Drug Induced Homicide Defense Toolkit
other than the person who held the drugs prior to the decedent.270 Of course, as described above, some states have adopted a "contributes to" standard to ease the burden of proof. The NDAA's white paper on opioids would go even further, recommending that legislatures explicitly "mak[e] every person in the chain of delivery criminally liable for an overdose death[.]"271 But even so, prosecutors have for the most part only found it practicable to pursue cases against tightly proximate individuals, which contradicts the deterrence rationale of the DIH concept (though, as discussed in subsection E below, evidence shows drug laws are generally ineffective at deterrence). B. DIH enforcement actually reduces help-seeking, thereby increasing the risk that people will die from overdose From a public health perspective, DIH enforcement against people who use drugs harms three important and interrelated public health imperatives: (1) the timely administration of naloxone to reverse overdoses; (2) public education and harm reduction efforts to reduce isolation among those who use opioids; and (3) the 911 Good Samaritan law designed to encourage help-seeking behavior among overdose witnesses. On the first of these, naloxone nasal spray is simple to administer and effective at reversing overdoses from all opioids, and it can be done by emergency responders, by
270
See Beletsky, America's Favorite Antidote at 57-58.
271
NDAA, The Opioid Epidemic: A State and Local Prosecutor Response at 9.
Version Date July 2021 – Check https://ssrn.com/abstract=3265510 for most current edition
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