Michael K. Williams advocated for ending the war on drugs. Now activists say arrests of dealers tied to OD death 'is not what he would want'

When law enforcement announced the arrest last week of four drug dealers linked to the Sept. 6 accidental overdose death of beloved actor Michael K. Williams, the tone was triumphant.

"This is a public health crisis. And it has to stop," Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement announcing the charges on Feb. 2. "Deadly opioids like fentanyl and heroin don't care about who you are or what you've accomplished."

The actor, 54, best known for The Wire, was found dead in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment on Sept. 6, with the medical examiner ruling it had been the result of "acute intoxication" by the "combined effects of fentanyl, p-fluorofentanyl [a fentanyl analog], heroin and cocaine," leading many to believe Williams had used either cocaine or heroin that had been laced, without his knowledge, with the synthetic opioids, which can be at least 50 times more powerful than heroin.

Reports broke down how the NYPD "cracked the case," with the police commissioner noting, "I commend our NYPD investigators, working closely with their federal partners … for their work to clean up this long-embattled block.…" The four arrested, who range in age from 39 to 70, were charged with one count of narcotics conspiracy and, one of them, Irvin Cartagena, with causing Williams's death in connection with the conspiracy, carrying a sentence of 20 years to life.

It's why instead of celebrating, many took to Twitter to express a range of emotions — from uneasiness to anger — over the continued approach of criminalization when it comes to the U.S. response to the opioid epidemic.

Some shared exasperation over the continued attempt to "arrest our way out of this," while others pointed out the "irony" of the situation, considering both the message of The Wire and the pro-harm-reduction beliefs held by the actor himself.

Williams, in a 2016 opinion piece for CNN, wrote about his own battles with addiction and his anger over the then-45-year-old "war on drugs," noting, "The war on drugs is a war on people and a war on progress. It's a war on opportunity for a generation of Black and brown Americans who have grown up conditioned to believe that prison is inevitable and incarceration is imminent." He implored readers to act, writing, "We must demand that policymakers in Washington begin unraveling the policies that have shackled generations of young Americans by supporting criminal justice reforms such as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act and start peeling back layers of policy that have criminalized and demoralized our communities for too long."

A link to the piece, along with a reminder that Williams was "an advocate for ending the failed war on drugs," was tweeted — and then liked over 3,300 times — by Alyssa Aguilera, co-executive director of Vocal New York, a statewide campaign organizer focusing on HIV, drug policy, incarceration and homelessness, and a direct-service provider of clean syringes, naloxone and outreach services in Brooklyn, where Williams lived and died.

"I actually remember going to drug policy spaces and events, and he would be there, and he'd talk about the connection to The Wire but also real life — about mass incarceration and ending the drug war. I knew he held those beliefs," Aguilera tells Yahoo Life. "So when I saw the alert of the arrest, I just thought, I'm sure this is not what he would want justice to be or that this is a mechanism to make sure that more people don't overdose in the future. … It's just more of the same criminalization, the same drug war he was against, and not harm reduction or safe supply."

Aguilera admits it's understandable to see people embracing the arrests as justice.

"Overdose, sadly, impacts so many people, and of course when somebody you love dies, so much of what's ingrained in our society is about revenge and punishment, and those are very natural responses," she says. "So part of what our work is to think about how … to reframe the way we even talk about responding to incidents like this — away from punishment and to real solutions that will keep people alive."

What is harm reduction?

Those "real solutions," according to Aguilera and other supporters of drug decriminalization or legalization, fall under the umbrella of harm reduction — a proactive, evidence-based approach and set of interventions aiming to reduce the harms associated with drug and alcohol use. The interventions may include drug users having access to sterile syringes, fentanyl test strips and overdose-reversing naloxone, all part of an approach that "stands in stark contrast to a punitive approach to problematic drug use” and "is based on acknowledging the dignity and humanity of people who use drugs and bringing them into a community of care in order to minimize negative consequences and promote optimal health and social inclusion," notes the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a national nonprofit promoting alternatives to the war on drugs approach.

The DPA weighed in on the recent arrests with a tweet of its own, asking for "less lip service. More practical solutions," and stating that "criminalization fuels the overdose crisis."

It's the DPA's position, office of national affairs director Maritza Perez tells Yahoo Life, that "criminalization leads to a poisonous drug supply, which leads to overdose — and also discourages people to seek help should they need it for fear of stigma or criminalization."

A 2020 Harvard University white paper on expert recommendations for the use of opioid settlement funds by advocates and policymakers stresses the positives of harm reduction over "punitive and carceral approaches," noting that "the criminalization of drug use has justified and sustained state-sanctioned violence against BIPOC communities and individuals living in poverty — ranging from arrest, detention, prosecution, incarceration and surveillance to family separation, loss of employment and housing insecurity."

Perez says that often, "when we're talking about people who sell drugs, we're talking about people who use drugs — we have this tendency to treat them as separate — in order to support their drug use. It's especially important to understand now when we're talking about fentanyl." That's because the criminalization of opioids, she says, has led manufacturers to make the deadly fentanyl analogs that "have become very common in the illicit drug supply in the U.S.," to the point where sellers, if not also manufacturers, might be unaware that [their supply] contains a fentanyl analog.

Instead, Perez highlights the tools that exist — but are not widely available in this country — that could have saved the life of Williams and so many others. Those include fentanyl testing strips, which are cheap, simple to use and found, in a 2018 study out of Brown University, to be effective in prompting drug users to change their behavior to prevent overdose. There's also naloxone, found to be at least 75 percent effective in reversing opioid overdoses when administered by a layperson.

Another tool is that of safe-injection sites — safe havens for people to use heroin and other narcotics and something the Biden Administration signaled just this week that it may support. Advocates of harm reduction point to the success of such an approach in many other countries around the world, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the U.K. and Portugal. (In the U.S., the first government-authorized safe injection sites opened in NYC in November, though their federal legality remains arguable.)

"It's interesting when you look at our country's response to the opioid epidemic versus the COVID pandemic and access to tests," says Perez. "Why aren't we sending fentanyl test strips and naloxone to every household? Instead, this country tends to treat drugs as a moralistic issue and one to be addressed through criminalization."

But what about people who break drug laws?

"It's a hard issue," Jonathan P. Caulkins, drug policy researcher and professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, tells Yahoo Life. He explains that much of the confusion and controversy in drug policy discussions comes from ideas of decriminalization — reducing criminal penalties — versus legalization, meaning suppliers would be given permission for above-board manufacturing that is tightly regulated and promoted, similar to how cannabis is now sold in some states.

"Should somebody who sells a hard drug be subject to any restrictions whatsoever? Or operate the same way grocery stores operate?" Caulkins asks, noting that general consensus is to not support full legalization of hard drugs. "The question is, What do you do with people who break that law? That's a hard issue."

He adds, regarding the recent arrests, "We're really, really good at being outraged. So on this issue of what to do with low-level sellers, we can be outraged that they get arrested … and say it damages so many lives. … But there are also people outraged with the idea that these guys who sold to Williams had already been convicted of violent crimes and drug distribution … with the claim that [Cartagena] was back on the street selling after 10 days [in 2020]."

In this case, those arrested are known as retailers — part of a multitiered distribution chain that, with cocaine, begins with peasants in Colombia and includes Mexican manufacturers and traffickers. They were not high up on the chain, Caulkins says, but "a gang of relatively high-volume sellers," selling to users.

But there is a "theoretical argument," with three possible outcomes, he says, about why the arrests might prove helpful.

One, if you "hassle drug sellers and make their lives miserable," the theory goes, it's possible to force prices up for the consumer, resulting in what operates like a tax, with fewer people using.

Two, he says, it can "induce those sellers to be surreptitious rather than flagrant" and points to a time, in New York City, when crack markets were "visible, flagrant, scary and brazen," and "bad for quality of life." This argument says that drug dealing happening quietly is way better, he says, "so sometimes you're doing that arresting to keep it from being brazen and flagrant."

And three, he says, though it hasn't worked yet with stopping the flow of fentanyl and its analogs, "sometimes you can say to dealers, 'If you behave in a certain way, we'll come down hard, but if you stick to normal dealing, there will be less hassle.' So 'if you're going to sell cocaine, we don't like it, but with fentanyl, it's really dangerous … because a cocaine user has not developed a tolerance,'" and that will result in harsher crackdowns — hopefully as a way to "get word out on the street."

Still, "it's all ugly. There are really no good options," Caulkins admits. "I just wish people would understand how hard it is for a government to deal with something that's prohibited."

Perez, for her part, adds this about Williams: "Sadly, nothing will bring him back. But there are things we can do to prevent other people from dying — and locking these four guys up is not going prevent it from happening to someone else."

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