line as to whom we should punish and whom we shouldn't? I don't have an easy answer but I certainly believe it's a question we should be discussing.
1