He played a lot smaller part than the Sackler family, who ran Purdue Pharma and pushed their drugs into communities. They killed a lot more people than this guy, and yet none of them are in jail.
Selling drugs isn't evil. Not selling drug doesn't make you good. People take drugs for various reasons. If a doctor sells them they are good but if someone else sells them they are evil?
The person buying could have been fired and can't afford Doctors prescription so the person selling could be an angel.
A doctor that over-prescribes them would be arrested, too. Or one that prescribed it to someone for a non-medical reason. (There are many of those latter docs.)
People that sell fentanyl (or similar) are very bad for society, to avoid the triggering "evil". Look how many people have died in the last 10 years. It's insane.
EDIT: I personally know a young man that died from a fent overdose and it's likely he didn't know what he took had fent in it. 22 years old and the whole world ahead him. Completely destroyed his family.
Evil is a moral concept, which is less tied to religion these days.
Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.
Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.
> Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots
No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.
Bush and his cronies resulted in the death of far more innocent people than your typical murderer. But we don't stop sending murderers to prison just because Bush/Cheney are not in prison.
I've voted for drug legalization (including possession). However, that doesn't mean that I condone all drug dealing behavior.
It took something like a decade to put Capone away. We still locked up murderers during that period.
The whole thread is silly. I don't think a lot of people here are going to stick up for a 15 year stretch for a 24 year old for selling opiates. Probably don't need to pull the Sacklers into it.
