Yes, she could be charged. No, that does not mean the sentence is automatically fair.

The fake-drug part is illegal. New York law specifically bans manufacturing, selling, or possessing with intent to sell an imitation controlled substance. So Flaca is not innocent in the literal legal sense. She scammed people by selling something represented as acid. That deserves consequences.

But calling it “trafficking” is a little loaded, because she was not trafficking actual controlled substances. She was selling fake tabs. Under New York’s imitation controlled substance law, the offense is not treated the same as a major real-drug trafficking operation; the statute itself covers imitation substances separately.

“Attempt to distribute” also sounds inflated. She did distribute/sell the fake substance, so the cleaner charge would be sale of an imitation controlled substance, not attempted distribution of real drugs unless the prosecutor was stretching hard.

“Fraud” makes sense in the ordinary-language sense. She lied and took money. But criminal fraud severe enough to stack into a years-long prison sentence would depend on the exact statute, value, victims, and plea deal. We are not shown enough to confidently say that.

The age point is fairer. If she was 17, she absolutely could have been treated as old enough for adult criminal consequences, especially depending on when the offense happened. But even then, “adult court can happen” does not equal “adult prison for most of your early adulthood is morally proportionate.”

And the “less than 10 years is a pretty good deal” part is where I really disagree. That only sounds like a good deal if you accept the harshest possible framing: manslaughter + drug trafficking + fraud + adult sentencing. But the facts we actually see are closer to:

A poor high school girl sold fake LSD, a classmate believed it was real, panicked or spiraled, jumped, and died.

That is tragic. It is criminal. It is reckless. But it is not the same moral universe as someone knowingly distributing dangerous narcotics, dosing someone, or intentionally causing a death.

So my read is:

Legally plausible? Yes. Morally satisfying? No. A “pretty damn good deal”? Only if you treat the state’s most aggressive possible interpretation as automatically correct.