client was convicted of providing her with a prescription drug methadone which she used and announced two hundred pounds to ms houston with other drugs and also used to take an overdose of the medication as a result she died as the courts where mr houston's sentence was pumped up probably ten fifteen full she was sentenced of over twenty years in prison has she been convicted soley of distribution of the drug humanitarian compassion and no intent obviously to bring harm to the victim essentially i think that's wrapped up proximate cause argument i could certainly understand from a substance liable if they have been sued and with the district court's instructions telling the jury that it had to find proximate cause least in here how was your client harm by the court's instruction even though it may have been erroneous and not necessary under the statutory well we're not we're we're we're not arguing there was an what the defendant did it is a matter of the law we make a policy decision that this defendant should not be held liable for the old but hasn't congress made that decision congress enacted a statute which essentially says if you're a drug dealer and you provide a controlled substance to a purchaser and death and suit in the jury here found that it was from an ingestion of too much methadone you are liable for the death isn't that the pol case the patterson case even in those cases recognized that there that there can be in certain instances a superseding intervening event if you will that would cut off the chain of causation how they determined that under the facts of those expects i think i think when you're looking at the cases that involve clearly illicit drugs the situation is different in that one the supplier of that drug knows that in fact the user is going to use it for  greater known risk at least that should be known by the supplier because of purity problems the way they're ultimately used i mean in this case the evidence and i don't think that that's there's any evidence to the contrary this been misused i would say a couple things first i think you need to look at those conversations also in light of other things that the mother and the victim's husband testify to and that is that neither one of them had any idea that this woman had a testimony that that is sort of the street price for prescription drugs that are misdirected in the manner that they're wrong and i don't think there was any testimony as to what the street price of the of the pills were have a question for you relating physically this case comes to us procedurally because a proximate cause instruction was given what's the government's position as to whether government's view let's assume a student at the university of montana has marijuana and sells  marijuana cigarette whatever that sperm these days to some other student sells a single cigarette and the other student has an allergic reaction to it and energy acts criminal process not because the question that would have to be answered as was answered by this jury is whether there was some other superseding intervening cause and if the jury in term criminal proximate cause which sounds to me like you're suggesting there is a difference between traditional proximate cause and or that wonderful case we all studied in last school oh for half a dozen of the long island railroad i don't think there are thin with the differences in the burden of proof because certainly under for law the tortfeasor can be held responsible i mean much thinner evidence by a preponderance of the evidence and we permit in criminal case intended victim all of which i think are part and parcel of a traditional proximate cause and i think the way i would look at it is more sort of a rule of leniency if you they say analyze that language and they and the court specifically held that there is a proximate cause component in analyzing in analyzing the if results language and the other thing just one last point i think i would make because if you look at the virtue of the verdict of guilty they found that the whole mystery understand your last point at all well i think my last point is that to the extent that the government is arguing that this is basically a strict liability statute didn't even have to be presented to the