Editorial: Some drug laws catch wrong targets
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The world of illegal substances can create webs of other social or legal problems — child or domestic abuse, theft, assault, death. Those problems then have to be handled by the government, which can mean new laws being written or old ones being tweaked.
Yet government involvement almost always means an opportunity for something to go awry.
The problem is that the illicit drug trade can be fast. The Legislature, on the other hand, moves at the speed of committee — a sluggish pace to start but one that then runs in circles instead of in a straight path to the finish line. The result can be laws that are huge nets with giant holes.
One of those is “drug delivery resulting in death.”
DDRD is a law that has been picked up in some form in many jurisdictions. It exists in federal court, and it is on the books in Pennsylvania.
The point of the law is that the people who are selling the drugs are responsible for the deaths that occur from selling it. If you are making your money selling stamp bags of heroin cut with fentanyl, you are on the hook for overdose deaths resulting from the lethal mix, with the penalty being 20 to 40 years in prison.
The intent was to try to stem the tide of opioid addiction deaths as Pennsylvania and the nation were falling further and further into an epidemic. The sentence has led to some people holding off on calling for help.
That could be because Pennsylvania has a habit of using the charge more than any other state. Westmoreland County, for example, has used the charge 42 times between 2000 and 2017. Allegheny County filed it 26 times. By comparison, Los Angeles County in California utilized it only 19 times, despite being 85% larger than the two Pennsylvania counties combined.
There is an uptick in federal court as well. U.S. attorneys in Pennsylvania prosecuted 93 DDRD cases between 2014 and 2019.
The problem is many of the people charged are not dealers so much as fellow users — people whose treatment would cut down on the drug problem and people who are just as much at risk of overdose.
Instead of relying on fear of DDRD’s penalties as a way to reduce death, there should be more education about the state’s drug overdose response immunity law, passed in 2014. This encourages people to call for help by promising not to prosecute. However, a provision of that law does allow for charges for other investigations including delivery or distribution.
The state should fix this tangled net and make it more possible for sharing users to call for help without risking a felony.
There is a place and a need for DDRD as a charge. It is against the higher-level dealers. The kingpins. The people who don’t use the product because they know how dangerous it is.