Trump’s Opioid Plan to Kill Drug Dealers Is About Vengeance, Not Solutions

CNN
5 min readMar 20, 2018
Photo: Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

By Ford Vox

Vengeance is not a public health policy. But it’s implicit in a policy measure coming out of the White House, which would attempt to solve the opioid crisis with a plan that includes sentencing some high-intensity traffickers to death. It may feel good, and for some segment of the population, vengeance may even look good.

The death of those deemed to be problematic is how some strongmen leaders that President Donald Trump has embraced keep their hold on power — such as Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte, who is following through on his pledge to kill every drug dealer he can find. But adding to the number of lives lost at the hands of the opioid crisis is not what the United States needs.

The 1980s made Trump. During that era’s crack and cocaine epidemic, first lady Nancy Reagan led the “Just Say No” campaign in an effort to curb drug use. But that effort didn’t address the underlying economic, social and educational causes of the drug problem in communities, nor did it equip adolescents with skills to overcome the barriers they faced. Opioids may present a new problem, but our President is looking back to his ’80s heyday for an old solution. “Miami Vice,” meet the “Heroin Triangle.”

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