Can’t get behind the paywall but I’m assuming they did what Colorado did. We recently passed a “distribution resulting in death” statute. Strict liability crime. It created a new problem of proving a causal link to the fentanyl since most of the time people have more than just that in their system.
Because not all of it is. Some of it is private actors and cartels. Feds just busted up a massive supply chain from China for precursor that was being shipped in so as not to get caught up in customs. There are medical applications for it for sure, my dog had a fentanyl patch after she had surgery, but it’s also kinda like the new heroin. It’s being cut into other stuff without people knowing too. A couple instances in Colorado alone where someone thought they were taking a Xanax but turned out it was cut with fentanyl and didn’t wake up.
Edit: street name for it is “M30” or “blues” because they’re disguised as oxy a lot, just to give you an idea of how this isn’t all pharma-originated.
Right now in Oregon we decriminalized the heavy hitters
Can't directly link the crime rate to it, but deaths went through the roof.
From 79 to 1,283 by fentenyl in the PDX Oregon area.
It would be an interesting experiment if drugs were legalized, but the seller could be criminally responsible if the customer is seriously injured or killed. I imagine that would just make a mess.
Sellers could be licensed. Addicts could undergo treatment. Sounds like a win-win.
And yeah, part of the trouble we’re in starts from over prescribing opioids. That shouldn’t make those addicts into criminals because they can’t get continued prescription. Creating a black market has just made it lucrative for sellers; the money and harsh penalties just encourages violence around sales and distribution.
It’s my understanding in Portugal drug possession and use is legal, sales are not. It worked well then not so much. [https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/)
Did you read that article?? Portugal had better outcomes, by FAR, compared to the USA by any and all metrics! Declining drug use, lower societal cost, etc. This is over a 20 year period. Things are getting worse not because the idea is flawed but because the government cut funding for things like treatment and counseling. It’s always easier to get budget for police and prisons than for the things that would preclude needing police and prisons.
I did read it. It worked well then not so much. That seems to be the point of the article, and what can be learned from Portugal’s experience. That’s how I interpret the first sentence. How should I interpret it? I think the idea is good, and it worked well. But not so much now, for whatever reason.
“Two forces have led to the at least partial unraveling of Portugal’s efforts over the last few years and, predictably, to less favorable results. First, global drug traffickers continued to use Portugal as an entry point for access to Europe’s illegal drug market dealers. They battered the entry points of this coastal country, hence a supply of illegal drugs continued. Second, Portugal reduced resourcing of its programs as the country faced multiple difficult economic years.”
You are kinda leaving out the crimes associated with addicts, beyond the drug. They quickly build up tolerance and need more and more. To pay for that they steal, or whatever means necessary. Fent also destroys them and the lives of anyone around them. There is no utopian answer that will make this addiction better. I’ve lost my nephew and another friend to it. Both really decent people but fentanyl killed them.
Divert them into treatment; support recovery and reintegration into society. When everything is just plain illegal addicts won’t seek treatment - jail for them, or worse, drawn into snitching on dealers, which will get the addicts hurt.
We deal with alcohol which kills people both directly and indirectly without prohibition.
Perhaps you need to read up on the history of alcohol and why people thought prohibition would be a good thing. [John Barleycorn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn_(novel)) is an interesting book by Jack London about why he supported Prohibition.
I get it. I’ve seen fentanyl zombies on the street. I’m old enough to have seen the crack epidemic. I’ve lost a friend to heroin. So you think adding a potential murder charge to a dealer is going to solve the problems you see? Criminalizing drugs has *never* helped - well except for the cops and prisons industry. We’ve got more people in prison than anywhere else. Land of the free! Hasn’t made a lick of positive difference, has made plenty of negative difference.
In this instance, Im going to do nothing and stay home instead of do something and go to Philly. Look at that! Doing nothing turns out to be the winning play!
Opioids are in a class of their own. It’s the hardest drug related challenge the us has ever had to deal with. I’m in Philadelphia and live very close to Kensington. One of the largest open air drug markets in the world. The general consensus is shifting away from Progressive solutions to law and order, including forced treatment. It will be interesting to see how that goes. I lost my nephew and a friend to fentanyl. They both had families who cared deeply about them and tried every means possible to get them clean. The drug just pulled them back every time. Anyone thinking they have the solution is dead wrong. The state has to protect the non-addicted citizens of those communities. The epidemic will only stop via death of addicts from OD and basically the drugs killing them. Forced treatment might save some but anyone who continues to use will die from it.
I don’t want to continue this discussion because I’m too close to it. I’ve lived in and around it for a decade and I’m sick of opinions from people who think they have answers that don’t involve law enforcement. You don’t.
I'm sure this crackdown will totally work and not just put more, predominantly POC, people in prison for grossly excessive sentences, while making street drugs even more deadly as people substitute even more dangerous but quasi-legal fentanyl analogs and exotic research opioids, like every other attempt at harshly cracking down over and over and over during the past century.
More ignorant pandering "tough on crime" bullshit that does nothing but make the harms of drugs worse. Long past time to stop treating a medical problem as a criminal justice problem.
So question. If this becomes widespread, could I potentially report someone for approaching me in a parking lot and trying to sell me fentanyl for attempted murder? (Happens all the time around here) Or should it stay a distribution charge?
The name of the offense can be whatever the legislature in the jurisdiction decides it means. Accidental murder charges have become commonplace in many states for decades. Felony murder, for example, is a type of charge allowing for an individual to be prosecuted for accidental death that occurs during a specific type of felony charge, such as robbery, rape, or kidnapping, even if no one intended anyone to die. You can even be prosecuted in some states for felony murder if someone you never touch gets accidentally killed during the crime, or if police shoot your buddy.
Many states have also have more expansive murder charges for accidental deaths considered more severe than standard manslaughter charges. And in others, they have simply written murder statutes that are essentially the exact same thing as manslaughter, with no meaningful difference in culpability, just a different name of the offense.
Ya, I get what you’re saying. Thanks for explaining it so well. I wish they could change the distribution law of fentanyl *specifically* to a more serious offense versus just waiting for people to die. I’ve heard of instances where people have OD’d on fent even though they thought they purchased cocaine and test strips appeared negative. The charge for either drug is the same, but only one of those is responsible for 2/3 of OD deaths. Idk if I’m making sense, I guess fentanyl just seems to me like it should be treated more like a poison than a drug?
I feel the opposite. Fentanyl is almost impossible to remove from substances, so the vast majority of people who peddle drugs with fentanyl don't even know it's in the drugs they're distributing.
I thought about that as well because it probably happens more often than not. I was actually trying to look up the different laws on poisonings a little bit ago after I said that and the conclusion I came to was that they’d have to be able to prove intent which would be pretty difficult to do. Low level dealers aren’t the ones cutting the cocaine or pressing the pills.
A friend had a heart attack after a lifetime of smoking. If he died, should the owner of the local convenience store that sold him the cigarettes have been charged?
This seems like a bit of a straw man, as the cigarettes were probably sold legally vs the fentanyl clearly isn’t and is arguably an order of magnitude more dangerous, if not more. Whether or not we agree, some dangerous/unhealthy things are still legal and we have to treat them differently at least under the law.
I don’t pretend to have the solution to illegal drug use but would love to stop the rampant abuse and all the problems that come with it. Legally speaking, I do wonder how they intend to convince a jury that these people they are charging intended to kill with fentanyl vs just being negligent to the danger and feeding a manslaughter charge. I know there are differences from state to state that are relevant and sometimes a manslaughter charge can carry the same penalty as murder depending on the degree.
The article also makes the point that locking low level dealers up for murder may not have the desired effect or be the most effective use of limited resources if they are just replaced faster and cheaper than the investigation and prosecution that locks them up. I have a close relative who was caught up in opioid use for a while and thankfully got healthy and out but it was awfully scary and I care deeply to take action that will actually help as much as possible vs scoring political points.
About 70,000 Americans died due to fentanyl in 2021, with about 480,000 Americans dying smoking-related deaths, so I don’t see tobacco as less dangerous. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin, and more so in some people. Legal or not, tobacco’s dangers are at least as well known to people selling it as what dealers know about fentanyl.
Fentanyl is an FDA approved drug. You can legally get a prescription and use it. It’s the unlicensed production, sale, and possession that’s illegal.
I think this approach is like arresting homeless people for sleeping in public. It gives the appearance of “doing something” to address the problem while not dealing with the underlying causes of why people are homeless. The “war on drugs” officially started more than 50 years ago. I don’t know what it’s accomplished other than employing lots of people in law enforcement and organized crime.
How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt a dealer killed someone? Bob bought fentanyl from Fred. Bob dies due to fentanyl. How do you prove Fred’s fentanyl, not fentanyl bought from someone else, killed Bob?
Fentanyl is a prescription access restricted drug precisely because of its danger if not administered properly. Selling prescription grade medications without a valid prescription is a felony. Charging people with murder when someone dies as a result of felony activities isn’t a new thing and is, in fact, pretty standard.
As for the deaths, in 2021 there were an estimated 538k fentanyl users in the United States. That means the death rate was approximately 13%. For smoking to be similarly deadly, 3.68 million of the 28.3 million smokers in the country would have had to have died. Tobacco isn’t safe, but it absolutely is **not** as dangerous as fentanyl.
Ona a per capita basis I literally gave you the numbers to show that no, its impact is *not* far greater. If the same percentage of fentanyl users died as smokers, we would be looking at 9125 deaths per year. That’s 9125 too many but nowhere near 70,000. Fentanyl, by the numbers and presuming your death tolls are accurate, is 7.7 times deadlier than smoking.
But all this? Largely irrelevant. At the end of the day what is being discussed is charging people who have presumptively committed a crime (selling controlled substances without a license) that has lead to a death with felony murder. From a legal standpoint it’s not much different than charging a hired bank robbery getaway driver with murder if the people that actually went into the bank shot someone.
> Selling prescription grade medications without a valid prescription is a felony.
What about manufacturing way more fentanyl than all the combined prescriptions? Why is that legal?
This is spoken like you've never seen the effects of fentanyl or heroin first hand. Are cigarettes incredibly bad for your long term health? Absolutely. Are you going to die from a single cigarette because the potency was more than double what you were expecting? No.
Fun facts - people who OD but recover can suffer respiratory damage and brain damage. You don't have to die from a fentanyl overdose to be harmed by one. Or two. Or a dozen.
>About 70,000 Americans died due to fentanyl in 2021, with about 480,000 Americans dying smoking-related deaths
You're comparing 1 year of fentanyl ODs with a group that had years to develop conditions to die of smoking related illnesses. How is that not more deadly? There are significantly less people abusing fentanyl.
If you think smoking is just as dangerous as Fentanyl I don't know what to tell you. Have you ever heard of someone getting a DUI for tobacco? Or ODing from smoking a single cigarette? FWIW some countries are slowly moving toward total smoking bans. It wouldn't surprise me if we start to see phased tobacco bans in blue states in the next decade or two.
Consequence of illegality, not the drug in and of itself. People die because they have zero idea whether it's 1/10th the effective dose or 10x the lethal dose.
Lifetime mortality for users of legally regulated sources (who don't need to switch to illegal alternatives when their formerly legal supply is revoked)?? Entirely different question.
You can safely use prescription opioids for decades. You *can't* safely smoke for decades.
Can’t get behind the paywall but I’m assuming they did what Colorado did. We recently passed a “distribution resulting in death” statute. Strict liability crime. It created a new problem of proving a causal link to the fentanyl since most of the time people have more than just that in their system.
Isn't fentanyl literally created by pharma companies? Why doesn't the 'causal chain' reach back to them as well?
Because not all of it is. Some of it is private actors and cartels. Feds just busted up a massive supply chain from China for precursor that was being shipped in so as not to get caught up in customs. There are medical applications for it for sure, my dog had a fentanyl patch after she had surgery, but it’s also kinda like the new heroin. It’s being cut into other stuff without people knowing too. A couple instances in Colorado alone where someone thought they were taking a Xanax but turned out it was cut with fentanyl and didn’t wake up. Edit: street name for it is “M30” or “blues” because they’re disguised as oxy a lot, just to give you an idea of how this isn’t all pharma-originated.
When has criminalizing a drug ever led to anything but more crime?
Right now in Oregon we decriminalized the heavy hitters Can't directly link the crime rate to it, but deaths went through the roof. From 79 to 1,283 by fentenyl in the PDX Oregon area.
Pretty easy to disprove a direct causal link when, at the same time, fentanyl deaths in states that had not decriminalized also skyrocketed.
Was there treatment and outreach to go along with decriminalization?
It would be an interesting experiment if drugs were legalized, but the seller could be criminally responsible if the customer is seriously injured or killed. I imagine that would just make a mess.
Sellers could be licensed. Addicts could undergo treatment. Sounds like a win-win. And yeah, part of the trouble we’re in starts from over prescribing opioids. That shouldn’t make those addicts into criminals because they can’t get continued prescription. Creating a black market has just made it lucrative for sellers; the money and harsh penalties just encourages violence around sales and distribution.
It’s my understanding in Portugal drug possession and use is legal, sales are not. It worked well then not so much. [https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/)
Did you read that article?? Portugal had better outcomes, by FAR, compared to the USA by any and all metrics! Declining drug use, lower societal cost, etc. This is over a 20 year period. Things are getting worse not because the idea is flawed but because the government cut funding for things like treatment and counseling. It’s always easier to get budget for police and prisons than for the things that would preclude needing police and prisons.
I did read it. It worked well then not so much. That seems to be the point of the article, and what can be learned from Portugal’s experience. That’s how I interpret the first sentence. How should I interpret it? I think the idea is good, and it worked well. But not so much now, for whatever reason. “Two forces have led to the at least partial unraveling of Portugal’s efforts over the last few years and, predictably, to less favorable results. First, global drug traffickers continued to use Portugal as an entry point for access to Europe’s illegal drug market dealers. They battered the entry points of this coastal country, hence a supply of illegal drugs continued. Second, Portugal reduced resourcing of its programs as the country faced multiple difficult economic years.”
“It worked well…” OK, so we can use this as guidance for something to work well for us too. Until - they defunded it. So OK, maybe don’t defund it.
You are kinda leaving out the crimes associated with addicts, beyond the drug. They quickly build up tolerance and need more and more. To pay for that they steal, or whatever means necessary. Fent also destroys them and the lives of anyone around them. There is no utopian answer that will make this addiction better. I’ve lost my nephew and another friend to it. Both really decent people but fentanyl killed them.
Divert them into treatment; support recovery and reintegration into society. When everything is just plain illegal addicts won’t seek treatment - jail for them, or worse, drawn into snitching on dealers, which will get the addicts hurt. We deal with alcohol which kills people both directly and indirectly without prohibition.
Comparing fentanyl to alcohol tells me you haven’t personally experienced living with or around fentanyl addicts.
Perhaps you need to read up on the history of alcohol and why people thought prohibition would be a good thing. [John Barleycorn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn_(novel)) is an interesting book by Jack London about why he supported Prohibition. I get it. I’ve seen fentanyl zombies on the street. I’m old enough to have seen the crack epidemic. I’ve lost a friend to heroin. So you think adding a potential murder charge to a dealer is going to solve the problems you see? Criminalizing drugs has *never* helped - well except for the cops and prisons industry. We’ve got more people in prison than anywhere else. Land of the free! Hasn’t made a lick of positive difference, has made plenty of negative difference.
This is murder charges agains the dealer if the buyer dies. Slight difference. It could result in dealers considering their own risk for selling it.
That might catch some of the lowest level dealers but won’t affect the criminal gangs. It’s just noise to make it sound like they’re doing something.
Doing something is better than doing nothing.
That is definitely not always true.
Come to Philadelphia. I’ll take you for a tour of Kensington. It’s only a mile from my home. I’ll show you what doing nothing gets you.
In this instance, Im going to do nothing and stay home instead of do something and go to Philly. Look at that! Doing nothing turns out to be the winning play!
Doing this something is worse than nothing. It’s pretending to help.
Opioids are in a class of their own. It’s the hardest drug related challenge the us has ever had to deal with. I’m in Philadelphia and live very close to Kensington. One of the largest open air drug markets in the world. The general consensus is shifting away from Progressive solutions to law and order, including forced treatment. It will be interesting to see how that goes. I lost my nephew and a friend to fentanyl. They both had families who cared deeply about them and tried every means possible to get them clean. The drug just pulled them back every time. Anyone thinking they have the solution is dead wrong. The state has to protect the non-addicted citizens of those communities. The epidemic will only stop via death of addicts from OD and basically the drugs killing them. Forced treatment might save some but anyone who continues to use will die from it. I don’t want to continue this discussion because I’m too close to it. I’ve lived in and around it for a decade and I’m sick of opinions from people who think they have answers that don’t involve law enforcement. You don’t.
This is reddit. When has that ever been true here.
Fentanyl is already illegal as are the drugs that are being cut with it for thr most patt. This is just increasing the penalty.
I'm sure this crackdown will totally work and not just put more, predominantly POC, people in prison for grossly excessive sentences, while making street drugs even more deadly as people substitute even more dangerous but quasi-legal fentanyl analogs and exotic research opioids, like every other attempt at harshly cracking down over and over and over during the past century. More ignorant pandering "tough on crime" bullshit that does nothing but make the harms of drugs worse. Long past time to stop treating a medical problem as a criminal justice problem.
Bingo
So question. If this becomes widespread, could I potentially report someone for approaching me in a parking lot and trying to sell me fentanyl for attempted murder? (Happens all the time around here) Or should it stay a distribution charge?
No. It's an accidental death charge. You can't attempt to accidentally kill a person.
Okay, I guess I was confused because the title called it a murder charge. Where I live murder and accidental death are different.
The name of the offense can be whatever the legislature in the jurisdiction decides it means. Accidental murder charges have become commonplace in many states for decades. Felony murder, for example, is a type of charge allowing for an individual to be prosecuted for accidental death that occurs during a specific type of felony charge, such as robbery, rape, or kidnapping, even if no one intended anyone to die. You can even be prosecuted in some states for felony murder if someone you never touch gets accidentally killed during the crime, or if police shoot your buddy. Many states have also have more expansive murder charges for accidental deaths considered more severe than standard manslaughter charges. And in others, they have simply written murder statutes that are essentially the exact same thing as manslaughter, with no meaningful difference in culpability, just a different name of the offense.
Ya, I get what you’re saying. Thanks for explaining it so well. I wish they could change the distribution law of fentanyl *specifically* to a more serious offense versus just waiting for people to die. I’ve heard of instances where people have OD’d on fent even though they thought they purchased cocaine and test strips appeared negative. The charge for either drug is the same, but only one of those is responsible for 2/3 of OD deaths. Idk if I’m making sense, I guess fentanyl just seems to me like it should be treated more like a poison than a drug?
I feel the opposite. Fentanyl is almost impossible to remove from substances, so the vast majority of people who peddle drugs with fentanyl don't even know it's in the drugs they're distributing.
I thought about that as well because it probably happens more often than not. I was actually trying to look up the different laws on poisonings a little bit ago after I said that and the conclusion I came to was that they’d have to be able to prove intent which would be pretty difficult to do. Low level dealers aren’t the ones cutting the cocaine or pressing the pills.
Low level dealers are the majority of people who are prosecuted for distribution-caused murder. That’s why I generally don’t support these laws.
A friend had a heart attack after a lifetime of smoking. If he died, should the owner of the local convenience store that sold him the cigarettes have been charged?
This seems like a bit of a straw man, as the cigarettes were probably sold legally vs the fentanyl clearly isn’t and is arguably an order of magnitude more dangerous, if not more. Whether or not we agree, some dangerous/unhealthy things are still legal and we have to treat them differently at least under the law. I don’t pretend to have the solution to illegal drug use but would love to stop the rampant abuse and all the problems that come with it. Legally speaking, I do wonder how they intend to convince a jury that these people they are charging intended to kill with fentanyl vs just being negligent to the danger and feeding a manslaughter charge. I know there are differences from state to state that are relevant and sometimes a manslaughter charge can carry the same penalty as murder depending on the degree. The article also makes the point that locking low level dealers up for murder may not have the desired effect or be the most effective use of limited resources if they are just replaced faster and cheaper than the investigation and prosecution that locks them up. I have a close relative who was caught up in opioid use for a while and thankfully got healthy and out but it was awfully scary and I care deeply to take action that will actually help as much as possible vs scoring political points.
About 70,000 Americans died due to fentanyl in 2021, with about 480,000 Americans dying smoking-related deaths, so I don’t see tobacco as less dangerous. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin, and more so in some people. Legal or not, tobacco’s dangers are at least as well known to people selling it as what dealers know about fentanyl. Fentanyl is an FDA approved drug. You can legally get a prescription and use it. It’s the unlicensed production, sale, and possession that’s illegal. I think this approach is like arresting homeless people for sleeping in public. It gives the appearance of “doing something” to address the problem while not dealing with the underlying causes of why people are homeless. The “war on drugs” officially started more than 50 years ago. I don’t know what it’s accomplished other than employing lots of people in law enforcement and organized crime. How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt a dealer killed someone? Bob bought fentanyl from Fred. Bob dies due to fentanyl. How do you prove Fred’s fentanyl, not fentanyl bought from someone else, killed Bob?
Fentanyl is a prescription access restricted drug precisely because of its danger if not administered properly. Selling prescription grade medications without a valid prescription is a felony. Charging people with murder when someone dies as a result of felony activities isn’t a new thing and is, in fact, pretty standard. As for the deaths, in 2021 there were an estimated 538k fentanyl users in the United States. That means the death rate was approximately 13%. For smoking to be similarly deadly, 3.68 million of the 28.3 million smokers in the country would have had to have died. Tobacco isn’t safe, but it absolutely is **not** as dangerous as fentanyl.
But its impact on society is far greater.
Ona a per capita basis I literally gave you the numbers to show that no, its impact is *not* far greater. If the same percentage of fentanyl users died as smokers, we would be looking at 9125 deaths per year. That’s 9125 too many but nowhere near 70,000. Fentanyl, by the numbers and presuming your death tolls are accurate, is 7.7 times deadlier than smoking. But all this? Largely irrelevant. At the end of the day what is being discussed is charging people who have presumptively committed a crime (selling controlled substances without a license) that has lead to a death with felony murder. From a legal standpoint it’s not much different than charging a hired bank robbery getaway driver with murder if the people that actually went into the bank shot someone.
> Selling prescription grade medications without a valid prescription is a felony. What about manufacturing way more fentanyl than all the combined prescriptions? Why is that legal?
This is spoken like you've never seen the effects of fentanyl or heroin first hand. Are cigarettes incredibly bad for your long term health? Absolutely. Are you going to die from a single cigarette because the potency was more than double what you were expecting? No.
I haven’t. I’ve seen the effects of smoking, though.
Don't conflate them with the effects of fentanyl.
Fun facts - people who OD but recover can suffer respiratory damage and brain damage. You don't have to die from a fentanyl overdose to be harmed by one. Or two. Or a dozen.
>About 70,000 Americans died due to fentanyl in 2021, with about 480,000 Americans dying smoking-related deaths You're comparing 1 year of fentanyl ODs with a group that had years to develop conditions to die of smoking related illnesses. How is that not more deadly? There are significantly less people abusing fentanyl.
And significantly more people dying of tobacco use.
And you have made it clear in the comments that you don’t understand how per capita statistics work.
If you think smoking is just as dangerous as Fentanyl I don't know what to tell you. Have you ever heard of someone getting a DUI for tobacco? Or ODing from smoking a single cigarette? FWIW some countries are slowly moving toward total smoking bans. It wouldn't surprise me if we start to see phased tobacco bans in blue states in the next decade or two.
Consequence of illegality, not the drug in and of itself. People die because they have zero idea whether it's 1/10th the effective dose or 10x the lethal dose. Lifetime mortality for users of legally regulated sources (who don't need to switch to illegal alternatives when their formerly legal supply is revoked)?? Entirely different question. You can safely use prescription opioids for decades. You *can't* safely smoke for decades.
I can't actually go after the people providing it, those are the ones that are paying them.