Hernando County is a Microcosm of the Futility of Florida’s Approach to Drug Abuse

In 2010, Hernando County, Florida had a prescription drug overdose problem. The Sheriff’s office reported that “a comparison of a 3 ½ year period (2006 — to first 6 months of 2009) revealed that drug related deaths totaled more than those killed in traffic fatalities in Hernando County (135 vs 127).” Only eight counties in Florida reported a higher drug overdose death rate than Hernando between 1999 and 2010.

In response to the troubling overdose death numbers, Hernando County prosecutors made the decision to change the way people who acquired and distributed prescription drugs illegally would be charged. Prior to the change, the standard practice had been to charge such defendants with a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Prosecutors decided those defendants would now be charged with “drug trafficking” — a first-degree felony with a mandatory minimum sentence of 3, 15, or 25 years, depending on the number of pills involved. (In 2010, seven pills triggered the three-year mandatory minimum, and 44 pills triggered the 25-year mandatory minimum.)

Then Assistant State Attorney Don Barbee offered an explanation for the change in the way drug defendants were prosecuted: “It gives us more of a hammer. We can more easily get one or more people to cooperate . . . We have to stop this problem somehow, and this is the best way that I know of,” Barbee said.

Between 2010 and 2017, Hernando County’s drug overdose death rate increased 21 percent. Moreover, “From 2014 through 2016, the most common calls to poison control [in Hernando County] were for exposure from analgesics (painkillers). Surprisingly, street drugs were much farther down on the list. One in four babies born in Hernando County in 2016 suffered from withdrawal from prescription or illegal drugs.”

It turns out “the best way” an Assistant State Attorney in Hernando County could think of to reduce the harms associated with drug abuse wasn’t actually an effective way to do that.

Who could’ve guessed?