Trump calls for death penalty for drug dealers

washington — US President Donald Trump on Monday made a controversial call for drug traffickers to face the death penalty, as part of his plan to combat America’s opioid epidemic — a move that appears to be as much about politics as policy.

The Republican leader launched the proposal during a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire — a state hard hit by the opioid crisis — and the move was designed to burnish his tough-on-crime credentials.

“These are terrible people, and we have to get tough on those people,” he told the crowd. “If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we’re wasting our time.

“That toughness includes the death penalty,” he added.

An estimated 2.4 million Americans are addicted to opioids, a class of drugs including prescription painkillers, as well as heroin.

Trump pledged to fix the crisis when he took office a year ago, but so far, he has struggled to make headway on an epidemic that kills an estimated 115 Americans a day due to overdoses, according to the governmentfunded National Institutes of Health.

Drug-related murder is already a capital offence in the United States, but no one has ever been executed using those rules.

Officials indicated there would be no attempt to change the law to make the death penalty mandatory for trafficking alone, a move that would could well run afoul of Supreme Court rulings on proportional punishment.

In those rulings, the high court suggested that nothing other than murder can be considered a capital offense.

“It’s possible that our country’s not ready for that,” Trump conceded. —