Pubdate: Fri, 20 Oct 2017
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2017 Times Colonist
Contact:  http://www.timescolonist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Page: A16

CRACK DOWN ON THE DEALERS

Dealers who hand out drugs laced with fentanyl could face manslaughter
charges if their customers die, B.C. Minister of Public Safety Mike
Farnworth said on the weekend. It's a harsh measure, but nothing else
seems to stem the waves of poison that are killing people across the
province. When even dead customers are not enough to stop a callous
retailer, society must put its collective conscience where the
dealer's is absent.

Farnworth's suggestion is not new. Other jurisdictions, fed up with
the senseless deaths, are coming down hard on those who, in the
minister's words, are "dealing death."

In early September, a 34-year-old man was charged by Brantford, Ont.,
police with manslaughter after a 46-year-old man died of a fentanyl
overdose.

About the same time, police charged two Innisfil, Ont., men with
manslaughter because they allegedly supplied drugs to a 23-year-old
who died of an overdose of heroin and fentanyl in April.

In late September, a man in Alberta was charged with manslaughter for
supplying drugs tainted with carfentanil that killed a man in a hotel
in Edson.

The charges come as the list of the dead continues to grow. The
province declared a health emergency last year in response to the
crisis. New data show 1,013 people died of overdoses between January
and the end of August, more than the 982 deaths in all of 2016, chief
coroner Lisa Lapointe said.

Fentanyl was linked to more than 80 per cent of those deaths, compared
with 2012, when fentanyl was detected in just four per cent of
overdose deaths. The dealers who mix drugs are putting it into heroin,
cocaine, marijuana - almost anything that people will buy. Some
customers even ask for it.

For dealers, fentanyl is cheap, and extremely potent, which makes
smuggling it into the country from China easy and low-risk. But the
drug's potency is what makes it so dangerous. A tiny amount can be
lethal.

The mixing equipment they use to combine fentanyl with other drugs is
crude. Unlike pharmaceutical companies, drug dealers have no way to
control the levels of ingredients in their products. One pill might
have no fentanyl at all, while the next one has enough to kill a
person in moments. Telling the difference with the naked eye is
impossible. But dealers know that. Not one of them could claim
ignorance of the dangers. Yet they continue to spread it among their
customers. To most people, their guilt is clear.

However, getting convictions would be hard, because while the dealers'
culpability is obvious to anyone with a normal moral compass, the
letter of the law is not so easily satisfied.

Those who oppose manslaughter charges say that many of the dealers are
addicts themselves, trying to feed their own habits. They say that
charging them criminalizes what is really a health problem and ignores
others who are equally culpable, such as pharmaceutical companies and
doctors who over-prescribed opioids.

Others say our inability to control the epidemic is further evidence
that we should follow the example of Portugal and decriminalize drugs
for personal use.

But there is a difference between those who use drugs and those who
deal them, especially the large-scale distributors of substances that
damage minds and bodies - and kill. Those people don't have a health
problem; they have a conscience problem.

Yes, we have to treat addiction and try to prevent it by dealing with
the social and personal issues that lead to it. But as with any health
problem, anyone who knowingly hands out poison in the guise of
medicine should be punished.

If the poison kills, they should go to prison.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt