By Tony Newman,

No one has ever died from smoking marijuana. But getting busted with a small amount of marijuana has led to countless tragic deaths.

This week, Shelley Hilliard, a 19-year-old woman from Detroit, was killed after working as a police informant. On October 20, Hilliard was arrested for a small amount of marijuana. The police offered her a way out: She could set up a drug deal. She called a drug dealer and said she had someone who wanted to buy $335 of cocaine and marijuana. When the dealer showed up he was arrested. The dealer was released, and three days later Hilliard was found dead in the streets. The dealer has been charged with murder.

Hilliard tragic death brings back memories of Rachel Hoffman, the 23-year-old, Florida State graduate from Tallahassee who also worked as an informant after she was busted with a small amount of marijuana and Ecstasy. Hoffman was sent alone on a “buy and bust” and was given $13,000 to buy Ecstasy, cocaine and a gun. The men shot Hoffman five times, stole her car and credit card, and dumped her body into a ditch. This week Tallahassee approved a $2.6 million settlement with Rachel’s parents.

These two women should still be with us on this earth, but were instead pawns in an unwinnable drug war that led to their violent deaths.

The unexpected collateral damage of the counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan.

Najibullah Quraishi journeys deep into the Afghan countryside to reveal the deadly bargain local farm families have been forced to make with drug smugglers in order to survive.

All of us are irreplaceable to someone—but few are irreplaceable in the public sphere. Siobhan Reynolds, 50, founder of the Pain Relief Network, who died in a plane crash Christmas Eve, was the exception. She tirelessly, compassionately and at huge financial and emotional cost to herself, worked to debunk myths about opioid treatment of chronic pain that continue to emerge even now.

The aspiring documentary filmmaker and mother of one was moved to activism by the overwhelming chronic pain suffered by her husband. Further spurred by learning that her son had inherited the same genetic disease, Reynolds was relentless.

Why, she asked, when opioids can help treat chronic pain, are they frequently only available to the dying—but not if your agony will last years? Why, when addiction to opioids is actually rare, do we treat them as though everyone who takes these drugs is likely to get instantly hooked? And why do we seem to see addiction—even in the dying— as a worse side effect than agony or even death?

To answer these questions, she educated herself in the intricacies of pharmacology, public policy, medicine and law. A master at simplifying complex stories for the media, Reynolds then used every means at her disposal to bring what she found to public attention.

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