You drop to the status of a boring working person who never took kickbacks to sell opiates? A fate worse than death, I guess.
The street dealer is also not likely to get 4 years. That's the point - 40 years was a number picked to illustrate a sentencing discrepancy argument. The fact that a 10x factor seems almost reasonable is the argument.
> a street dealer doesn't have 400 kilos of coke
What do you think Resenberg's prescriptions added up to, by weight? It's probably not fair to compare a street dealer to him.
Yeah, they don't look favourable upon those sorts of quantities.
Fortunately I only got caught with about five days worth of merchandise.
People suffer from relative poverty, so that would be pretty bad.
He's getting both. And he's losing everything: money, status, possibly family, ability to get another decent job... So he might rather do 10 years in jail but return to what it had before.
Also the doc loses his license and every single penny he has, between lawyers, years without being able to make a penny, and court fines. When you make a certain amount of money the trend is to live up to it: mortgages, fancy cars, club memberships, schools for kids and so on. When the money stops coming in, guess what happens?