Comment by TulliusCicero 3 days ago
Wow, 15-30 years seems like an insane amount of time for drug possession. Even if the amount implied dealing, that still seems really high. Don't people typically get less than that for sexual assault or armed robbery?
I'll add on, he mentions in his blog that he was making "tens of thousands of dollars a week" selling drugs. He was not a small time dealer and certainly wasn't just buying drugs for himself.
His current sentence also (15-30 years) isn't his first prison sentence. He was released and reoffended which absolutely contributed to the longer sentence.
15-30 years is a bit heavy for 30 million doses even. 1.5-3 years is way more fair.
15-30 years of adulthood is like putting your child in timeout for 6 to 12 years (childhood being 0-19)! Is there anything your child could do to spend half his childhood living in a concrete room, maximum grounding? This is what we are doing to a man.
No. 12 years is public school length so that should be the life sentence, in the interest of keeping government in check. Think it's unfair in your case? Murder him when he gets out and serve your 12. Or... get over it, life goes on, etc. :^)
By what logic? I could just as easily say that 150 years is "way more fair."
A comparison with a literal child is disingenuous, children clearly aren't held to the same standards as adults.
I don't know. If you are in posession of enough of a controlled substance to kill 300 people I'm kind of okay with a drastic response. For every Preston Thorpe who turns their life around there 100s of others who will just go out and keep endangering lives like this. I think this is a nuanced topic and 10-30 years is too much for drug possession is entirely lacking the necessary nuance to evaluate. Comparison to other crimes is not particularly useful either without going into the relative harms of each as compared to the harms of the other.
"enough of a controlled substance to kill" is an absurd, inflammatory metric. They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers and we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.
He shouldn't be in prison, period.
> They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers
In general, high-potency opioids are cut (diluted) with other powders and then sold as a different product to unsuspecting buyers.
Most fentanyl overdoses are from people who thought they were consuming a different, more familiar opioid. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids like this one are preferred by drug dealers because it's much easier to smuggle a tiny amount of powder and cut it 1000X than to smuggle the real product.
It's nearly impossible for amateurs to properly dilute a powder like this, so the end product has a lot of "hot spots" that lead to overdose.
They're sold as some other known opiod and the dealers typically try to dose them to be equivalent because that's all they're getting paid for.
There is no incentive to give out "free drugs", not least because you might kill an otherwise paying customer.
> we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.
If someone gave a loaded hand gun to a small child, there might not be any reason to believe that this person was trying to kill the small child, but when the child inevitably shoots himself or someone else, the one who gave the child the gun in the first place shares at least some of the blame.
You may protest that children are not comparable to adult drug addicts; to this, I’d suggest taking a walk through any major metro area in America and deciding for yourself if “willing and aware” are appropriate words to describe these addicts.
> They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers and we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.
People have already addressed the "aware" part, but "willing"? Really? Do you understand how addiction works?
I'd bet a lot of money that they saved some number of lives by catching him. He was engaging in an activity that had a high probability of resulting in some deaths. I can sell knives in a store, and I have a reasonable level of confidence that no one died because of those knives. Here, the probabilities are inverted.
>> to willing and aware buyers
This part is really debatable, based on what we're seeing with overdoses. The dealers (probably) know what they're selling but I'm not sure the buyers do, which even for a legal good would be a crime.
I really doubt he told the buyers this was synthetic BS, more likely he lied to all his customers about the substance and thus could have killed them due to mis-dosing...
A pack of cigarettes is enough nicotine to kill a grown man. Provided you smoke them all at once.
It's a bad measurement.
How many deadly chemicals are in an average home? Every time I fill up my car with gas, I buy enough to commit dozens of cases of arson.
Intent matters and there's no reason to believe he intended to harm anyone. I believe it's a crime and should be a felony but this sentence is a bit extreme in terms of punishment fitting the crime.
the conviction was literally for the intent to distribute; RTFM
Of course the decision is ultimately up to the individual judge/jury, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that would consider it reasonable that an ordinary dealing of drugs be akin to an "intent to harm".
Unless the circumstances of a particular drug transaction directly caused some other harm, like a fight, I highly doubt the charges would be considered 'violent' and hence carry the harm aspect.
I read it and I simply don't think intent to distribute should be synonymous with intent to kill. There are violent crimes with actual victims that serve less time than this. This is a mathematical calculation of damage that could have been done in worst possible scenario, no evidence of that scenario playing out at all.
This math of weights and maximum hypothetical carnage produces very unfair sentencing.
> Every time I fill up my car with gas, I buy enough to commit dozens of cases of arson.
Did you read the link? They also found scales, baggies, and Carfentanil (a more potent version of fentanyl).
Filling your car up with gas doesn't compare. A better analogy would be if you tried to fill up a 10,000 gallon tank of gasoline that you couldn't possibly use yourself, all while having a truck full of matches and explosives, and a map to a building with a big circle around it.
No evidence this guy was trying to start a massive explosion with a single target. Most evidence is that he was trying to start a lot of tiny fires just like I could with the 20 gallons of gas that's in my tank. Except, not even that because he was just reselling the fuel and the consumer gets to decide how big of a fire they want to create.
Intent to distribute is a huge scam and calculates out to a unjustly long sentence for a lot of minor offenders. I'm not arguing it shouldn't be illegal or even tack on some extra time above just normal possession, but 15-30 years is absurd for what this guy did in my opinion.
Decriminalization in Portugal and in Oregon ended up in disasters. Resulted in more drug addicts, more violent crime, more crazy behaviors, more people laying or crawling in the streets.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/the-hard-drug-decrimina...
That article is concluding that decriminalisation in Portugal didn't work, by comparing drug users in 2022 with the year of decriminalisation in 2001, and comparing overdose rates between 2018 and 2022. I don't find that very honest.
Consumption is rising worldwide, and nobody knows what these metrics would show had Portugal not decriminalised consumption of hard drugs.
Also, the reason for decriminalisation wasn't simply to lower addiction rates, it was mostly to stop getting people in jail for consuming, which was making the issue worse.
I agree that decriminalization in Oregon didn't go well, but it's more complicated that "decriminalization doesn't work". I lived in Portland at the time (and yes, I voted for decriminalization). What I observed:
- The rehab programs were never properly available
- The general culture in Portland made it very difficult for the city to form any coherent response to homelessness. Most people in Portland really want to be "compassionate" to the homeless/drug addicted/mentally ill, so there was strong pushback on any effort to clear homeless encampments (literally to the point that people were advocating for changes in building code that would force commercial buildings to *enable* homeless people to sleep in front of them by building sleeping platforms.)
- This time period overlaps the BLM protests (which were absolutely massive in Portland), with all the "Defund the Police" / "ACAB". Indeed, the majority of Portland has been very anti-police since the late '90s. The police, obviously, didn't like this. From anec-data, it seemed to me that the street cops just stopped even bothering arresting people. (Here's an anecdote - a friend of mine was riding mass transit, with homeless men both behind him and in front of him, who got in to a conflict that resulted in one man brandishing a knife. The police were called and showed up at the next stop, no arrests were made.)
To make the point abundantly clear, the brandishing of knives in public was never decriminalized, but the police absolutely stopped enforcing *any* laws on the homeless.
- Oregon is generally terrible at implementing anything, even well-supported, popular programs fail to achieve even basic milestones of success. There's also a general lack of funding for most everything.
- COVID
- Fenatnyl use rose massively, nationwide, in spite of local drug policy. The negative effects have definitely been more pronounced in far-left cities, but it's disingenuous to assume that decriminalization increased usage.
Things got so bad, that you had to move, as a result of all the policies that you support. Consider that your policies are not good, and your defense of them doesn't look like defense at all.
And some of your reasons make no sense. COVID/fentanyl didn't just hit Portland.
> stopped even bothering arresting people
Oh, look, the direct consequence of your actions and your policies. You declare that ALL cops are bad, and then complain when they stop doing what they do. And your DA releases nearly all arrested people without a charge because "compassion", so cops have no reason to arrest anyone.
Again, consider that your policies and ideas are horrible.
Unless you do something so heinous it captivates the public or have a bunch of priors the only crimes that reliably will put you away for that kind of time are ones that the government takes specific offense to. Usually that means ignoring their monopoly on violence but seeing as this guy is behind bars for dealing and not murder I'd bet he just got unlucky and happened to sell the dose that some more equal animal or their relative OD'd on.
Preston's recent interview with the changelog podcast[1] explains that he's been convicted twice. Repeat offenders don't usually get light treatments.
Unlikely...He's an incredibly callous individual that was cutting drugs with a substance orders of magnitude more dangerous than fentanyl so he could drive an Audi and live the high life. Given that they tied several deaths back to his operation, and that it was a multi-state joint effort, I doubt he'd get a slap on the wrist by a European judges.
in addition to the other comments, this was also not his first conviction. They get extremely punative.
> Wow, 15-30 years seems like an insane amount of time for drug possession.
The sentence was for intent to distribute. It's an extremely potent substance. This would be like discovering someone had 30,000 pills. You can't really argue that it was for personal use at that point. They also found him in possession of carfentanil (a more potent version of fentanyl), scales, baggies, and other products. This looks like a very clear case of someone importing high-potency synthetic opioids to redistribute.
High potency synthetic opioids are a high priority target for law enforcement. These are most often cut (diluted) and then sold to buyers expecting some other opioid product. As you might expect, perfectly diluting a 1mg dose of a powder into a 500mg - 1000mg pill form is extremely hard to do and there's a high risk of "hot spots" forming in certain pills (or sections of a powdered product). This results in a lot of serious overdoses.
It's a severe problem right now. Most fentanyl overdoses are from users who thought they were taking some other drug. They might have even "tested" it before, but missed the hot spots.