Selling Heroin Can Bring Murder Charges

Today I read an article that Matt Zapostosky wrote for The Washington Post. He quoted US Attorney Dana Boente and Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring as saying that they’re “pouring resources into investigating and prosecuting heroin cases.”

If someone sells heroin to a user, and the user dies, prosecutors may charge the seller with murder.

Zapostosky wrote that “Virginia lawmakers are also considering a bill that would make it felony murder to sell banned drugs that cause someone’s death.”

For the past 50 years, we’ve used the criminal justice system as the primary response to our nation’s problems with substance abuse. Our drug policies contribute to our nation’s commitment to mass incarceration. But the heroin epidemic suggests that those policies of punishment fail as a response to our nation’s problem with substance abuse. Despite the millions of nonviolent people we’ve locked in cages for selling drugs to consenting adults, many people continue to abuse illicit substances.

For example, the Virginia Department of Health published its “Fatal Drug Overdose Quarterly Report.” That report shows that the total number of fatal drug overdoses has increased each year in Virginia. By 2013, fatal drug overdoses became the number one method of unnatural death in Virginia. “In Leesburg,” Zapotosky cites an unnamed police spokesman, “fatal overdoses claimed the lives of three people in their 20s over a five-day stretch at the end of January and into early February.”

Prosecutors may bring murder charges against the people who sold those drugs. It doesn’t matter whether that the people who died voluntarily chose to use drugs. It doesn’t matter that the people who sold the drugs may be addicts themselves, and didn’t intent to kill anyone.

Our track record of punishing people who traffic in drugs doesn’t suggest that prosecuting more people for murder is the answer to the heroin epidemic. Rather than “pouring resources” into locking more people in prisons for multiple decades, we should invest resources into helping more people understand the relationship between the decisions they make and the consequences that follow.

Even Virginia’s US Attorney Dana Boente said that our approach shouldn’t only include prosecutions.

“It’s got to be education and prevention, and it’s got to be treatment.”

Unfortunately, our leaders continuously divert resources that we could pour into education and treatment. Instead, many prefer to prosecute more people and strengthen our misguided commitment to mass incarceration.