OUR VIEW: Better reforms of drug laws and education needed on opioid crisis – Opinion – southcoasttoday.com

“Operation Ghost.”

That was the name of the year-long investigation that resulted in the arrest of 21 people last week in what the Bristol County D.A’s office said was a fentanyl trafficking ring.

The investigation, which was conducted by way of a wiretap, and was named “Ghost” because one of the ringleaders, 40-year-old Orlando Badillo, was considered a ghost by his own underlings. He was “hands-off and difficult to reach.”

This kind of operation of a lethal drug venture as a cold, calculated business operation is one of the reasons law enforcement has found it challenging to successfully prosecute high-ups. And even if authorities do manage to pin down the higher end dealers, the state’s 2015 fentanyl trafficking bill — designed to mete out tough penalties to the purveyors of the extremely lethal substance — in the past made it difficult to win convictions.

That’s because that law was written so that authorities had to prove there was more than 10 grams of the highly lethal fentanyl in a much larger mixture of heroin and other substances.

In 2015, under the leadership of Gov. Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey, the state passed a law that made it possible for the first time to punish fentanyl trafficking with up to 20 years in prison. But law enforcement ultimately acknowledged that the much praised statute did not work well. The reason was that in order to charge a trafficker, police and prosecutors had to demonstrate that more than 10 grams of fentanyl had been mixed into a much larger amount of another substance.

But fentanyl, an extremely powerful synthetic drug, is customarily cut into heroin and baking powder in much smaller quantities. It doesn’t take much of it to render the desired effect or worse. Complicating matters was that the State Police drug lab did not have the ability to test substances for purity so they had to send the seized fentanyl to private labs, which created a delay that made it difficult for district attorneys’ offices to use the statute.

Law enforcement and Baker, as part of last year’s reform of the state’s criminal justice system, enacted a law that simply required prosecutors to prove that a more-than-10-gram illegal drug mixture contained any amount of fentanyl. That was a good idea and will help in keeping criminals like Mr. Badillo behind bars.

But the difficulties in enacting effective fentanyl trafficking statutes is an illustration of the challenges in containing the opioid epidemic solely from the supply side. As with the draconian enforcement laws passed in the 1980s to control the crack cocaine epidemic, we cannot simply incarcerate our way of the fentanyl and opioid epidemics, particularly with the low level dealers, who are often addicts themselves. As long as there is a strong demand for substances like fentanyl, unscrupulous “business” interests like Mr. Badillo’s “ghost” operation, will look for ways around it.

More effective educational programming about the effects of powerful drug use, more and affordable substance abuse programs, and increased opportunities for working people to make a gainful living in the legal economy are all needed. It is traditional to call for these kinds of reforms to our illegal drug problems. But in truth American society has not yet committed to the kinds of comprehensive reforms to law enforcement and our underground economy that could really change things.

If the present opioid epidemic — most prevalent in areas of the country like New Bedford left out of the roaring economy of much of the past three decades — does not motivate us to make better reforms, one has to wonder what ever will.