Prosecutors have increasingly been pressing charges against dealers who sell opioids that kill people, a trend they say is necessitated by the drug epidemic. However, advocates of treatment-first policies are worried these charges are counterproductive.
Many of these charges are for involuntary manslaughter, which carry heavier punishments than drug charges, and have been waged not only on high-level drug traffickers but on family members and friends. Some have been been found guilty of unintentional homicide, and have been sentenced to prison for decades or for life without parole.
Law enforcement officials stress they believe their work is only one prong of a broader strategy that will be needed to combat opioid overdoses, which claimed the lives of more than 42,000 people across the U.S. in 2016.
“This is just one quiver in the arsenal,” said Saleh Awadallah, supervising assistant county prosecutor for Cuyahoga County, Ohio. “Our approach is a multi-faceted approach. That seems more reasonable than saying, ‘Let’s not prosecute anyone, let’s treat our way out of this.’ There are people making money off this for purely profit reasons, and to turn a blind eye to that I don’t think is a correct approach.”
But critics of enforcement say the actions could obliterate other, more compassionate approaches and clash with a growing consensus among politicians that say it’s time to treat addiction as a disease rather than a moral failing.
The shift comes at a time when President Trump has called for prosecutors to seek harsher penalties, including the death penalty, on drug traffickers.
“Whether you are a dealer or doctor or trafficker or a manufacturer, if you break the law and illegally peddle these deadly poisons, we will find you we will arrest you and we will hold you accountable,” Trump said Monday at an event in New Hampshire. “We can have all the blue ribbon panels we want, but if we don’t get tough on drug dealers we’re wasting our time.”
The rise in charges for drug deaths were underway years before Trump took office. Amid surging death tolls, prosecutors began invoking crack-cocaine-era homicide laws of the 1980s.
“These laws may have been used around the time of their initial passage but had been dormant for years,” said Lindsay LaSalle, senior staff attorney at the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit in favor of drug decriminalization. “They are really being dusted off as a response to the opioid epidemic.”
Delaware, Florida, and Kansas have passed such laws in recent years, and bills have been introduced in at least 13 other states. A report from the Drug Policy Alliance found 1,200 media mentions in states of drug-death prosecutions in 2016, a three-fold increase since 2011. LaSalle said she began to notice a “tough on crime” policy at the state level during that time, but is also troubled by the White House’s rhetoric on enforcement.
“Trump is upping the ante in the hope that his inflammatory rhetoric will embolden an embrace of the tough-on-crime response reflected not only in federal, but also state, policies,” she said.
The Drug Policy Alliance is concerned the approaches will result in fewer people receiving treatment and in more deaths as bystanders decline to call for help for fear they will be punished.
David Herzberg, a drug-policy history expert from the University at Buffalo, said more stringent approaches to crime resurface every few decades.
“The harms that come from drug use are heartbreaking and maddening, and the desire to punish people who are involved is very understandable,” Herzberg said. “But there isn’t any evidence that this kind of thing addresses our policy goals, which are to keep people alive and healthy and to reduce the kind of damage that’s done with drug addiction.”
Police and prosecutors counter that enforcement actions are important and do believe they help deter drug dealers.
Because of this, states are shifting the way they investigate overdoses. They are looking at them as crime scenes rather than accidental death situations in which they contact a person’s next of kin and clean up the scene. They now collect DNA, follow up with witnesses, and try to discover where the drugs came from. They hope this will lead them to find drug dealers and stave off the influx of illegal substances.
“When you look at it that way it really changes the nature of the drug investigations and makes them more fruitful,” said Benjamin Agati, a senior assistant attorney general for New Hampshire. “It is unrealistic to think that we can solve and determine who the dealer was in every one of those deaths, but in some of those cases we have really good track records.”
Such investigations can lead to drug charges in New Hampshire. In other states they can lead to homicide charges. Either way, the trend has troubled those who point out that people with opioid dependency sometimes sell drugs to support their addictions.
“There is a lot we can do to solve this problem, but it hasn’t yet worked to simply put people in prison,” Herzberg said. “People with addictions don’t stop using drugs because someone says that they’ll do something bad to them if they don’t stop.”
But Agati said sentencing in New Hampshire distinguishes between people who shared drugs with the victim and cooperated in the investigation versus people who are unaddicted and dealing fentanyl despite knowing it has killed people.
“Those people are both guilty of the same crime, but what the sentences are going to be are vastly different,” he said.
Officials say they hope their approach might cause dealers to rethink their actions. Awadallah explained that previously dealers in the county received a few months of parole but could now be sentenced to prison for three to 11 years.
“There are people who are out there to turn a profit on people’s misery. Those are the people we’re targeting,” he said. “Our goal always is to move up the chain and to hold accountable the actual dealers.”
