Comment by djrj477dhsnv 6 months ago
While tragic, those people (or at least the vast majority) weren't forced to use drugs. They made that decision and faced the consequences. Shifting the blame for their poor decisions onto the drug dealer is unwarranted imo.
Agreed if the dealer is lying and selling something more dangerous than he is claiming to sell.
The Russians tried using a carfentanil aerosol to sedate hostages and it killed over 120 people. It's 100x more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 times more potent than morphine. He put the lives of god knows how many people at risk and could have easily cross contaminated the weed we also know he was dealing (probably to kids). And peer-pressure is an immense force, even with adults (https://news.utdallas.edu/health-medicine/peer-pressure-adul...). If he had the humility and self-reflection to post that his actions were ruthless and killed people than I'd be feel better about his mindset, but his insistence on being classified as a (non-violent) drug offender is clearly an attempt on his part to manipulate.
If someone breaks the law by jaywalking, and a driver of a car runs him over when he could have avoiding hitting him (by braking) is it likewise unwarranted to shift the blame for the poor decisions of the jaywalker onto the driver?
If not, what is the reason you decide the two situations differently?
I don't think the analogy holds. A drug user wants to buy from the dealer. The dealer is providing a service that the drug user can voluntarily turn down.
I don't see how that's similar to a driver running into a jaywalker. Just because he's jaywalking doesn't mean he wants a driver to hit him.
In the law, the jaywalker and the driver will share responsibility. If you knowingly sell carfentanil, the mechanism by which the law apportions blame onto the "victim" won't exist: there is no set plausible of circumstances in which you could reasonably believe it was OK to sell someone carfentanil, where in the jaywalking case there are dueling factors of pedestrial negligence and driver duty of care.
I agree it’s not black and white, but let’s be reasonable. When you sell to an addict the drug they crave, knowing full well that they will take it, and you switch it with deadly poison, just because it’s cheaper? I mean, it is hard to argue that it is not an act of both fraud and premeditated murder, at the very least gross negligence. Is the addict responsible for the risk they were obviously taking? Well sure, not that they have much of a choice at that point, but there’s always a choice, and mostly they got themselves into that situation, and they are committing a crime too. Still that doesn’t take much blame away from the dealer.
It’s like saying: it’s your fault that you got shot for being in the wrong neighborhood at night. Were they knowingly taking a risk? Sure, but the murderer is still a murderer.
And we long got rid of the concept of “outlaw” where if you commit a crime any subsequent crime on you is fair game. That’s rather barbaric.
EDIT: I was assuming that it is obvious that no one takes such synthetic opioids on purpose. They are known not to be much fun and very dangerous. They are mostly used as a cheap filler in other more mainstream drugs, most notably in fake branded prescription drugs.