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April 12, 2022 10:32 AM UTC
10 Comments
Absolutely ridiculous to have simple possession a felony. The last drug war worked so well.
That's exactly what Colorado needs: more "We're Doing Something About It " Theater.
Let's raise the limit to 40 grams.
Let Darwin rule.
Oh, 4 grams is more than enough for Darwin to work with. just three milligrams will kill an average man. And frankly, I don’t mourn the fools who check out with the stuff. But users should get treatment, not prison time.
Many of the victims don’t know what they’re ingesting, since it’s routinely mixed with other drugs. You could argue that nobody should take a non-prescribed drug ever, and you’d be right.
But there are children who are given fentanyl-laced pills for pain or to “calm them down”. There are workers with injuries who think that they are taking a regular pain pill. In 1991, the typical fentanyl overdose victim was a 32 year old white male with a history of heroin use. But that’s changed. Victims are younger, and more diverse in every way. We lost two teens in Jeffco schools to fentanyl this year alone. I’m tired of it.
The problem is that fentanyl is cheap to make, easy to smuggle, and 50x more potent than heroin as a narcotic. There’s a reason that they give terminal cancer patients fentanyl patches; it works. It takes the pain away and gets people high.
Today, a dead fentanyl user could be anybody who has a pill-popping relative or friend who wants to “help”. Does that count as “distribution”? I think it should.
I’d argue for criminal penalties depending on consequences of passing fentanyl to someone. If the recipient overdoses and dies, it should be a freaking felony. Same if there is a fatal accident because of impaired judgment.
Simple possession? Misdemeanor is enough. But hammer them with required classes, monitoring, UAs, therapy, NA groups, whatever it takes to get them clean and cognizant that they just can’t ingest or pass out unknown pills to people.
At the border, it’s beyond dispute that cheap , potent fentanyl is being manufactured and smuggled from Mexico and central America. That’s not anti-immigrant; it’s just reality.
We know that USA legalization of cannabis hurt the cartelistas. I don’t know what the big picture cure for fentanyl smuggling is, but I suspect it’s a holistic makeover of these Central American economies, de-incentivizing corruption and oligarchy, paying living wages to employees of exploitative multinational corporations, making it possible for people to stay and raise their families in peace. In other words, the same “cure” as for illegal immigration.
Just a quick PSA for context. The bill is more than 40 pages long. While penalties for possession are getting the most attention, probably with good reason, the bill goes after distributors much harder than simple users. It also has sections on harm reduction, like treatment for addicts, narcan, and test strips. I would fully agree that mere small quantity users shouldn't be felonized, but overall fentanyl's an awfully serious problem right now. If anyone trusted me to run stuff, I'd propose some type of bill even though I'm fairly libertarian about many types of drugs. Of course details matter.
I remain pleased with the representation I am getting from my state representative Alec Garnett.
Also, for what it is worth, the mass of the drugs shouldn’t be in the controlled substances act at all. Instead, criminal punishments should be based upon the nature of the activity (e.g. mere possession, delivering drugs as a “mule”, selling, supervising other people selling), rather than how much of a drug there is, and if we are going to use any metric of the amount of drugs, it should be their value in dollars since drug dealing is primarily an economic crime for the people who are in the drug dealing trade.
Exactly
Here's hoping the bill includes economic consequences to those who are conspiring to distribute opiates — perhaps something like 2 times the estimated dollar amount of the quantity shown to be involved.
Follow the money.
Well said