Micheal K.Williams, who played Omar Little in The Wire, died of an overdose, reportedly from a “deadly dose of fentanyl-laced heroin.” The Drug War has been a disaster, and it’s still bad to be a junkie, and junkies sometimes die of overdoses. Four men have been arrested for selling this “deadly dose” to Williams. Not for homicide, as has become a popular enhancement to drug prosecutions, but a federal narcotics conspiracy.

Someone who knew Williams well, David Simon, says he would have been against this prosecution.

Please don’t @ me on this. I do not think Mike is honored or properly remembered by more incarceration in his name. Knowing him and his thoughts, I think he would be appalled at this. End the goddam drug war.

There are vehement calls for the government to respect Williams’ views against the drug war and mass incarceration and not prosecute the four men who it alleges sold the drugs.

The man who was charged, Irvin Cartagena, and three others were accused of being part of a drug-trafficking crew that continued to sell the drug even after knowing it had killed Mr. Williams — operating in broad daylight amid apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan, according to a criminal complaint.

The sale of the fatal dose to Mr. Williams in a hand-to-hand transaction in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood on Sept. 5, 2021, was captured on security video, the authorities said.

If there is anything unusual here, it’s that the feds didn’t take the investigation further, trying to go up the chain to those running the conspiracy. The street sellers are at the very bottom of the conspiracy, but with a celebrity overdose, they likely felt pressure to take the low-level bust for the sake of public appearances.

“This is a public health crisis,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement announcing the charges. “And it has to stop. Deadly opioids like fentanyl and heroin don’t care about who you are or what you’ve accomplished.”

Is it a public health crisis or a crime crisis? Talk is cheap and appealing to the feelings of an easily confused public can turn a Drug Warrior into Clara Barton, if done right. Of course drug addiction is a public health crisis, but that does nothing to help Williams because he was still an addict and he still OD’d. And addicts need to get their horse somewhere, and addicts need to get the money to pay for it, which perhaps wasn’t a big issue for Williams, but it is for others. And so on.

While the government says that the four arrested for the sale to Williams had been under investigation prior to his death, the prominence of this bust is obviously due to Williams. Does that make Williams’ views on the Drug War salient to the prosecution?

Mr. Williams, who earned five Emmy Award nominations during his career, was a fierce advocate for criminal justice reform off screen, including as a founder of a local organization where he worked to reimagine what public safety in Brooklyn might look like.

On the one hand, whenever a “high profile” overdose occurs, there’s a tendency to “weaponize” it to prove how bad drugs are and how important it remains that we eradicate the blight of drugs from society. In the past, it’s worked extremely well. Remember Len Bias? But in this instance, the reaction from those who cared about Williams went the other way.

The Drug War has put a great many people in prison for an extremely long time, and hasn’t accomplished much of anything else. Drugs are still sold on the street. People still buy and use them. People still die of overdoses. Arrest one crew and another will be selling on the same corner the next week.

One explanation for why this happens is that they constrained to engage in crime because they have no alternative path to success because of discrimination. To some extent, this is no doubt true. Not everyone can go to Harvard and get paid oodles of money to sit in a corner office, and as long as there’s a fortune to be made selling dime bags on the street corner, someone is going to do it.

Williams could have gone clean, but he didn’t. He was a victim. He was also a person who made a choice that ended in his death. It’s certainly likely that Simon is right about what Williams would have thought if he hadn’t died, but then, death has a way of changing someone’s opinion. In any event, does Williams’ view matter? Crimes are against the government, not the individual.

Hypothetically, what if Williams’ mother demanded the harshest possible outcome for the “murderers” who killed her beloved child? Would that cause the passionate to feel her pain and support her Draconian demand? Should that matter?

“There are so many people here — beautiful and beautifully flawed people — and I want all of their stories to be told,” Mr. Williams said of the residents of the housing complex in a 2017 interview with The New York Times.

The four men arrested by the feds for narcotics conspiracy would have never had their names in the New York Times, but for the connection to Williams. They would have been one more narcotics conspiracy case in the Southern District of New York, like so many more before them. There would have been no voices speaking out against their prosecution because Mike wouldn’t have wanted it. They, like so many before them, would have been prosecuted in obscurity and no one would have cried for them because no one, outside of their family and their lawyer, would have known.

Should these four be treated differently because the guy who died of an overdose was both famous and a strong voice against the Drug War? The only principled approach would be to demand that the government not prosecute any of these narcotics conspiracy cases. But would that have prevented Williams’ death by overdose, or the many people who lack big name recognition from dying or committing crimes to pay for their fix? Williams had the wherewithal to go to rehab to shake the habit, but he didn’t. Would he make the same choice, take the same positions, if he knew that it would kill him? Would it matter?