Since this is just a blog, I have permission to throw some ideas out there without doing thorough research!
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that a local drug dealer has been charged with drug-induced homicide for sealing heroin cut with fentanyl to a Depute Police Chief’s son who died after he used the drugs.
A number of things come to mind here. First, the story reports that 185 people have died under similar circumstances in Cook County (where Chicago is located) since spring of last year, yet this is the first time a drug dealer has been charged. This is sad on many levels. It seems that it only occurred to the police that they should prosecute the dealers when one of their own kids died. This smells like favoritism or unequal treatment.
Next, the police chief says that greed killed his son. We will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is also upset by the 185 other deaths and that he thinks greed killed them also. His concept is that the dealer wanted to make more money so he cut the heroin with fentanyl (no one says it is cheaper than heroin – I guess we should just assume that). According to one person, this kid had been buying heroin from the same dealer for two years. According the dad, he had been doing heroin since January. Either way, he was a repeat customer. In any business, it is typically a bad idea to kill your repeat customers. Besides losing a steady stream of income, you get a bad reputation and people that you didn’t kill might not want to buy from you. The drug dealer was trying to balance repeat business with his costs. If we were talking about subway using 4% less cheese on each of their sandwiches, we wouldn’t call it greed – we would call it smart business. Greed is a strong word here.
But, smart business didn’t kill 186 heroin users – bad drugs killed people since last spring in one county. How many people died from tainted alcohol or nicotine cut with some cheaper drug in Cook County? I am going to guess zero. A major problem in this case is that when the government outlaws a product, it looses the ability to regulate that product. Alcohol and tobacco are highly regulated and if someone were selling bad cigarettes, the government would shut it down long before 186 people died. But, since heroin is sold underground, we don’t have an effective way to regulate it. Heroin may be more risky than cigarettes, but regulated heroin is much safer than unregulated heroin. The police chief would have more correct if he had said that drug laws killed his son. They certainly had more to do with the 186 deaths than greed.
The police chief admits that he knew his son was doing heroin since January. This is a complicated problem, but if the police chief had known for the last eight months that your kid was doing drugs, what do you think would happen? He would arrest your kid, of course. Let me make a comparison. Let’s say the police chief knew his son had killed someone or raped a minor or some other horrible crime. Do you think the chief would just send the kid to counseling? I hope not! I hope that the he would arrest him. Why not treat drug “crimes” the same way? Because they are not the same. We punish drug use with the same severity as other serious felonies like assault, but they don’t deserve that type of treatment. The fact that the cop didn’t think it was important to arrest his son for drug use shows that he thinks that drugs are not as serious as other crimes. Criminalization of all drug use is absurd and this cops actions show that he agrees on some level.
