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Prosecutors Focusing On Drug Suppliers

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – With heroin overdoses killing more young people in Ohio than car crashes, prosecutors are increasingly going after dealers, friends and others who unknowingly provide doses that end up killing drug users.

Going after suppliers in drug-induced deaths isn’t a new idea but a new heroin scourge has prosecutors intensifying efforts to identify, charge and imprison people who provide and sometimes ever administer the killer doses.

Just during the past year in Ohio, suppliers have been sentenced to a few years in prison or more when users have died from overdoses.

Defense attorneys and other critics of the strategy say prosecutors, under pressure from the public to do something – anything – about the problem, are charging people who had no intent to kill.