Local Variations in Drug Induced Homicide Prosecutions for Overdoses

• In Event: Poster Session: Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics & Health Politics and Health Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Health Politics & Policy: Opioid Politics in the United States

Abstract

Background & Purpose: For much of the past century, criminal justice framing of problem drug use has depicted the person who uses drugs as a social deviant, aligning policy proposals with punishment as a response to substance use and dominating the policy discourse to the exclusion of other ways to understand substance use as a social problem. Since the “second wave” of the current opioid overdose epidemic (the early 2010s), scholars have noted a shift in the policy discourse, with substance use increasingly framed as a health concern rather than a criminal one. This health-oriented frame has accompanied the enactment of three pieces of opioid-related federal legislation enacted from 2016-2019. While such legislation has not embraced a true demand approach, which would focus on harm reduction and treatment, it nevertheless presents the problem of substance use disorders as a medical disease. Moreover, while this health-oriented approach gained footing, Congress has not enacted any major criminal justice or punitive legislation to address the opioid crisis.
At first glance, it might appear that state responses have been health-oriented in a way equal to that of the federal response; and, perhaps, this may have been initially true. Between 2010 and 2016, numerous states passed health oriented legislation, such as syringe decriminalization and 9-1-1 Good Samaritan provisions to state controlled substances acts, which fundamentally addressed the opioid crisis as a public health problem. However, the health-oriented response at the state level has frequently been followed, or accompanied by, a narrative fiction which portrayed the “drug dealer” and the “drug user,” the person affected by substance use disorder, as two distinct and separate persons, in spite of the fact that, at the interpersonal/relational level, these are by and large the same people. This false narrative positions the idea of a “drug dealer” as a poorly defined spectre of evil--as a categorical “bad guy”--who exploits individuals with substance use disorders through their cavalier trade.
These policy narratives set up the punishment of dealers to be the logical raison d’etre of subsequent policy proposals. For example, some states have enacted new statutes that allow for the prosecution of drug dealers with “death by distribution”--a charge often defined as equivalent to homicide--if a substance traded through their hands becomes implicated in a fatal overdose. Where these laws have not been enacted, some states have seen increased prosecution of drug dealers for murder under existing statutes. This behavior has varied greatly, not only by state, but also by county. This paper explores this variation by analyzing predictors of aggressive prosecution of drug dealers for murder at both the state and county levels.
Methods: We will begin by statistically analyzing the variation of drug induced homicide prosecutions by state, then at the local level, using counts produced by Leo Beletsky and the Health In Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University, which uses automatic analysis of online news sources to estimate the number of prosecutions. While this is an imperfect measure of the number of actual prosecutions, court records systems for some states do not have the capabilities to provide us with aggregates of cases by charge. Our proposed predictor variables include a measure for political ideology, media framing of the opioid crisis, number of overdose deaths, race of overdose victims, and age of overdose victims. To capture media framing of the opioid crisis at the local level, we will use a mixture of discourse historical analysis and quantitative content analysis of local newspapers, to describe patterns and discourses present in the media framing of the opioid overdose crisis as a health/medical vs. criminal/deviancy concern. We then will run two poisson-family regressions, one with the number as state level prosecutions as the outcome variable and the second with the number of local level prosecutions as the outcome variable.
Significance: This study will shed light on the discursive moves that have fundamentally shaped state and federal responses to the opioid overdose crisis in the past decade. In contrast to the values encapsulated in the phrase “we can’t arrest our way out of this”--the veritable mantra of the federal shift towards a health-oriented approach--this latest policy shift visible at the state level has been characterized by the abandonment of structural drivers of substance use as targets for legislation and a new hyper-focus on individual responsibility and classic theories of criminogenesis. This study will contribute to the understanding of how ideological and discursive orientations toward the social issue of substance use shape policy and what impact that policy has on key population health and criminal justice outcomes.

Authors

• Taleed El-Sabawi, florida international university

• Jennifer J Carroll, Elon University