Death Penalty For Drug Dealers: Would It Work?
Looks like the administration is gonna try to go after drug dealers' necks.
The Department of Justice “will seek the death penalty against drug traffickers, where appropriate under current law,’’ the White House said in a fact sheet released on Sunday.. The White House also floated several other initiatives to combat opioid overdoses that killed more than 40,000 people in the U.S. in 2016 - five times higher than the rate in 1999.
Personally, I think this could be a good thing. There are drug dealers out there that are responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people. Of course, this would be very controversial - since the drug dealers aren't directly harming others and a sale is both sides acknowledging receipt of the drugs.
There are no parameters mentioned yet, but the president is set to talk about it tomorrow in New Hampshire. Today, normal death penalty cases stay in trial for years before a true and final verdict - I could see these cases being much more stretched out when it's over selling drugs. On the flipside, this surely would prevent a LOT of people from selling drugs or considering it. At what extent would it become plausible to consider the death penalty? Would you measure this by the amount of drugs the dealer was selling when you caught them, or something else?
the problem with drug dealers, drugs, drug addicts, drug penalties, is:
the DEFINITION of a "drug".
caffeine is chemically (nearly) identical to cocaine. both are brain-altering, psychotropic drugs. (the FDA classifies it as a DRUG). yet you can easily buy powdered caffeine on Amazon. keep in mind, one TEASPOON can be DEADLY. (the bag for $20 has hundreds of teaspoons).
so, should Amazon sellers and Starbucks baristas get the death penalty? (if you ask me, perhaps)
[full disclosure: I am 100% PRO death penalty for crimes that matter and are well-defined. I also refrain from any caffeine intake, since I don't do any drugs.]
you should hold off on talking for like 5 years
I think your stance on "drugs" is utterly pedantic.
While partly in jest, I get it, caffeine is not a drug. Even your argument caffeine can be deadly at such a low dosage, then there should be millions of people OD'ing.
Heroin and opioids are drugs, anything where there is a not an arms length transaction, meaning I doubt for the junkie buying his black tar he has any "real" choice over the matter. There are thousands, millions, billions(?) for whom caffeine has no tangible effect of not going to work on time, leaving your family, getting into debt to pay for the habbit.
I'm sure I will get whole boatload of monkey shit for this one, but personally, I think every illegal drug known to man-kind should be legalized, quality checked, sold only to adults and be taxed like hell. Doing this would completely decimate the criminal enterprises that currently make billions/yr on the illicit drug trade. Doing so would also drastically reduce the hundreds of billions of dollars that we pour into drug interdiction, undercover drug stings, coast-guard cutters and "go-fast" boats chasing around drug mules, blah blah blah.
Those same hundreds of billions currently spent on interdiction could then be spent on rehab, job-training, recovery facilities and other programs that could potentially prevent mass substance abuse to begin with. Simply because our benevolent government tells people what they may and may not put into their bodies has NEVER been an effective means to stop anything.
However, we all know this will never happen. It is as much big business for our government as it is big business for the drug kingpins.
The only thing I would nitpick is that whatever money we’re wasting on the drug war should be redeployed to other drug related stuff. First, it would be difficult to spend that amount on other stuff. It’s a tremendous amount of money. This is especially true if you count the tax money coming in from drug sales. Second, the collateral damage from the drug trade would decrease so significantly that it is hard to imagine. The reduced drug law enforcement/jail/border patrol is obvious. But, homicide investigators, emergency rooms, etc would all require significantly less resources. Sure, put a little more into treatment and the like, that’s fine. Not expensive though.
That being said, you have to make sure the taxes you employ are still less than the cost of being illicit or people will still be trafficking drugs to avoid the tax.
I agree (with a caveat). As a person of extremes, I believe we should either blanket legalize ALL drugs, or make illegal ALL drugs. As in everything (including caffeine, alcohol, opioids, etc).
The worse thing is to "pick and choose" which drugs are socially acceptable, based on the going social consensus at the time.
I'm sorry but thats just dumb. Drugs have health benefits/side-effects so clearly you have to pick and choose or at least put limitations on access to certain ones. That's why you can't get chemotherapy drugs as easily as vitamin C pills. There difference is that if instead of braindead stupid politicians, scientists and clinicians were allowed to make solid decisions about which drugs would be legal, things would be MUCH better.
As someone with a pharmacology background I can guarantee that what fucks up the whole drug debate is the lack of scientific knowledge. When you hear about 'teen dies after line of cocaine', the politicians go 'coke is bad' the scientists go 'if your coke is 30% pure and the rest is powdered paint and powdered glass, no shit people die'.
What I think deserves the death penalty is allowing people with no knowledge of a topic to make decisions about it. This goes beyond drugs to other topics such as abortion, euthanasia and household chemicals.
The death penalty for drug dealers works fairly well throughout the world, but wouldn't work in the U.S. because 1) the public would never approve; 2) if the public did approve the courts would never allow it (the Supreme Court already tossed out the death penalty for child rapists, which is a crime potentially as bad as 1st degree murder); 3) if the courts allowed it then few prosecutors would seek the death penalty; 4) if prosecutors did seek the death penalty few judges would lay down that penalty; 5) if the death sentence were given then, like it is today, cases would end up in appeal for 20-30 years; 6) by the time the appeals process was done the death penalty would be reversed by a future government.
But yeah, generically speaking, societies that arrest and summarily execute drug dealers generally have pretty low rates of drug abuse. But seeing that in America is a pipe dream. So I would not hold your breath on that.
It will probably work as well as their revival of the "Just Say No" campaign will
Legalize it. I want to microdose LSD at the office.
the problem with death penalty for drug dealers is that there already is a death penalty for drug dealers and it doesn't do anything. This death penalty is swift and extrajudicial.
Another thing to consider- drug dealers would be more incentivized to kill any potential witnesses/threats since it's in their best interest. If someone is a witness or threat to disclosing the dealer's reputation, the dealer would just kill the threat since his only other option would be to face the death penalty if his identity is divulged.
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