Heroin Traffickers and the Cure

“…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.