As the opioid “epidemic” continues to be the driver of drug hysteria, and the drug dealers who sell to people who overdose are prosecuted not as dealers, but as murderers, the concept of murder continues to expand. First, it went from dealer to sharer. Now, an introduction to a connection is all it takes.
But Jamie Nelson, 34, was not the dealer who provided the fentanyl and heroin that killed Tracy Skornika in June. According to police, Skornika gave Nelson $50 to help her to find a heroin connection. Nelson took her to a dealer she apparently knew. Skornika overdosed and was found on her bathroom floor. She was pronounced dead three hours later at a hospital.
There’s nothing is this story that even suggests that Nelson wanted her friend dead. The Orlando Sentinel report on the case notes that Nelson cried when she found out Skornika had died.
That Nelson felt terrible, even cried, isn’t a defense to a murder. But then, that doesn’t answer the question of how her doing as a friend asked, introducing Skornika to her dealer, turns out to be a murder either.
As was learned in the Crack “Epidemic” of the 80s, fear and loathing are a strong driver for criminal laws to be used in imaginative ways, but people seem to be relatively good with it as long as it only applies to people they despise. After all, it would never be used against the “good” folks. That was the rationale for civil asset forfeiture, to “take the profit out of crime” for crack dealers, since it was meant for drug dealers, and hotel owners weren’t drug dealers.
A similar slide in the definition of murder happened with drunk driving, where the murder charges were grounded in a depraved indifference toward life. Conceptually, it was a problem, as there was nothing remotely resembling intent and the crime was committed at the time a person became drunk and turned the ignition key in his car. Everything that happened after that was purely fortuitous. Most people made it home to sleep it off. A few killed someone along the way. It was purely a matter of luck after the conduct of drunk driving was initiated.
Drug dealers certainly don’t want to kill their customers. It’s bad for business. And the business is bad, but where there is demand, there will be supply. The act of selling drugs is certainly distant from the unfortunate end product of an overdose, and further still from the overdose that ends in death. It’s attenuated. There is an intervening event. No one forces a junkie to use the fentanyl she bought. The dealer isn’t the one who pushed her to shoot too much. His interest ended with her handing over the money. It doesn’t make him a swell guy, but does it make him her killer?
But for someone like Nelson, whose involvement was to fulfill a friend’s request, make an introduction so that the friend, whose desire for drugs existed independently of Nelson, could exercise her own independent choice to engage in conduct that was dangerous, and in this case, deadly, it could mean the death penalty.
It’s an absurd upending of justice to think someone should be indicted for first-degree murder without intending to kill anybody. But Florida’s drug war is so focused on punishment that prosecutors and lawmakers don’t even care about intent. Nelson could face the death penalty if she’s convicted.
Granted, Nelson could face the death penalty just for using, no less for steering, but then it would at least be by her own choice and hand. It’s not that Nelson should win “friend of the year” for aiding Skornika in getting her hands on drugs, but we already have laws prohibiting, and punishing, the full panoply of drug-related conduct. Murder had no place in that paradigm but for a terrible overdose and death.
But there remains quite a bit of slippery slope left to slide. As has been well-known by everybody except the government, the foremost pushers of opioids aren’t guys on street corners, but guys in bespoke suits in Big Pharma C-suites. As this Harvey Weinstein-level secret is coming to light, what about the ODs they caused?
Our policy was: You get 15 people hooked on opioids, and you’re a thug who deserves to rot in hell; you get 150,000 people hooked, and you’re a marketing genius who deserves a huge bonus.
It was their pushing that shifted the path of junkies.
It used to be in America that people became addicted to opioids through illegal drugs. In the 1960s, for example, 80 percent of Americans hooked on opioids began with heroin.
That has completely changed. Today, 75 percent of people with opioid addictions began with prescription painkillers. The slide starts not on a street corner, but in a doctor’s office.
If steering a person to the source of their killer drug is murder, what does that make the health insurers, doctors, and the PR guys who put drug commercials on TV to begin your yearning for a fix?
It may well be impossible to directly attribute any particular overdose, any specific death, to a pharma exec, but as Nick Kristof channels the old Stalin rationale, the problem isn’t that they don’t do the same, but they do it too well.
When the elements of murder are satisfied by some attenuated chaos theory, despite there being neither purpose nor a direct hand in another human being’s death, the question becomes just how far away from the body a person has to be before they are no longer responsible for murder. For too many of these extended rationalizations, there is no edge beyond which the cries for retribution won’t go. In this instance, however, there’s a good chance that the murder charge will go no further than the threshold of Pharma corporate offices.
Once you can tie things to murder, you can justify any punishment you want. In Massachusetts, I recently read a story of a drug bust for ” 103 grams of suspected fentanyl.” The magistrate ordered $100,000 bail and said this ridiculous BS:
“The sale of such a high number of fentanyl hits would likely result in death and a potentially legally viable charge of manslaughter,” she said. “As such, the nature and circumstances of the charge are reasonably closer to homicide under the above circumstances. Because fentanyl is such a life-threatening narcotic, appropriate bail must reflect the actual potential charges.”
This trend is ridiculous.
If it’s murder, then it warrants a murder’s punishment. But if you connect enough dots, everything is murder.
Dear Papa,
Keep fighting the good fight to get those damn marketers and drug producers and pushers prosecuted for murder. What’s good for the rank and file ought also be good for our corporate denizens. The color of the market doesn’t matter if the results are the same. It’s the only honest way, if the slide is to continue.
Best,
PK
Time for your morning Zen. There are two paths. One leads to perdition. The other to Starbucks. Which will you take?
Id rather take the one that goes to Dunkin Donuts
So perdition it is.
Krispy Kreme glazed will get you $37,500, you know, but lab tests prove it’s unduly sweet and inadequately delicious.
Remedial donut training for any officers who misidentify glaze!
Training and experience, indeed.
All roads lead to perdition when we’re just sinners in the hands of an angry god. I’ll take the one with Starbucks on the way, thanks. Not like I have a choice anyway.
Time to arrest mom and dad. Because if the victim was never born, she never could have been murdered. So really, it’s all their fault.
And obviously all their failed teachers, and the farmers who grew their food. And…
I blame defenders of free speech. Once again they are literally killing us.
They were the worst.
I literally can’t even respond right now. Where’s my designated safe space?
According to the Sentinal article, the prosecutor is claiming that she bought lethal drugs from Nelson, not just that Nelson helped her find a dealer. The Reason article doesn’t pass along this claim. And the Sentinal article doesn’t include any other documentation to help us understand its contradictory and incomplete characterizations. Are we sure these articles are making us smarter?
Are you prepared to dig deeper than “the prosecutor is claiming”?
I suspect the remarks of the prosecutor were misquoted, misunderstood or misconstrued by the Sentinel reporter.
It’s been known to happen.
But of course. These reporters don’t make it easy, since they didn’t include much information and they couldn’t even spell the deceased’s name right. (Fair play since I obviously can’t spell Sentinal.)
But if you google “Tracy Skornicka” (with a “ck”) you’ll find other news reports that talk about Nelson selling her heroin laced with fentanyl for $50 and then introducing her to another dealer, and the defense argument is that we can’t really know which drugs were the ones that killed her.
I’m not saying this to pick a side in the case. I’m just observing that a whole lot of people are jumping on the outrage train based on these Reason and Sentinol articles with a deceptively incomplete set of facts.
Argh. I swear it was captcha’s fault. It timed out and bumped me out of the thread when I reloaded. Bad captcha. At least the binary math problems are easier.
Uh huh.
This has been an ongoing trend for a few years now. It’s not one story, one case. And then there was the real gist of the post. And then there’s your captcha and reply fails. Anything else you feel compelled to add?
I could provide an addendum to my understanding of the case since my last post, having triangulated with a couple more reports each presenting the facts in slightly different ways, but I should probably retire to my chair in the corner with my book and and my meatloaf sandwich.
Does Captcha also serve as a test for Replicants? Asking for a friend.
Signed, R. Deckard
I have no implanted memory of any captcha.
My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.
Binary math?? What thort of pagan ritual ith that??
I hate deceptively incomplete sets of facts. They are so deceptive, and so incomplete, that they are not really a set of facts.
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, they were known to the victim here as Grandma and Grandpa, but they were and are the pushers who 30 years ago bought the victim his first so-called “Happy Meal” — a box filled with saturated animal fat, a week’s-worth of sugar and salt — and, to make sure the victim got hooked, a toy! The evidence shows they did this repeatedly throughout his young life. Sure, the victim begged them to take him to McDonald’s, and they did because they had gotten him addicted. They even paid for these meals, even though, of course, many public service announcements warned that that fast-food meals were nutritionally dangerous. And that is why, today, when the victim shows signs of heightened cholesterol, the People of the State of New York ask you to find these pushers guilty of Attempted Murder.”
Do you have any idea how much I miss you?
Perhaps this potential prosecution explains why, according to no less august a news source than The Onion, “McDonald’s Drops ‘Hammurderer’ Character From Advertising” (an actual article, though no link per rules).
The vegetarians are waiting. Meat is murder you know.
I just had a small-time, street dealer of drugs, so poor he qualified for the help of a “public pretender,” prosecuted and convicted of murder by distribution of an illegal substance (heroin). He was sentenced to life in prison, the sentence mandated by Florida law. There was no indication, much less proof, that he made any money from the deal. The man who collected the whopping $20 for the drug was not charged. The young man now serving a life sentence made the mistake of communicating with the relapsing addict via text message. He was an easy target and completely undeserving of this persecution/prosecution.