Privilege in the war on drugs

 Originally published to Facebook October 21, 2020

A CNN article released today on the fines and closure of Purdue Pharma, makers of Oxycontin mainly talked about the consequences for the non-biological corporation. At the very end, it talked about actual consequences for biological humans, you know like the humans sitting in jail for low-level, non-violent drug offenses:
"The Justice Department also reached a separate $225 million civil settlement with the former owners of Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family. Still, the Sackler family -- as well as other current and former employees and owners of the the company -- face the possibility that federal criminal charges will be filed against them."
I think that a just society would either see employees from the top down to "distributors" serving multiple life sentences in prison with sentences proportional to the number and severity of addiction cases and the profit generated by exploiting the addictive nature of their product...
...or change current prison terms related to non-violent drug offenses to fines proportional to the profit generated by the offender and the number and severity of addiction cases they participated in... let's do some math!
The Sackler family has an estimated net worth of $13 Billion and was fined $225 million, roughly 2% of their net worth.
If low-level drug dealers are estimated to make around $20,000-$30,000 per year, that's equivalent to making $10-$15 hour at a full time job, hovering at or above minimum wage. Let's assume a net worth for a drug dealer to be around or under the national median: $35,000 for African Americans, $150,000 for whites. 2% of the median African-American households net worth would be $700.
That's proportional to their net worth, but is it proportional to the number and severity of addiction cases they have some responsibility in? Surely a low-level dealer has a lesser impact and bears less responsibility for uses of the product they distribute than the owners of the company that produces 10s of Billions of dollars worth of a much more addictive and dangerous substance (a life "ruined" by opioid addiction and a life "ruined" by frequent cannabis use can't really be compared, can they? I mean, Seth Rogen?). Let's accept a really high number and say that a low-level marijuana dealer arrested for non-violent drug offenses is 1% as responsible for tragic consequences to end users as the owners of a major opioid production company.
That would mean that low-level, non-violent drug offenders would have to pay a fine of under $10 - not per offense, but in total for their involvement in the drug trade over the course of their careers - if we justly used the same calculus as was used to arrive at the $225 Million figure for the Sackler family.
And even though the Sackler family was fined hundreds of millions of dollars, that's out of a $13 Billion dollar fortune! They are left with over $12 Billion that they made by selling drugs they knew to be addictive and devastating after receiving their punishment!
The article does say that they and other members of the company may still be facing criminal charge. Let's assume that they get life sentences. For the older members of the family let's say that amounts to 25 years. A proportional jail sentence for a non-violent low-level drug dealer using our previous calculations would be just under 2 days (again, not per offense but total for their entire career) on top of their $10 fine.
That seems more like justice to me.

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