Trump Re-shuffles the Drug War Deck of Cards

On Monday, March 19, 2018, Trump will release his plan to combat the opioid epidemic with a call to Stop Opioid Abuse. The plan includes law enforcement measures that allow the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for some drug dealers “where appropriate under current law.”  Trump will also call on Congress to pass legislation reducing the threshold amount of drugs sold that are required to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers and trigger the application of the death penalty in certain other cases. Those are actually two old ideas that have, to date, jammed our prisons past full capacity. In true Trump fashion, if it didn’t work before, just double down on it.

 This is what happens when you let people who don’t understand the problem come up with a simple (or rather simple-minded) solution, because Trump’s plan to include the death penalty for drug offenses is a “might-makes-right” approach and is no different than the way drug lords handle drug turf disputes, Also of note is that these offenses are ill-defined and likely to be interpreted any way a Trump-appointed judge wishes to interpret them. It will no longer be the rule-of-law in this country but the rule-of-Trump.

The opioid commission, chaired by Jared Kushner, was supposed to introduce its recommendations on ways to curb the epidemic November 1, 2017, but we can see Jared has been as effective at that job as he has been at bringing peace to the Middle East.

In late October, Trump and his administration finally got around to…declaring the opioid epidemic a “national public health emergency,” not a crisis, in order to buy extra time to come up with something…ANYTHING. In the meantime Trump went around bragging at his staged pep rallies that he liked the solutions of thugs and foreign leaders like Duterte of the Philippines, Xi of China, and Loong of Singapore. They claimed to have ended the drug problem in their countries by liberally applying the death penalty. So naturally Trump now thinks the best course of action is killing drug offenders, specifically people pedaling opioids.

But we know opioids are not plants grown in secret indoor gardens or cooked up in mom-and-pop meth labs. They are the result of pharmaceutical companies creating powerful pain killers as medicine, for a profit of course. How many pharmaceutical CEOs or lobbyists will be executed for manufacturing the opioid pills that are at the heart of the crisis? For example, will Trump demand death for Dr. Craig Landau the current CEO of Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, Oxycodone and Hydrocodone? If not, why not? If Trump is looking for the biggest “pusher” of opioids, you can’t get any higher. (Pun intended.)

How about executing Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and Paul Ryan, three of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma lobbying dollars? These are people who have used their positions to ram through legislation benefiting Big Pharma financially, as well as generously lining their own pockets, and to hell with the people who get hooked on Big Pharma’s products.

Will doctors be subject to the death penalty for simply prescribing an opioid medication to a patient in pain because later on some bureaucrat looking through the doctor’s notes decided the person had been prescribed too many? Will this be a new avenue for the DEA to apply their military approach to the Drug War? Shoot first; ask questions later. (It’s a variation on Trump’s approach to gun violence; take the guns first, apply due process later.)

Has it ever occurred to Trump that maybe people are deliberately overdosing on opioids because they are so embarrassed he is the president?

Applying the death penalty is such a revolutionary idea; let’s apply it to other crimes that indirectly harm people. Like money laundering. If someone…anyone…is even suggested to be engaged in money laundering, give them the death penalty. And apply it the way the Chinese do; 24 hours after conviction, the sentence is carried out.

Another area might be ethics violations. If any member of the White House is charged with an ethics violation, have them executed on the front lawn of the White House. There must be zero tolerance. That would be one way to stop people like Kellyanne Conway from thumbing their nose at the Hatch Act.

Where's a wooden stake when you need it?

          In Trump’s grandiose plan to sentence drug dealers to death, he seems to forget just how much money drug companies, the biggest drug dealers in the world, pour into in American politics. Pharmaceutical companies were among the biggest donors to Trump's inauguration, right up there with Big Tobacco and Big Oil companies. Is Trump really going to cut into Big Pharma’s profits by threatening to kill its users and sales force?

Watch for the sun to rise in the west first.