The Trump administration plans to move forward with seeking the death penalty for opioid traffickers whose drug distributions result in overdose deaths.
“The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty against drug traffickers when it’s appropriate under current law,” Andrew Bremberg, director of domestic policy for the White House, said in a call Sunday with reporters.
The move is as part of a larger, wide-ranging blueprint to tackle the opioid epidemic that President Trump will unveil Monday in New Hampshire. The blueprint will cite policy recommendations to Congress as well as actions the administration plans to take on its own through approaches involving education and prevention, law enforcement, and treatment and recovery efforts, said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president.
The administration would be “focusing on these three fronts simultaneously,” a senior White House official said.
Though some requests will need to go through the legislative branch, the Department of Justice will move ahead with seeking the death penalty in some cases, a senior White House official said.
“Obviously, there are instances where that would be appropriate,” the official said. “The Department of Justice is already going to examine and move ahead to make sure that’s done appropriately.”
When asked for specifics about what crimes would merit seeking the death penalty, White House officials deferred to the Department of Justice. In response, an official told the Washington Examiner that Trump was “serious about ending this crisis.”
“Under current law, the federal death penalty is available for several limited drug-related offenses, for example through violations of the ‘drug kingpin’ provisions,” the official said.
A “kingpin” is a person who controls a large network of people who sell illegal drugs.
Several of the other recommendations in the White House blueprint include approaches that would involve more stringent criminal justice action. For instance, Trump will call on Congress to pass legislation that reduces the threshold amount of drugs needed to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers who knowingly distribute fentanyl, which is lethal in small doses.
Others are approaches that have long been endorsed by addiction and mental health advocates, including recommendations to divert people with addictions to treatment rather than jails. The administration also will in coming months launch media campaign to inform the public about the dangers of opioid misuse, bolster government research on alternatives to treat chronic pain and on medicines to treat addiction, and allow more facilities to be reimbursed by the government for providing treatment.
The blueprint sets a goal of cutting the number of prescribed opioids such oxycodone and hydrocodone by a third.
It does not make a specific request for funding, a point a senior White House official said was still being determined through conversations with Congress as they approach a deadline for a long-term spending bill this week.
Trump said during his campaign he would make tackling the opioid epidemic a national priority. The number of overdose deaths from opioids like heroin, fentanyl and prescription painkillers has been climbing steadily since the early 2000s, surpassing 42,000 in 2016. Many of the addictions started when patients sought treatment for chronic or acute pain, becoming hooked on drugs like OxyContin and later switching to cheaper, more available alternatives like heroin.
The number of deaths have been so high that overdoses have contributed to a lower life expectancy in the U.S., and local officials have struggled to keep up.
The president will be accompanied by administration officials including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Jim Carroll, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Conway noted that while New Hampshire is one of hardest-hit states, “obviously this crisis affects everyone everywhere.”
Public health advocates have been urging the Trump administration to lay out a blueprint to lead the way on how the government, working alongside health providers, law enforcement, businesses and nonprofits, should go about tackling the opioid epidemic.
Trump at the start of his term established a commission that laid out 56 recommendations. The announcement Monday will take some of those recommendations into account.
The president’s blueprint does not include funding for what are known as safe injection sites, or facilities being looked at by various cities that allow people to use drugs with staff nearby to revive them and to provide clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV. The recommendation had not been among those cited by the opioid commission, and the Trump administration does not support it, though an official said it was always willing to look at data behind various policies.
“Right now the use and possession of these drugs is almost always a federal crime,” a senior White House official said. “We at this point have not seen clear and convincing evidence that these so-called safe injection sites work to reduce overdose deaths.”
Though the rhetoric of federal health officials has centered on the need for treatment and prevention, some of the comments the president has made about the need to impose the death penalty on people responsible for large numbers of overdose deaths has alarmed public health advocates.
“Rather than helping people at risk of overdose and their families, Trump is cynically using the overdose crisis to appeal to the worst instincts of his base, and pushing for measures that will only make the crisis worse,” Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement.
“If this administration wants to save lives, it needs to drop its obsession with killing and locking people up, and instead focus resources on what works: harm reduction strategies and access to evidence-based treatment and prevention.”
A House committee is scheduled to meet over the course of two days this week to discuss 25 different bills aimed at treatment and prevention for the opioid epidemic. The lower chamber will seek to pass a larger legislative package ahead of Memorial Day.
