West Virginia Man Who Faced Life in Prison for Taking a Psychedelic With His Wife Got a Year Instead

In my recent
Forbes column about dangerous drug substitutions
encouraged by prohibition, I mentioned the March 2013 death of
Renee Honaker, a 30-year-old West Virginia woman who took “LSD”
that turned out to be 25B-NBOMe. As I
noted at the time, Roane County Prosecuting Attorney Josh
Downey charged her husband, Todd Honaker, with first-degree murder
for sharing the drug with her. But Downey ultimately had to drop
that charge because the relevant statute, which makes delivery of a
controlled substance resulting in death punishable by life in
prison, applies only to prohibited drugs. At the time of Renee
Honaker’s death, 25B-NBOMe was not banned by West Virginia or
federal law.

In an agreement reached last December (which I came across while
researching the Forbes column), Todd Honaker pleaded guilty to
involuntary manslaughter. He also agreed to cooperate in the
prosecution of the chemist who supplied the 25B-NBOMe. Honaker
was sentenced to one year in jail, nine months of which he had
already served. His mother-in-law complained that the punishment
was too light. “My disappointment with the legal system right now
cannot be expressed,” she told The
Charleston Gazette. “It just seems like catching up with the
guy that created the drug is more important then the life of my
daughter.”

Whatever you might think of Honaker’s legal or moral culpability
for his wife’s death, equating it with first-degree murder was
clearly absurd. He took the same amount
of the same drug she did, which both of them evidently thought was
LSD. He clearly did not intend to kill her; nor was her death a
forseeable consequence of taking LSD, which has never caused a
fatal overdose.

Yet Downey was prepared to put Honaker in prison for the rest of
his life when he mistakenly believed the case involved LSD. When
Downey discovered that the drug was actually a considerably more
dangerous substance, but one that the West Virginia legislature had
not gotten around to banning yet, he had to settle for a one-year
sentence. If the issue is Honaker’s responsibility for his wife’s
death, it makes no sense for such a huge difference in punishment
to hinge on the whims of state legislators.