alt Hacker NewsWow, 15-30 years seems like an insane amount of time for drug possession. Even if the amount implied dealing, that still seems really high. Don't people typically get less than that for sexual assault or armed robbery?
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I don't know. If you are in posession of enough of a controlled substance to kill 300 people I'm kind of okay with a drastic response. For every Preston Thorpe who turns their life around there 100s of others who will just go out and keep endangering lives like this. I think this is a nuanced topic and 10-30 years is too much for drug possession is entirely lacking the necessary nuance to evaluate. Comparison to other crimes is not particularly useful either without going into the relative harms of each as compared to the harms of the other.
Unless you do something so heinous it captivates the public or have a bunch of priors the only crimes that reliably will put you away for that kind of time are ones that the government takes specific offense to. Usually that means ignoring their monopoly on violence but seeing as this guy is behind bars for dealing and not murder I'd bet he just got unlucky and happened to sell the dose that some more equal animal or their relative OD'd on.
Preston's recent interview with the changelog podcast[1] explains that he's been convicted twice. Repeat offenders don't usually get light treatments.
in addition to the other comments, this was also not his first conviction. They get extremely punative.
In Singapore, it's the death penalty.
> Wow, 15-30 years seems like an insane amount of time for drug possession.
The sentence was for intent to distribute. It's an extremely potent substance. This would be like discovering someone had 30,000 pills. You can't really argue that it was for personal use at that point. They also found him in possession of carfentanil (a more potent version of fentanyl), scales, baggies, and other products. This looks like a very clear case of someone importing high-potency synthetic opioids to redistribute.
High potency synthetic opioids are a high priority target for law enforcement. These are most often cut (diluted) and then sold to buyers expecting some other opioid product. As you might expect, perfectly diluting a 1mg dose of a powder into a 500mg - 1000mg pill form is extremely hard to do and there's a high risk of "hot spots" forming in certain pills (or sections of a powdered product). This results in a lot of serious overdoses.
It's a severe problem right now. Most fentanyl overdoses are from users who thought they were taking some other drug. They might have even "tested" it before, but missed the hot spots.