Exploring Variation in Recently Adopted Drug-Induced Homicide Laws (2018 – 2024)

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Abstract

The current landscape of drug use in the United States has been shaped by historically competing policy treatments of drugs as matters of criminal justice and public health. Despite public policy’s recent orientation towards public health in the midst of the overdose crisis, these efforts have done little to reduce the scope and impact of drug criminalization. The concordant pursuit of public health and criminal legal approaches to the overdose crisis can be observed in US states’ recent adoptions of both Good Samaritan Laws (GSL), which provide legal protections for those reporting drug overdoses, and Drug-Induced Homicide (DIH) Laws, which explicitly criminalizes the act of delivering a substance that results in the death of a person through fatal overdose as a homicide event. A growing body of literature on GSLs highlights immense variation within the statutory protections provided to overdose bystanders; however, little attention has been dedicated to the content of DIH laws. The purpose of the current study is to provide a descriptive overview of the variation in the statutory provisions contained in DIH laws among recently adopted states, covering a period of 2018 to present day (n = 7). This work serves as initial foregrounding for future empirical research examining the relationship between DIH adoption on overdose reporting behavior and drug-related mortality.

Author

• Codey Carr, University of Maryland, College Park