Trump wants to kill the drug dealers? Look at Big Pharma
It’s April 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been assassinated and the Vietnam War continued with more than onehalf million U.S. soldiers on the ground in the conflict.
Locally, a headline sounded alarm about a drug culture in Princeton. “Marijuana, LSD, ‘Speed’ — A Community’s Concern the special report blared.”
An official alleged that 30 percent of any class at Princeton High had experimented with marijuana while others had used hashish and even raided their parents’ medicine closets for mind alteration opportunities.
Fifty years later, U.S. citizens and officials find themselves concerned about the same issues although body counts number many more than past times as heroin and prescription drugs claim thousands of lives.
Opioids and powerful painkiller fentanyl contributed to approximately 63,000 deaths last year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioids includes heroin, methadone, prescription painkillers. Dealers frequently cut heroin with fentanyl which increases a chance for fatality.
Officials have attempted to curtail drug deaths by charging dealers with murder when their customers die from overdoses, an action that has not halted the sale of heroin. Addiction reigns superior to punishment as dealers deal and users use, many after having their lives saved by Naloxone, a medication designed to reverse opioid overdose.
Personally, a young nephew has been brought back from a life-threatening heroin overdose — several times. A frustration exists, of course, although opinions offered by some critics believes that addicts should receive one Naloxone experience then — if they want to die then let them die.
President Donald Trump weighed in on the U.S. drug problems with another midgetminded thought that exercised few brain cells. Trump believes drug dealers deserve the death penalty. Trump says drug dealers kill people and should be put to death or serve life in prison.
Trump called the U.S. justice system soft on drugs and blamed addiction death numbers on people who traffic drugs across unchecked borders. The President offered these comments while speaking at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania for congressional candidate Rick Saccone who faces a tough challenge against Democrat Conor Lamb.
Voters head to the polls on Tuesday as each attempts to fill the vacancy created when Rep. Tim Murphy resigned in October 2017. The 18th Congressional District representative admitted to an extramarital affair and that he asked his mistress to have an abortion.
“You kill 5,000 people with drugs because you’re smuggling them in and you are making a lot of money and people are dying. And they don’t even put you in jail,” Trump said. “That’s why we have a problem, folks. I don’t think we should play games.”
Trump said he recently asked the president of Singapore if that country has a drug problem. “He said ‘We have a zero tolerance policy. That means if we catch a drug dealer, death penalty,”” Trump said.
Trump praised Singapore leaders for hardball tactics a reaction he shares for Philippine President Rodrigue Duterte.
Kellyanne Conway, who leads the White House’s anti-drug efforts, said Trump wants death or imprison talking about high-volume dealers who are killing thousands of people. The point he’s making, she says, is that some states execute criminals for killing one person but a dealer who brings a tiny quantity of fentanyl into a community can cause mass death in just one weekend, often with impunity.
No doubt, Trump and supporters of this kill ‘em, if the got ‘em drug strategy have an idea regarding the personas of drug dealers, where they live and what they look like.
Big-time drug dealers include Purdue Pharma, Abbott Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, Coviden, Watson Pharmaceuticals and Endo Pharmaceuticals who flood the market with opioid products.
Doubtful that Trump will seek and destroy CEOs from these companies that saturate our drug culture. Nor will Trump put to death or imprison doctors who play a major role in the distribution of painkillers.
We should dismiss this death penalty punishment or long-term incarceration idea for initiatives that deal with addiction.
Also, as New Jersey debates the legalization of marijuana, let’s make certain that we enlist the brightest minds for discussion of this topic before we head down this potentially compromising highway.
Fifty years after warning signs appeared in Princeton, we still face the challenges and issues delivered by drug addiction.