Trump Admin Reportedly Finalizing Anti-Drug Plan That Includes Death Penalty
By Randy DeSoto
March 15, 2018 at 1:51pm
The Trump administration is preparing to roll out its plan to address the opioid crisis, which will include imposing the death penalty for some drug dealers.
Politico reported President Donald Trump’s plan, which has been circulating through various federal agencies, would create a new Justice Department task force to aggressively monitor internet sales of opioid drugs.
Additionally, it would address how the federal government pays for opioid prescriptions to limit access to the powerful painkillers. The target is to bring down the number of opioid prescriptions by one-third within three years.
Further, the plan would facilitate Medicaid paying for treatment, making it easier for those addicted to the drugs to receive inpatient care.
According to the National Institute of Health, there were 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016, and most of them were related to opioids.
In a statement released earlier this month, the White House noted that same year over 20 million Americans, or about 1 in 13 people age 12 and older, had a substance use disorder.
“Opioids are a class of drugs that includes everything from heroin to legal prescription pain relievers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, and morphine,” the statement read. “The increase in deaths involving opioids is so large that it now affects average U.S. life expectancy.”
At a White House summit on opioid abuse on Mar. 1, Trump said the death penalty may be the best way of handling some drug dealers.
“We have pushers and drugs dealers, they are killing hundreds and hundreds of people,” Trump said. “If you shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty. These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people and nothing happens to them.”
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