Comment by tux3 4 days ago
The Sacklers are comfortably above the law and that's a bad thing, but that doesn't make small time carfentanyl operations any less bad
Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots
Sometimes big crime families or notorious serial killers get away with it, but it doesn't lower the threshold for anyone else
It doesn't make it any better that someone else is doing even worse. You don't get to do a little crime, as a treat
Evil is a religious concept.
Selling drugs isn't evil. Not selling drug doesn't make you good. People take drugs for various reasons. If a doctor sells them they are good but if someone else sells them they are evil?
The person buying could have been fired and can't afford Doctors prescription so the person selling could be an angel.
A doctor that over-prescribes them would be arrested, too. Or one that prescribed it to someone for a non-medical reason. (There are many of those latter docs.)
People that sell fentanyl (or similar) are very bad for society, to avoid the triggering "evil". Look how many people have died in the last 10 years. It's insane.
EDIT: I personally know a young man that died from a fent overdose and it's likely he didn't know what he took had fent in it. 22 years old and the whole world ahead him. Completely destroyed his family.
Fentanyl takes the fun out of drugs and since its laced in every street drug these days it means that no drug is safe anymore.
It cannot be understated how harmful fentanyl is and how low quality of a drug it is. Low quality as in the high sucks.
(I've never taken drugs and I don't drink)
Evil is a moral concept, which is less tied to religion these days.
Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.
Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.
> Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots
No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.
Discretionary enforcement is just used as a way to disguise discrimination
Perhaps our laws would be fairer and simpler if enforcement were draconian and uniform
Better a potentially discriminatory society I'm the ingroup in, than a totalitarian utopia where every criminal rule is enforced mercilessly.
Focus on the bad thing, not piling on the guy who is serving his sentence (while also making a new life for himself).