Drug dealers would face manslaughter charges for opioid overdoses under proposed Florida law
These bills need to be passed A.S.A.P.!
And the other 49 states of the Union need to follow suit! When I was a Paramedic, we had a an epidemic of Overdoses one Summer. There were 18 the first week if I remember correctly.
Out of the 18, only 2 survived. One of the local heroin dealers started cutting the dope with fentanyl. Which, current pre-hospital corrective measures for overdose don’t work to counter. We were pretty much helpless to save these patients.
These poison pushers should have much more severe penalties for what they do. I couldn’t agree more with what these Floridian Politicians are trying to do.
Dealing with a drastic rise in the number of fatal overdoses tied to the use of synthetic opioids, lawmakers in Florida introduced on Tuesday a pair of bills that if passed would make it easier to prosecute drug dealers peddling those substances.
Florida politicians hope that the matching pieces of legislation — House Bill 477 and Senate Bill 150 — will combat the ubiquitous use of synthetic drugs like fentanyl throughout the Sunshine State following a crackdown on prescription painkillers that has led to a spike nationwide in heroin and opioid abuse.
“The people bringing these drugs in, selling and trafficking them, deserve to be punished as hard and as fast as possible,” Florida state Rep. Jim Boyd, the Republican legislator who introduced HB 477, told Fox News.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin. While it has legitimate medical uses — for example, doctors prescribe fentanyl to cancer patients with an intolerance to other narcotics — the risk of abuse, overdose and addiction is so high the Food and Drug Administration has classified it as a Schedule II controlled substance. (Read More)