Jailing drug dealers doesn’t save lives. KC’s opioid epidemic is a health crisis
The face of Ashton Harmon-Manser on a billboard hangs high above a busy strip of Interstate 70 in Kansas City because that’s where the 22-year-old died two years ago of an accidental overdose of fentanyl.
His mother Sara Manser paid for the giant sign to make more people aware that street pills laced with fentanyl can be deadly, she said. Her son “thought he was taking oxy,” the painkiller oxycodone that he had taken before. The pill was instead laced with fentanyl, an opioid that can stop breathing in seconds.
Manser and others like her think dealers who sell fentanyl-laced pills that kill users should go to jail — for murder. These aren’t accidental overdoses but drug-induced homicides, they argue.
Teresa Almanza, a retired Chicago police officer who founded the national nonprofit Drug-Induced Homicide, said her group believes that if police treated overdoses as homicide cases they would investigate them more deeply.
But long experience with the failed war on drugs has shown that harsh sentences don’t effectively deter drug dealers, and they aren’t likely to rid the streets of dangerous drugs.
Missouri prosecutors already have the option of charging dealers with murder when the drug they sell kills. But having evidence to support such cases is “rare,” said Mike Mansur, spokesman for Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. Mansur could recall only one case, in 2019, in which prosecutors had evidence and charged a Lee’s Summit man with second-degree murder for selling fentanyl-laced heroin that killed a woman.
In 2021, nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses, with more than two-thirds involving illegal fentanyl used, often haphazardly, in illicit opioids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled the rapid rise in deaths from fentanyl overdose a national epidemic. The Drug Enforcement Administration says that in 2021 “more Americans died from fentanyl than from cars or guns.”
In Missouri, 1,375 residents died of opioid overdose in 2020 and 1,275 of those deaths were because of synthetic opioids, of which fentanyl is by far most common. In Jackson County, 1 in 5 drug overdose deaths are kids under the age of 15, according to county health officials.
Tougher punishment for drug dealers is a tempting idea, especially when changes in the drugs they sell make them secretly far more dangerous. But rather than deter drug dealing, cracking down ended up disproportionately impacting young Black and brown males, who often lack adequate legal representation and fill our prisons serving big time for small drug sales.
The immediate goal needs to be saving lives. The Biden administration has proposed prioritizing harm reduction measures to save lives over harsher punishment.
That’s smart, and that’s why so many jurisdictions — 40 states, including Kansas and Missouri — have adopted so-called “good Samaritan laws” to provide immunity from criminal prosecution for certain crimes for a person who is either experiencing an opioid-related overdose or observing one and calls 911 for help.
Another harm-reduction measure is to make naloxone, the opioid overdose antidote known by the brand name Narcan, widely available. Naloxone administered within a short window of time saves lives. Missouri schools, businesses and emergency responders should have the antidote available. Training for administering it needs to become as common as CPR.
More funding is also needed to increase treatment for those struggling with addiction. And Missouri and Kansas lawmakers should legalize cheap fentanyl home test strips that both states currently outlaw as drug paraphernalia.
Dealers who knowingly add fentanyl to street drugs sold to users who die as a result should be prosecuted. But rather than focusing on tougher sentences, the aim of police, policymakers and advocates ought to be adopting measures that can save lives in the first place.
This story was originally published September 9, 2022 at 5:00 AM.