President Trump wants to spill blood. More specifically he wants to execute drug dealers.
Trump has included in his plan to address the opioid crisis a provision calling for the death penalty for some drug dealers, Politico reported. It would be the most brutal escalation in the war on drugs in U.S. history and it is also a significant shift for the president personally.
Before becoming president, Trump took a more pragmatic, even libertarian, approach when it came to drug use. “We’re losing badly the war on drugs,” Trump, then the New York billionaire, told reporters in 1990. “You have to legalize drugs to win the war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars,” he also said, as the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng reported.
That was a perfectly defensible argument by 1990s Trump. Prohibition has never produced the intended result and it is possible that turning recreational drugs over to pharmaceutical companies rather than cartels might actually reduce abuse. As Trump argued all those years ago, the tax revenues of a legalized drug trade could be used to educate the public on the dangers of drugs. It is certainly more defensible than guillotining druggies.
There’s no guarantee the death penalty that Trump currently favors would actually deter dealers, but it would make the product more expensive and make addicts less likely to get the help they need.
