He shouldn't be in prison, period.
In general, high-potency opioids are cut (diluted) with other powders and then sold as a different product to unsuspecting buyers.
Most fentanyl overdoses are from people who thought they were consuming a different, more familiar opioid. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids like this one are preferred by drug dealers because it's much easier to smuggle a tiny amount of powder and cut it 1000X than to smuggle the real product.
It's nearly impossible for amateurs to properly dilute a powder like this, so the end product has a lot of "hot spots" that lead to overdose.
There is no incentive to give out "free drugs", not least because you might kill an otherwise paying customer.
If someone gave a loaded hand gun to a small child, there might not be any reason to believe that this person was trying to kill the small child, but when the child inevitably shoots himself or someone else, the one who gave the child the gun in the first place shares at least some of the blame.
You may protest that children are not comparable to adult drug addicts; to this, I’d suggest taking a walk through any major metro area in America and deciding for yourself if “willing and aware” are appropriate words to describe these addicts.
People have already addressed the "aware" part, but "willing"? Really? Do you understand how addiction works?
I'd bet a lot of money that they saved some number of lives by catching him. He was engaging in an activity that had a high probability of resulting in some deaths. I can sell knives in a store, and I have a reasonable level of confidence that no one died because of those knives. Here, the probabilities are inverted.
How do you know that they were both willing and aware? Just how aware is your average drug buyer on what they're buying and how upfront your average drug seller on what they're selling?
This part is really debatable, based on what we're seeing with overdoses. The dealers (probably) know what they're selling but I'm not sure the buyers do, which even for a legal good would be a crime.
It's a bad measurement.
Intent matters and there's no reason to believe he intended to harm anyone. I believe it's a crime and should be a felony but this sentence is a bit extreme in terms of punishment fitting the crime.
Unless the circumstances of a particular drug transaction directly caused some other harm, like a fight, I highly doubt the charges would be considered 'violent' and hence carry the harm aspect.
This math of weights and maximum hypothetical carnage produces very unfair sentencing.
Did you read the link? They also found scales, baggies, and Carfentanil (a more potent version of fentanyl).
Filling your car up with gas doesn't compare. A better analogy would be if you tried to fill up a 10,000 gallon tank of gasoline that you couldn't possibly use yourself, all while having a truck full of matches and explosives, and a map to a building with a big circle around it.
Intent to distribute is a huge scam and calculates out to a unjustly long sentence for a lot of minor offenders. I'm not arguing it shouldn't be illegal or even tack on some extra time above just normal possession, but 15-30 years is absurd for what this guy did in my opinion.
