Bob Timm, Minot

Every obituary is a loss or even a tragedy. It was sad to read about a young man in the obituaries in a late July issue of the Minot Daily News. This was a very promising and talented young man. My hat is off to the family for openly calling attention to the fact that this man’s demise was due to a struggle with addiction.

Who killed this young man? Some say he did it to himself as an addict and there is some truth to that, but it’s not the whole truth…so help me God.

I say the answer also lies in the pages of the Minot Daily News.

Nearly every day the Minot Daily News publishes the “Crime Beat” and almost every day there are two or more people arrested for selling heroin and/or meth. These people killed this young man. Each and every one of them! Every seller of these drugs are killers whether they supplied the drugs involved in the overdose or not. They feed people’s addictions and it never turns out good. It’s not that this particular young man got a bad dose of the drug… it’s that someone working to make a profit or in an effort to support their own habit sold it to him – that’s who killed this man.

It doesn’t stop there and again the answer can be found in the Minot Daily News in the court reports. Look at the sentences pushers get today. Unless they directly kill someone like this young man’s pusher did, chances are they will be sentenced to time served and probation. I and many others wish this young man would have received probation, but some unknown person gave him a death sentence, and profited from it.

I’m going to add lawmakers to the list of people responsible for this young man’s death. Those lawmakers who look to the bottom line and decide we can’t afford to build bigger prisons to hold the killers who sell these drugs. A prison sentence isn’t always a cure, but it does take one more pusher off the street. That one pusher who never did time in prison may have been the one who killed this man… or next time, your son or daughter.