Trump Urges Death Penalty for Drug Trafficker

US President Donald Trump calls for death penalty for drug dealers to beat America’s opioid epidemic on Monday and sent a message to prosecutors to be harsher.
An estimated 2.4 million Americans are addicted to opioids, a class of drugs that include prescription painkillers, as well as heroin. The crisis claimed an estimated 63,600 lives nationwide in 2016, say health officials.
Trump said, “These are terrible people, and we have to get tough on those people”. “We’re wasting our time if we don’t get tough with drug dealers, and that toughness includes the death penalty,” in typically combative style.
He later added: “The ultimate penalty has to be the death penalty. Maybe our country is not ready for that, it’s possible, it’s possible.” Trump said “personally I can’t understand that” about those opposed to such drastic measures.
Drug-induced homicide laws, which emerged in the 1980s, are being used more frequently because of the opioids crisis, according to a November 2017 report by the Drug Policy Alliance. However, there is no evidence that such laws reduce drug use.
Trump pledged to fix the crisis when he took office a year ago, but so far, he has struggled to make headway on an epidemic that kills an estimated 115 Americans a day due to overdoses, according to the government-funded National Institutes of Health.
The high court suggested that nothing other than murder can be considered a capital offence. The justice department said the federal death penalty is already available for limited drug-related offenses, including violations of the “drug kingpin” provisions of federal law.
>Juthy Saha