“…died of an overdose…”.
We’ve read that line far too many times in print media,
heard those words too often during the evening news. Now, more than ever in the
history of these United States, heroin addiction and overdose deaths are at
their worst.
I drove a school bus part-time for fifteen years. Students
who rode my bus in years past have died of overdose; kids who boarded as
kindergarteners, whose little faces I can still see clearly in my mind, dead
mere months after graduating from high school. Last week my wife and I attended calling
hours for a young man whom I coached in summer league baseball, gone because of
this plague of heroin addiction.
Law enforcement is scrambling, working hard to build strong cases
against persons responsible for distributing drugs in our communities, particularly
opiates. These cases are presented to a grand jury by the prosecutor’s office,
traffickers get indicted and eventually end up in criminal court.
Yet time and time again I read of heroin traffickers sentenced
to probation for their crime.
Why probation? Why are these people, convicted of or
admitting to selling heroin and the death, despair and destroyed families that accompany
it, allowed to roam among us on the streets and sidewalks, stand behind us in
line at the grocery store?
“Our hands are pretty much tied”, a judge once told me, “Sentencing
guidelines don’t mandate prison time for persons convicted of heroin
trafficking on a first offense so, in most cases, we can’t send them to prison.”
Therein lies the problem. Unless we get serious about
addressing the top of the heroin food chain and target the traffickers with
something they fear, people will continue to die of overdose at an
ever-increasing rate. Loved ones, neighbors and young people who formerly rode
that school bus will die from injecting or snorting heroin. Crime will continue
to rise, families will continually suffer, alongside those who have already
been savaged by the loss of a loved one, unless opiate traffickers get
mandatory prison for a first offense. The law, along with sentencing
guidelines, needs to change in regards to heroin trafficking.
Of one thing you can be certain: heroin dealers don’t fear
probation.
