Innocent merriment

The wrong people are in jail. I was reminded of this the other day after watching an episode of “Last Week Tonight” that focused on the opioid crisis and how the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, have pretty much escaped liability.

Oh sure, there’s a big financial settlement, but it’s the usual class action thing: an impressive-sounding cumulative number, lots of money for lawyers, insufficient money for individual plaintiffs, and a big payment delay that means no one is really paying anything.

Now imagine doing something intentional that leads to more than 500,000 deaths. Shouldn’t prison be an option for doing that?

I guess those guys were too murderous to fail. You need to think big in life (or death).

The Sacklers aren’t the only example of this odd phenomenon. Imagine, for example, you run a company that sells a substance — say, a fuel — that’s destroying the environment and will, as a result, probably end up killing and/or displacing millions. No one’s going to jail for that sort of thing either.

Or how about encouraging a mob to charge the Capitol? People in the mob (mobsters?) are getting arrested. Encouragers-in-chief not so much.

Or how about vaccine and mask discouragers? There’s more than one way to mass murder.

You can probably come up with your own examples. Wearing suits and thinking massive seems to be the key to immunity.

What can be done about this? I don’t know, but I have been thinking about "The Mikado." If nothing else, punishments need to fit the crimes so we can at least have some innocent merriment.

I’m thinking confinement to emergency rooms for the Sacklers, exile to a sinking ocean island for the oil execs, and a new home in, say, Afghanistan, for insurrectionists so they can experience the wonders of instability.

An object all sublime.

Criminal license. Here a question you’ve probably never considered: if you’re selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a preschool, should it matter whether there’s a sign saying the school is a licensed child care facility?

If you’re a drug dealer, would you have made sure to check?

You know what I’m going to say next: yes, there’s an appellate ruling on this issue. A three-judge panel has ruled that a drug sentence can’t be enhanced for a guy who sold heroin and cocaine within 1,000 feet of a licensed child care facility because there wasn’t a sign with “licensed child care” on it.

There were signs saying “preschool” but that didn’t count because a Florida sentence-enhancement law requires the sign with the right words. Apparently Florida legislators wanted to make sure the state’s drug dealers were properly informed.

So if you’re selling drugs in Florida, be sure to check signage and maybe measure your distance from anything that looks like a school.

Random thought. Have you noticed that the same people who complain about homeless encampments also whine about low-income housing proposals in their neighborhoods?

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