Blaz plan: $22M more vs. opioids
PRESIDENT TRUMP declared Monday that he wants death sentences for drug dealers, repeatedly vowing to get “tough” while blaming immigrants and Democrats for the country’s opioid epidemic.
Speaking at an event in Manchester, N.H., Trump unveiled his long-awaited plan to combat the country’s drug crisis, calling for broadening awareness about addiction while expanding access to proven treatment and recovery efforts. But the backbone of Trump’s plan was clearly to toughen the punishment for those caught trafficking drugs.
“This isn’t about nice anymore,” Trump said to applause from the crowd. “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.”
Trump said the U.S. should learn from countries that are already sentencing drug dealers to death.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has waged a notoriously violent war on drug dealers, with law enforcement officers killing scores of them, often in grisly and public ways.
Trump added that “maybe our country is not ready” for such a system, but urged Americans to reconsider.
“Unless you have really, really powerful penalties, led by the death penalty, for the really bad pushers and abusers, we are going to get nowhere,” he said.
Trump also took a jab at Democrats for refusing to provide funding for his long-promised border wall with Mexico.
“Eventually, the Democrats will agree with us and will build the wall to keep the damn drugs out,” Trump proclaimed.
During the campaign, Trump pledged that Mexico would pay for the wall, but he has shifted gears since taking office and has asked Congress to earmark billions of taxpayer dollars for the border barrier.
Trump also blamed “sanctuary cities” such as New York for not complying with federal authorities, painting undocumented immigrants with a broad and damning brush.
“They’re safe havens for just some terrible people,” Trump said. “And they’re making it very dangerous for our law enforcement.”
There’s no data backing up the claim that immigrants commit more drug-related crimes than U.S.-born citizens.
In addition to death penalties for drug dealers, Trump said he wants “great commercials” aired during “the right shows” to show children “how bad” drugs are.
“When they see those commercials, hopefully, they’re not going to be going to drugs of any kind, and we’ll save a lot of lives and make their life a lot easier,” he said.
Opioids, including prescription pills, heroin and synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, killed more than 42,000 people in the U.S. in 2016, more than any year on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump has declared that fighting the epidemic is a priority for his administration, but critics say the effort has fallen short.
Last October, Trump declared the crisis a national public health emergency, short of the national state of emergency sought by a commission he put together to study the issue.
Monday was Trump’s first visit as President to New Hampshire, which has long occupied a special place in his political rise. He captured his first presidential primary there in 2016, though he narrowly lost the state in the general election to Hillary Clinton. New Hampshire has been ravaged by opioids and is also an early marker for the reelection campaign Trump has already announced. MAYOR DE BLASIO said he’ll sink another $22 million in his efforts to fight opioid overdoses in the city, saying the initiative has begun to show results as overdose rates in the city flatten following years of increases.
De Blasio made the announcement, which will bring total funding for the “Healing NYC” program to $60 million, on Staten Island, a borough that has been hard-hit by the opioid epidemic — but where preliminary data shows overdose deaths declined in 2017 compared with 2016.