Is there a statute that specifies that selling fentanyl is considered murder? I doubt it. It’s drug distribution. I mean, it could be murder if the seller forcefully administered the drug against the user’s will. Otherwise, I don’t see how it’s not the user’s fault.
Do you want firearms manufacturers held liable for bad actors after they sell their products? Or car manufacturers? Pharmaceutical companies for abuse of their legal products?
Maybe negligent homicide.
Fentanyl is camouflaged as another not deadly drug or eve candy. It would be like disguising a hand grenade as a child’s toy. I am not ready to surrender our country to the Chinese manufacturers and Mexican cartels
“Do you want firearms manufacturers held liable for bad actors after they sell their products?”
Well if you knowingly sell or lend a firearm to someone you know is disqualified by a felony, mental illness, drug use, etc. you are liable. Not the manufacturer but the dealer.
I was in the gun store looking at riflescopes and two guys were in there looking at Saturday Night Specials. The store clerk came up to them and said “You both smell of marijuana. You have to leave the store.” They did leave.
Problem now is fentanyl is now made to look like pieces of candy and could easily be mistaken for goodies by a child. They call it “rainbow fentanyl”. So if you knowingly sell this stuff, yes you could be charged with distribution and homicide:
https://www.kxly.com/spokane-dad-charged-with-homicide-for-young-daughters-fentanyl-overdose/
No loose candies this Halloween, only packaged candy.
The statutes will vary by State, but yes. Providing a known deadly controlled substance, probably of unnown strenghth, illegally to a user resulting in their all too predictable death is considered murder. Fentanyl belongs to a class of drugs subject to the highest regulation because it is so toxic. Controlled substances must be prescribed by licensed physicians for specific medical purposes, at sprecified concentrations and dosages. If the same dealer sold the user an unopened bottle of aspirin, and the user had some weird reaction to it and died, that would not be murder, because aspirin is not a controlled substance.
The analogy is not to normal products that work as intended. I would want gun manufacturers to be liable if they sold firearms that routinely blew up, killing the shooter, or car manufacturers to be liable if half their vehicles randomly veered off to the left causing 100,000 head-on collisions per year.