“Drugs, what a devil-inspired poison,” street preacher David Wilkerson wrote in the 1962 book “The Cross and the Switchblade.” “It’s death on the installment plan.”
Anyone who knows an individual with a drug problem, or knows a family dealing with the situation, understands the author’s words. Each installment payment – each time the drug is snorted, smoked or injected – has the potential to bring the user one step closer to death.
Nearly 50 years ago, when “The Cross and the Switchblade” passed for limited drug education for youth too late for Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock and too early for Studio 54, a drug addict might elicit a measure of sympathy. But the “dope pusher” was said to be the real villain, the one whose insidious distribution ring placed potential poison in the hands of a much larger group of people.
Today, police are still looking for the “pushers” and are attempting to make them pay dearly when their supply of a drug can be directly linked to the death of someone who took that drug.
Earlier this week, a woman was charged with second-degree murder in connection with the 2017 overdose death of a Hamilton County man who had a lethal amount of fentanyl in his system. When the findings in the case were presented to a Hamilton County grand jury late last month, it was the first such fentanyl-related overdose death brought before the panel.