Law & order

Trump Wants To Execute Drug Dealers. Here’s Why That Won’t Fix The US Drug Epidemic.

“If we catch a drug dealer — death penalty,” President Donald Trump told a crowd this weekend at a campaign rally outside Pittsburgh, generating cheers.

The tough-on-crime plea comes amid a national public health emergency over US drug overdoses, which killed more than 62,000 people in 2016. Driving the epidemic are deaths from illegal drugs, largely heroin, cocaine, and counterfeit pain pills tainted with the synthetic opioid fentanyl, now the leading cause nationwide of fatal overdoses.

Trump said at the rally that although people convicted of homicide can face the death penalty, those who sell fatal drug doses get lighter sentences. The president called for execution, not jail time, for people who traffic in doses of drugs that kill “thousands.”

“That’s why we have a problem,” Trump said.

Legal observers and addiction experts, however, don’t agree. Several told BuzzFeed News that executing drug dealers would be both unworkable and ineffective.

“Expanding the death penalty for fentanyl trafficking won’t solve our nation’s opioid epidemic,” former Office of National Drug Control Policy official Regina LaBelle told BuzzFeed News by email. “Quick fixes won’t change the fact that more than 2 million people have an opioid use disorder, many of whom became addicted through the use of legal, prescribed opioids.”