Trump plan sparks pushback in Texas:
‘Get tough’ policy tops other ways to combat crisis
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Unveiling a long-awaited plan to combat the national scourge of opioid drug addiction, President Donald Trump called Monday for stiffer penalties for drug traffickers, including embracing a tactic used by some of the global strongmen he admires: the death penalty.
“Toughness is the thing that they most fear,” Trump said.
The president traveled to New Hampshire, a state ravaged by opioids and which is also an early marker for the re-election campaign he has already announced. The president called for broadening awareness about drug addiction while expanding access to proven treatment
and recovery efforts, but the backbone of his plan is to toughen the punishment for those caught trafficking highly addictive drugs.
“This isn’t about nice anymore,” Trump said. “This is about winning a very, very tough problem and if we don’t get very tough on these dealers it’s not going to happen folks … I want to win this battle.”
The president formalized what he had long mused about publicly and privately: that if a person in the U.S. can get the death penalty or life in prison for shooting one person, a similar punishment should be given to a drug dealer who potentially kills thousands.
Trump has long spoken approvingly about countries that harshly punish drug dealers. During a trip to Asia last fall, he did not publicly rebuke Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who authorized extrajudicial killings of his nation’s drug dealers.
Outside a local firehouse, someone compared the leaders with a sign that said: “Donald J. Duterte.”
The Justice Department said the federal death penalty is available for limited drug-related offenses, including violations of the “drug kingpin” provisions.
It is not clear if the death penalty, even for traffickers whose product causes multiple deaths, would be constitutional. Doug Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, predicted the issue would be litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
John Blume, director of Cornell Law School’s death penalty program, said the Federal Drug Kingpin Act has yielded few “kingpins” or major dealers, mostly ensnaring mid- to low-level minorities involved in the drug trade.