Drug dealers should face death penalty, Trump says

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Unveiling a long-awaited plan to combat the national scourge of opioid drug addiction, President Trump called Monday for stiffer penalties for drug traffickers, including embracing a tactic employed 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 already has 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 like Singapore that have fewer issues with drug addiction because they harshly punish their 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 that Trump visited before the speech, someone compared the leaders with a sign that said: “Donald J. Duterte.”

“Drug traffickers kill so many thousands of our citizens every year,” Trump said. “That’s why my Department of Justice will be seeking so many tougher penalties than we’ve ever had and we’ll be focusing on the penalties that I talked about previously for big pushers, the ones that are killing so many people, and that penalty is going to be the death penalty.”

He added: “Other countries don’t play games . ... But the ultimate penalty has to be the death penalty.”

The Justice Department said the federal death penalty is available for limited drug-related offenses, including violations of the “drug kingpin” provisions in federal law.

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.

Opioids, including prescription opioids, heroin and synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, killed more than 42,000 people in the U.S. in 2016, more than any other year on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trump has declared that fighting the epidemic is a priority for the administration, but critics say the effort has fallen short.