Dealers who hand out drugs laced with fentanyl could face manslaughter charges if their customers die, B.C. Minister of Public Safety Mike Farnworth said on the weekend.
It鈥檚 a harsh measure, but nothing else seems to stem the waves of poison that are killing people across the province. When even dead customers are not enough to stop a callous retailer, society must put its collective conscience where the dealer鈥檚 is absent.
Farnworth鈥檚 suggestion is not new. Other jurisdictions, fed up with the senseless deaths, are coming down hard on those who, in the minister鈥檚 words, are 鈥渄ealing death.鈥�
In early September, a 34-year-old man was charged by Brantford, Ont., police with manslaughter after a 46-year-old man died of a fentanyl overdose.
About the same time, police charged two Innisfil, Ont., men with manslaughter because they allegedly supplied drugs to a 23-year-old who died of an overdose of heroin and fentanyl in April.
In late September, a man in Alberta was charged with manslaughter for supplying drugs tainted with carfentanil that killed a man in a hotel in Edson.
The charges come as the list of the dead continues to grow. The province declared a health emergency last year in response to the crisis. New data show 1,013 people died of overdoses between January and the end of August, more than the 982 deaths in all of 2016, chief coroner Lisa Lapointe said.
Fentanyl was linked to more than 80 per cent of those deaths, compared with 2012, when fentanyl was detected in just four per cent of overdose deaths. The dealers who mix drugs are putting it into heroin, cocaine and other drugs 鈥� almost anything that people will buy. Some customers even ask for it.
For dealers, fentanyl is cheap, and extremely potent, which makes smuggling it into the country from China easy and low-risk. But the drug鈥檚 potency is what makes it so dangerous. A tiny amount can be lethal.
The mixing equipment they use to combine fentanyl with other drugs is crude. Unlike pharmaceutical companies, drug dealers have no way to control the levels of ingredients in their products. One pill might have no fentanyl at all, while the next one has enough to kill a person in moments.
Telling the difference with the naked eye is impossible.
But dealers know that. Not one of them could claim ignorance of the dangers. Yet they continue to spread it among their customers. To most people, their guilt is clear.
However, getting convictions would be hard, because while the dealers鈥� culpability is obvious to anyone with a normal moral compass, the letter of the law is not so easily satisfied.
Those who oppose manslaughter charges say that many of the dealers are addicts themselves, trying to feed their own habits. They say that charging them criminalizes what is really a health problem and ignores others who are equally culpable, such as pharmaceutical companies and doctors who over-prescribed opioids.
Others say our inability to control the epidemic is further evidence that we should follow the example of Portugal and decriminalize drugs for personal use.
But there is a difference between those who use drugs and those who deal them, especially the large-scale distributors of substances that damage minds and bodies 鈥� and kill. Those people don鈥檛 have a health problem; they have a conscience problem.
Yes, we have to treat addiction and try to prevent it by dealing with the social and personal issues that lead to it. But as with any health problem, anyone who knowingly hands out poison in the guise of medicine should be punished.
If the poison kills, they should go to prison.
