Justin Fox Burks
A Memphis man was sentenced to 100 months in federal prison for selling heroin in 2017, according to a statement released last week by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Tennessee.
Melvin Scott, 41, was arrested in September 2017 after members of the Memphis Police Department (MPD) Organized Crime Unit received a tip that Scott was selling heroin from his vehicle in North Memphis. When approached by law enforcement, Scott fled from officers and attempted to conceal a plastic bag that police later discovered held heroin.
Scott’s case was prosecuted by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Griffin. He was sentenced to a little over eight years in federal prison by U.S. District Court Judge T. Fowles Jr. last week.
Scott’s prosecution is one of 59 this year done under the West Tennessee Heroin Initiative, a joint effort between the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Tennessee.
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The initiative, launched in May 2017, aims to remove career drug dealers and high-volume sellers of heroin and fentanyl from Shelby County in an effort to make the community safer, according to the West Tennessee U.S. District Attorney’s Office.
“Heroin dealers are directly responsible for the destruction of countless lives through addiction, injury, and overdose deaths,” U.S. Attorney Michael Dunavant, said. “Under our heroin initiative, we prioritize these cases in order to remove dangerous drug dealers from the streets and save lives.”
To date, 150 cases have been reviewed under the initiative and 100 have been accepted.
According a report by the Shelby County Health Department, in the first two quarters of 2018 suspected opioid-related overdoses totaled 89. Though that’s a 14 percent decrease from the same time period last year, officials project that by 2020 there will be more than 250 opioid-related deaths a year in Shelby County.
See real-time opioid data for Shelby County here.
