How Florida Entraps Pain Patients, Forces Them to Snitch, Then Locks Them Up for Decades: New at Reason

On April 11, 2002, Cynthia Powell entered the criminal justice system for the first time in her life, for what could be the rest of her life.

Two detectives for the Sunrise Police Department in Florida had arrested Powell in the parking lot of a Starbucks for agreeing to sell 35 of her Lorcet pills—basically Tylenol with a small amount of hydrocodone—and some of her Soma pills (a muscle relaxant) to an undercover police officer.

Powell, a 40-year-old African-American woman, had no prior convictions and no arrest record. Her occupation was listed on the arrest report as “unemployed.” On her criminal history sheet, it’s listed as “disabled.”

“Anyone who knows my mother knows she’s a sweet lady,” Powell’s daughter, Jacqueline Sharp, says in an interview with Reason. “Even before she went, people would drop their kids off for her to watch them.”

In many other states, Powell would have been a candidate for a diversion program or maybe probation. Under Florida’s ruthless anti-opioid laws, she received a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison on charges of drug trafficking and possession with intent to sell.

As fentanyl and heroin use have spiked across the U.S. in recent years, lawmakers and prosecutors have responded by pushing tough new sentences to crack down on dealers and users.

The Pennsylvania Legislature is advancing a bill, pushed by state prosecutors, to restore mandatory-minimum sentences for drug crimes. An Ohio town has started filing misdemeanor charges of “caus[ing] serious public inconvenience or alarm” against overdose victims, simply for receiving treatment from emergency first-responders.

U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) introduced a bill last year to dramatically lower the weight threshold to trigger a five-year mandatory federal prison sentence for fentanyl possession. And in Florida, where lawmakers seem to have exceptionally short memories, a state senator has introduced a bill, with the backing of the Florida Sheriff’s Association and the Attorney General’s office, that would create harsh new penalties for fentanyl trafficking.

But before legislators pass new laws, they should look at Florida’s recent history. Two decades ago, the state enacted strict mandatory-minimum sentences to combat prescription pill abuse. In an effort to shed light on the effect of those laws, Reason pored over the cases of every current inmate in the state admitted for trafficking hydrocodone or oxycodone pills. Those cases, rarely examined at the macro level and never at the individual level, show Florida’s war on prescription pain medicine has been an abject failure for 20 years and counting.

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