News Is a drug overdose murder?

[Cream Gravy?]

depend what you mean by "much"??

so that is about 25,000 a year or half total opioid deaths including street OPs.

I guarantee you the number of deaths from prescription opioids is a mere single digit percentage in the U.S. as of 2020, if not a fraction of a percentage.

You don't seem to be getting my point... oh well.

 

[December Flower]

I’ve known situations where the police shot and killed someone while they were high then charged a drug dealer with murder… Gotta love it.

-GC

No offense, but I do not believe this.
Do you have any sort of proof? I'll take an indicator

There's bound to be a very select few of such cases, where the police at least try to pin their own deeds on someone else,
but no one with a gunshot wound is going to be diagnosed as if they had died from an OD
Maybe they'll say the dealer took their gun and shot the other one, I dunno. But how is any medical professional going to look at that crimescene and say "sure, OD - the gunshot wounds came post mortem" I mean wtf
If that is truly how American medicine & law works in praxis, why are you not beheading your leaders and doctors?

edit: Just came to me that this might be exactly the way you expressed it.
You never said "OD"

 

[Burnt Offerings]

A popular bumper sticker in my rural hometown says “Shoot your local heroin dealer”….

It’s funny, someone else brought that message up here a while back. Someone mentioned, like you did, that there really is no hard line between users and dealers, ESPECIALLY in the rural United States. I don’t even really know anyone who was in the game who DIDN’T sell drugs at one point or another lol, and the amount of drug dealers who were selling at least partly to support their own habit was very substantial

So for practical purposes the slogan amounts, “kill drug users”, something which is, to my mind, an ignorant, ugly & reactionary sentiment. Plus, anyone with any experience buying drugs will tell you that the people who play the role of “heroin dealer” are often not people you’d usually expect. Are you ready to shoot a 65 year old woman? How about a kid?

But I get it, simple and emotionally-satisfying rhetoric like that is appealing for some people…

 

[G_Chem]

No offense, but I do not believe this.
Do you have any sort of proof? I'll take an indicator

There's bound to be a very select few of such cases, where the police at least try to pin their own deeds on someone else,
but no one with a gunshot wound is going to be diagnosed as if they had died from an OD
Maybe they'll say the dealer took their gun and shot the other one, I dunno. But how is any medical professional going to look at that crimescene and say "sure, OD - the gunshot wounds came post mortem" I mean wtf
If that is truly how American medicine & law works in praxis, why are you not beheading your leaders and doctors?

edit: Just came to me that this might be exactly the way you expressed it.
You never said "OD"

Basically the guy was super high and did something that “made” the cops shoot him, it’s been years so I forget the exact circumstances, this happened half a lifetime ago. Then because this person was so belligerent from the drugs that the cops looked at it like the drug dealer “caused them” to kill this guy. If he wouldn’t of been fucked up, they wouldn’t have had to pull the trigger.

Very fucked up reasoning I know, but sometimes it’s hard to get into the minds of law enforcement in the US.

I should step back though, I can’t remember the exact charge but it was definitely in the murder/manslaughter category. They essentially hung the death of their doing onto the drug dealer, that I do remember.

-GC

 

[TheUltimateFixx]

.. Also no matter what services you provide you will NEVER have 'the demand not existing' .
They're still automatically treating all drug use as drug MISuse; and as though the reason for any and all drug use just HAS to be some kind of dysfunction.

If you could eradicate all poverty and adverse life circumstances, prevent any and all social maladjustment, any suffering or mental illness, you might eradicate PROBLEMATIC drug use. You'd never get rid of drug use per se because very many people do, always have and always will, use because they just LIKE it.

 

[thegreenhand]

It’s funny, someone else brought that message up here a while back. Someone mentioned, like you did, that there really is no hard line between users and dealers, ESPECIALLY in the rural United States. I don’t even really know anyone who was in the game who DIDN’T sell drugs at one point or another lol, and the amount of drug dealers who were selling at least partly to support their own habit was very substantial

So for practical purposes the slogan amounts, “kill drug users”, something which is, to my mind, an ignorant, ugly & reactionary sentiment. Plus, anyone with any experience buying drugs will tell you that the people who play the role of “heroin dealer” are often not people you’d usually expect. Are you ready to shoot a 65 year old woman? How about a kid?

But I get it, simple and emotionally-satisfying rhetoric like that is appealing for some people…

yep the region i saw that sticker in is a rural part of Ohio that has been stricken with severe poverty. in the rust belt, no jobs left, etc.

it's simply much easier (for both politicians and citizens) to blame the boogey man heroin dealer for all their problems and not talk about the complex systemic issues plaguing that region.

my opinion is that the "opioid epidemic" is simply the crack epidemic rebranded to avoid dealing with poverty in Appalachia... except since the users are predominantly white there is at least some talk of treating it as a health issue