Deja vu seattle store crack#

The legislation in Texas was in part driven by 10 students from three schools in the northern suburbs of Dallas overdosing on fentanyl-laced drugs at the end of last year. Similar signs appeared in Texas where a surge of fentanyl-related deaths of more than 2,000 people last year prompted several new laws including a provision for murder charges when supplying the potent opioid causes death. In Oklahoma, parents erected a billboard with photographs of a dozen victims of opioid overdoses next to the words “Their lives matter” and the question: “Why are drug dealers getting away with murder?” Kathy Plante-Hunt posted a sign in Watertown, New York, in memory of her daughter Tamarra: “A drug dealer sold my daughter her last breath … FENTANYL KILLS!”

The surging death toll has prompted parents across the country to post pictures of their lost children on billboards as a warning to others and to demand action against what the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Anne Milgram, has called “the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered”. Evidence tells us that these types of prosecutions and policing actually increase community harm, increase overdose risk Jennifer Carroll of North Carolina State University The fentanyl is then laced into other drugs to boost their strength and value, but small amounts of it are so powerful it is hard to calculate the strength of the narcotic and easy for the unwitting user to overdose. The synthetic opioid, usually made from chemicals manufactured in China and shipped via Mexico, is popular with cartels because it is many times more powerful than other narcotics and so requires smaller quantities which are easier to smuggle than heroin or cocaine. The push for tougher action is in part driven by grieving parents who sometimes describe fentanyl in the language of terrorism because it is a terrifying, highly dangerous killer often hidden from view within other drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, or disguised as prescription pills. We are headed in the wrong direction because our policymakers, our political leaders, want to appear strong and tough on crime, tough on these drugs. It’s actually going to create harms as we travel down this road again, persecuting users instead of getting them the help that they need. “This is a kneejerk emotional response which is not going to make a difference.

So here we are with fentanyl and we’re starting to see a repeat of the failed past policies and laws,” said Franklin, who led the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a criminal justice reform group, after he left the police.

‘Let’s get tough with these penalties.’ Then we realised what a mistake we made and we rolled those archaic policies back.

Deja vu seattle store crack#

“When crack hit our cities, they said we’ve got to do something about that. Maj Neill Franklin, former commander of the the Baltimore police’s drug bureau and before that a narcotics agent with the Maryland state police, said those laws led to a surge of arrests and prison time, particularly of Black Americans, without having much impact on the drug trade. Attorneys general of 18 states are pressing President Joe Biden to declare fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, saying that in a single month US customs seized enough of the drug to kill every American.īut critics say the measures have echoes of discredited 1980s laws passed to combat the crack epidemic, including life sentences for people who dealt drugs that killed the user. Virginia has gone further by classifying illegally produced fentanyl as a “ weapon of terrorism” alongside bombs, biological agents and radioactive devices in a move to increase prison sentences for dealers. They died but she survived and was charged with killing her friends. Other states are dusting off old statutes permitting them to charge drug suppliers with murder, including users such as a 17-year-old in Tennessee after she overdosed with two classmates while taking fentanyl-laced cocaine.

Dozens of states have introduced tougher laws in recent months in a desperate attempt to hold back the tide of a drug claiming nearly 200 lives a day that is the leading cause of deaths among American adults under the age of 45.