How many years would a street dealer have gotten? 40 years?
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.
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.
What do you know? Do tell.
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.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkates...
It suggests that $10 million of profit would be quite the success.
Is it possible he has enough cash hidden away to make this all worthwhile? Yes, but I'd bet against it.
2 different opinions, neither sourced nor backed by data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So yes, I stand by my claim that the original poster's point was an emotional reaction.
Had koolba instead said something like, "An adequate deterrent should be in proportion to the crime committed, and I believe 4 years in prison falls below that standard for reasons X, Y, and Z," then I would not have called that a knee-jerk emotional reaction. But he didn't.
And the street dealers’ customers know full well that they’re buying a very addictive substance which is not medically indicated.
You're forgetting the large number of non-addictive substances that carry long sentences.
I’m not defending the doctor but the point being made doesn’t apply.
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.
I mean doctors in particular, but other high income earners in professional areas as well.
He’s essentially already retired now.
It sounds so foolish when people so close to retirement take undue risks and ruin it all at the end.
Greed can be a dangerous bait at times.
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.
In much the same sense as people who sell cigarettes do; perhaps we should, therefore, have life without parole for convenience store clerks.
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.
As if the US government agencies would ever let that happen. They seem to favor a "shock 'em straight" approach that's utterly ineffective.
BUT then you might face state charges for possession if the DA wants to bother.
Doctor: 4
Executive: .4
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?
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.
People suffer from relative poverty, so that would be pretty bad.
Yeah, they don't look favourable upon those sorts of quantities.
Fortunately I only got caught with about five days worth of merchandise.
He's getting both. And he's losing everything: money, status, possibly family, ability to get another decent job... So he might rather do 10 years in jail but return to what it had before.