Marijuana Moment
President Donald Trump is again promoting his support for executing people who sell currently illicit drugs, calling it a “very humane” policy to prevent overdose deaths that he’s “ready” to implement.
He also ambitiously projected that his administration will cut drug use in the U.S. by 50 percent during his new term by launching an aggressive advertising campaign to warn Americans about the harms of substance misuse.
During a White House event with governors from across the U.S. on Friday, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) told Trump about his concerns with fentanyl trafficking, to which the president responded by offering his extreme capital punishment proposal of following the lead of countries like China that impose the death penalty on people involved in selling illegal drugs.
While he said he’s unsure whether the U.S. as a whole is similarly “ready” to move forward with the policy, Trump encouraged governors to push for it at the state-level.
“If you notice that every country that has the death penalty has no drug problem. They execute drug dealers,” Trump said. “And when you think about it, it’s very humane, because every drug dealer, on average they say, kills at least 500 people—not to mention the damage they do so many others. But they kill large numbers of people.”
Of course, while fentanyl and synthetic analogues are more frequently exported from China to other countries than sold on the illicit market domestically, it’s unclear what data the president is referencing when he claims countries that execute drug traffickers have “no drug problem.” Public information about drug use and overdose in China is limited.
But Trump reiterated at last week’s event that “there are quite a few [countries]—many in Asia—where they have the death penalty. There’s no drug problem whatsoever.”
“They come to our country because we have much softer policy. We give them a slap on the wrist, and they kill a lot of people,” he said. “So we are going to—I mean, I don’t know if our country is ready for it. I am ready for it: The death penalty if you’re dealing drugs.”
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