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How many years would a street dealer have gotten? 40 years?
by 1ris 9y ago
How many years would a street dealer have gotten? 40 years?
- dcposch 9y agoThat just means we should treat low level criminals humanely. Four years is plenty. The thing where decade plus sentences are fairly common is unique in the first world: only in America. It’s barbaric and embarrassing. The science is pretty unambiguous—a high likelihood of being caught and punished is a better deterrent than a low-probability but larger punishment. So I don’t want to see this doctor get a 40-year sentence. I’d rather see lots of doctors who accepted gifts from opioid manufacturers get one-year sentences. Most important is that the pharma executives go to jail, too. Criminal justice should never be about retribution. In this case, the purpose is to keep future patients safe.
- koolba 9y agoIt’s really not. Four years is hardly a deterrent. It’s barely a slap on the wrist considering the number of lives destroyed by that plague. What’s makes this particularly heinous is the trust we place as a society in medical providers. The vast majority of people will take whatever medicine a doctor prescribes. No questions asked. Abusing that position of power is sickening.
- rhizome 9y agoFour years is hardly a deterrent What do you know? Do tell.
- CamperBob2 9y agoHonestly, if you could make $10M as a mid-level distributor, squirrel most of it away tax-free, with the downside risk being only four years in the pen, that would be a massive rational win for most people. Of course, the only reason you can make millions of dollars illegally at this racket is because it's illegal in the first place, so never mind. Drug laws cause far more harm to society than the drugs themselves ever could. Any argument to the contrary can trivially be resolved to a special-pleading fallacy.
- maxerickson 9y agoThere's a famous paper about drug gang economics: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkateshAnEconomicAnalysis2000.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkates... It suggests that $10 million of profit would be quite the success.
- csallen 9y agoFor reference, the doctor in the story "pleaded guilty to taking more than $188,000 in kickbacks disguised as speaker fees." As a result, he "lost his medical license and was ousted from his post as a Brown University professor, … the judge sentenced him to 51 months and ordered restitution of $754,000," and I'm sure he's gotten a heap of public shame and humiliation. Is it possible he has enough cash hidden away to make this all worthwhile? Yes, but I'd bet against it.
- paulcole 9y agoCouldn’t the same be said of, “Four years is plenty.”? 2 different opinions, neither sourced nor backed by data.
- csallen 9y ago> Four years is hardly a deterrent. It’s barely a slap on the wrist considering the number of lives destroyed by that plague. This is the exact kind of emotional thinking that makes it so easy to jack up sentencing to an unreasonable degree. It's why we spent so many millennia of human history insensitive to the torture and abuse of our fellow man so long as he could be labeled a criminal. First, you're comparing a single doctor's sentence to the entirety of the misery caused by a crisis caused by many, many people and systems. Second, what makes you think four years isn't a deterrent? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but we should be using evidence to decide that, not knee-jerk emotional reactions.
- loufe 9y agoI have to agree. It's not "a slap on the wrist" at all. A criminal record is a massive hurdle to overcome in finding work or keeping standing with any professional association. Not to mention the damage to reputation, personal relationships, finances, and family dependencies. Purely emotional thinking does not help the problem.
- KMag 9y agoThis. Deterrent effectiveness is quantifiable and repeated psychological studies show that increasing the expected chance of getting caught is a much higher deterrent value than increasing the expected number of years behind bars. One's subjective feeling of deterrence is strongly influenced by one's natural subconscious desire for mob revenge. Cultural change away from mob revenge starts with changing the dialogue. The cost to society is roughly linear in the number of years behind bars, and the deterrent factor gets dramatically sub-linear pretty quickly as number of years behind bars increases. That money spent on guards, etc. and opportunity cost (including lost taxable income) of having a potentially productive member of society behind bars are better spent on better monitoring and other measures that increase the likelihood that offenders are prosecuted. Increasing publicity of convictions would presumably also be a pretty cheap way to reduce crime by increasing the perceived chances of getting caught. I would really like to see it be a common thing for criminals to cut plea deals including recording public service announcements publicizing that they got caught. Though, this would also probably make it harder for reformed ex-convicts to escape their pasts.
- tinokid 9y agoThis is absolutely correct and should not have been downvoted. It is the abuse of a position of trust that aggravates this crime relative to that of a simple outlaw street dealer. Commenters who are concerned with the effect on the convict's reputation and future employability are simply not in touch with reality....this was a grave breach of the basic ethics of the medical profession and seriously harmed the innocent patients involved. There is no return to work after something like this...any more than with a scientist who falsifies data, a teacher who sleeps with minor students, a lawyer who steals from escrow, etc. I find it highly disturbing that there is more discussion in this thread as to the effect on the doctor's return on investment from his medical degree rather than on the individuals who bodies were damaged by someone they were supposed to be able to trust.
- csallen 9y agoNobody is "concerned" about the convict's reputation and future employability. You are misreading people's statements and thus misunderstanding their points. Namely, that the justice system serves a greater purpose than simply making you and me feel better and causing harm to perpetrators. What point is there in discussing the so-obvious-it-goes-without-saying good-bad polarity of this situation? If we myopically give in to our emotions, rather than dispassionately examine the best course of action, then we'll miss an opportunity to improve the system and deter future incidents. Stated another way, by attempting to redirect the course of this conversation, you are saying that virtue signaling by pitying current victims and demonizing the perp is more important than preventing future victims. If anything is highly disturbing, it's that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tinokid 9y agoYou're missing the point because you don't understand the gravity of the crime. A minimum wage fast food worker is constantly observed by a phalanx of cameras that will incriminate her should she attempt to steal five dollars from the till, but a surgeon in an operating room performs an infinitely more consequential task with nary a recording device in sight. Why? The immense trust and responsibility invested by society in medical doctors. There is a common misconception that a medical license is basically just a reward for a demonstration of technical mastery, much as a developer job flows from passing a coding interview. But in reality the technical aspect is only secondary; the primary purpose of all those years of training is to ensure that the student understands the fullness of the obligations associated with the profession and is properly disposed to accept them. In a case like this, the person understood and accepted those grave obligations, as well as all the privileges that came with them, only to toss them out the window when the opportunity arose to make a few extra dollars. That is what is being punished here. Four years is hardly too long, or cruelly retributive.
- j_jochem 9y ago> That just means we should treat low level criminals humanely. Four years is plenty. And the street dealers’ customers know full well that they’re buying a very addictive substance which is not medically indicated.
- andybak 9y ago> And the street dealers’ customers know full well that they’re buying a very addictive substance You're forgetting the large number of non-addictive substances that carry long sentences.
- j_jochem 9y agoI was thinking of dealers selling heroin in particular, since that feels like the appropriate thing to compare fentanyl-pushing MDs to, but in a broader sense, your point is if course correct.
- jjeaff 9y agoIronically, fentanyl is more dangerous than heroin and a large amount of heroin overdose have supposedly been because fentanyl was mixed in with the heroin unbeknownst to the user.
- skellera 9y agoIt’s more dangerous because you don’t know how much you’re getting on the streets. In a prescription, it’s a regulated medicine that is exactly the amount the label says. I’m not defending the doctor but the point being made doesn’t apply.
- stordoff 9y agoIt's more dangerous in street drugs because it is potent at extremely low doses, so poorly mixed drugs can contain fatal doses very easily. In a controlled setting, where the dose is precisely known, that is not an issue. I did some reading of fentanyl vs. morphine a while ago, and found that fentanyl is often preferred for acute pain due to faster onset, shorter duration (which may make controlling adverse reactions/overdoses easier), fewer side-effects and less histamine release. Specifically: > When adverse event rates were counted across both the out-of-hospital and ED phases, morphine's and fentanyl's safety levels were extremely close, erasing even the suggestion of a trend toward safety in one drug or the other. Our data do not suggest that further work should be done to try to determine which drug is safer: The low absolute rates and small difference between the two drugs make it unlikely that this difference would become either clinically or statistically significant, even with a larger sample size. I don't believe the notion that fentanyl is per se more dangerous, rather than being dangerous when misused/poorly handled, is supported. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2924527/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2924527/
- owly 9y agoThe deterrent and long term way to keep patients safe is not just the 4 years in prison, it is losing his medical license in perpetuity throughout the USA. Not sure if his sentence includes this but it should be in public records. My PCP in MA was busted for a different charge and lost his ability to practice medicine FOREVER throughout the USA. Way to throw all those years of med school in the dustbin!
- esturk 9y agoHe did lose his medical license but he's also 63. After he's out, he's most likely going to retire.
- dmoy 9y agoIf he saved enough, ha. You'd be surprised at how many doctors making $300k+/yr have less than a couple years' worth of expenses saved up :/
- namelost 9y agoStreet dealers, "low level" or not, do actually kill their clients. Prison sentences for dealing hard drugs should be in line with prison sentences for murder, otherwise the implication is that the lives of drug users are much less valuable than the lives of regular people.
- mattnewton 9y agoManslaughter is different from murder.. selling someone something that they use to kill themselves, is different from selling something stronger than they anticipated, is also different from pulling the trigger yourself. Intent matters in the eye of the law.
- throwaway2048 9y agoand so do doctors prescribing unnessisary opiates.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Street dealers, "low level" or not, do actually kill their clients. In much the same sense as people who sell cigarettes do; perhaps we should, therefore, have life without parole for convenience store clerks.
- ajmurmann 9y agoIf I buy drugs from a street dealer I know what I'm getting into. If I get prescribed opioids from a supposedly trained professional whom I'm supposed to be able to trust I don't. So as far as I'm concerned adults should be allowed to take whatever drugs they want. However, it should be illegal to bullshit them into taking them. Especially as a medical professional.
- freedomben 9y agoDon't worry, we've so over-corrected this thing as a society due to our knee-jerk emotional reactions and mob mentality, you won't be getting any opioids prescribed. Fourth stage cancer patients are now having a hard time getting them. Chronic pain patients that have been stable for decades are being heartlessly dropped by doctors that now fear the DEA. We are turning our backs as a society on the most vulnerable among us.
- onetimemanytime 9y agoNot really comparable. The street dealer is not likely to get 40 years, although many may have gotten it (Assuming that a street dealer doesn't have 400 kilos of coke in his stash house. If he does, he's no street dealer) Also the doc loses his license and every single penny he has, between lawyers, years without being able to make a penny, and court fines. When you make a certain amount of money the trend is to live up to it: mortgages, fancy cars, club memberships, schools for kids and so on. When the money stops coming in, guess what happens?
- pessimizer 9y ago> When the money stops coming in, guess what happens? You drop to the status of a boring working person who never took kickbacks to sell opiates? A fate worse than death, I guess. The street dealer is also not likely to get 4 years. That's the point - 40 years was a number picked to illustrate a sentencing discrepancy argument. The fact that a 10x factor seems almost reasonable is the argument. > a street dealer doesn't have 400 kilos of coke What do you think Resenberg's prescriptions added up to, by weight? It's probably not fair to compare a street dealer to him.
- lopmotr 9y ago> You drop to the status of a boring working person who never took kickbacks to sell opiates? A fate worse than death, I guess. People suffer from relative poverty, so that would be pretty bad.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoCrikey! If I'd been caught with everything that went through my hands as a small scale dealer I'd be screwed. Over ten years it certainly adds up! Kilograms of methamphetamine, thousands of ecstasy tables, tens of thousands of LSD tabs, a few hundred grams of pharmaceutical grade heroin. Yeah, they don't look favourable upon those sorts of quantities. Fortunately I only got caught with about five days worth of merchandise.
- jacquesm 9y ago
- siruncledrew 9y agoStreet Dealer: 40 Doctor: 4 Executive: .4
- ggg9990 9y agoCEO: $4m fine. With an annual salary of $20m+.
- ransom1538 9y agoYou would fall under 'trafficking' which is federal (Schedule 1 or 2 depending). Schedule 1 that is up to 20 years in federal prison. You would probably plea down maybe get 14. There is no good time in federal prison so you do the full 14 years. Schedule 2 maybe 15 years plea down to 9 years. THAT is if things work out and you don't get a crazy federal prosecutor that wants to file multiple charges (unlikely). This is federal prison (traffickers, embezzlers, wire-fraud) so it isn't that bad compared to state (state is where they keep murders and rapists). EG Guys in for trafficking can probably hold a good game of chess and discuss current world events. BUT then you might face state charges for possession if the DA wants to bother. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30722.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30722.pdf