At a meeting with state governors, President Donald Trump repeated a favorite theme of his—saying that states should put people who sell banned drugs to death. The federal government and certain states already have laws on the books theoretically allowing the death penalty for drug sales in some circumstances.
“If you notice that every country that has the death penalty has no drug problem,” Trump falsely claimed at a meeting of the National Governors Association, held at the White House on February 21.
“Your states have the right to go death penalty also for drug dealers,” he said. “But only do that if you want to get rid of drugs.”
Trump was joined by 19 governors, Democrats and Republicans, to discuss a range of issues including disaster aid and tariffs. He had a hostile exchange with Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) over transgender athletes. Trump threatened her state with a loss of federal funding for not complying with his edict to ban transgender women from girls’ and women’s sports, to which she responded, “We’ll see you in court.”
Trump referenced his dialogue with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose government carries out executions for drug convictions.
Drugs came up during a conversation with South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (R), about fentanyl being smuggled into the state through packages sent from China. Trump referenced his dialogue with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose government carries out executions for drug convictions.
Trump added that the federal government plans to launch a new anti-drug campaign, with advertisements explaining how “[it] destroys your skin, it destroys your teeth, it destroys your brain, it destroys everything.”
Like any reality TV show, Trump is a fan of recycling ideas. The anti-drug campaign is reminiscent of the 1980s and “Just Say No.” And he’s been a proponent of killing people for selling drugs since at least his first term.
In 2017, the Intercept reported, Trump congratulated then-President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for an “unbelievable job” on the “drug problem.” Duterte waged a brutal campaign against poor Filipinos nominally suspected of selling or using drugs—with tens of thousands of victims of vigilante violence, arbitrary imprisonment and extrajudicial murders. The International Criminal Court has attempted to investigate Duterte’s actions, but was blocked by his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
Throughout his first term, Trump publicly and privately praised nations that execute drug sellers—embracing the idea while also sometimes backing off it. One senior official, for example, reported that Trump praised China and the Philippines for supposedly not having drug issues: “‘They just kill them.’” Trump tweeted his support for China’s use of the death penalty for fentanyl trafficking, saying that the “results will be incredible!” The then-president reportedly wished the United States had a “law to execute all drug dealers,” and told a law enforcement group, “We’re wasting our time” if the death penalty isn’t pursued.
Harm Reduction International found that at least 467 people were executed for drugs worldwide in 2023—the highest total the organization has counted.
In 2023 Trump reiterated the idea during a Fox News interview, when he bizarrely failed to realize that this policy would have executed Alice Johnson, who served 21 years in federal prison on a cocaine trafficking conviction. Trump pardoned Johnson during his first term. The day before the governor’s meeting, Trump appointed here as the White House “pardon czar.”
Worldwide, the numbers of people sentenced to death for a drug conviction, and those put to death, are growing. For years, the nonprofit Harm Reduction International has tracked these actions, which are shrouded in secrecy in some countries. In 2024, HRI found that at least 467 people were executed for drugs the previous year—the highest total the organization has counted in two decades of reporting. Drug convictions accounted for 42 percent of all known executions in the world that year. HRI also counted at least 3,000 people who remain on death row for a drug conviction.
There are plenty of countries Trump could look to emulate—in addition to China, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Singapore are known to have carried out executions for drugs in 2023. North Korea and Vietnam are “assumed” have done so too, according to HRI, but secretly.
There would be significant legal challenges to carrying out such executions in the US, however, according to Giada Girelli, a senior analyst with HRI’s human rights and justice team. The Supreme Court, she said, would likely rule such a sentence unconstitutional if a homicide or similar crime was not involved.
Trump’s Deparment of Justice issued a 2018 memo instructing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in “certain drug-related crimes,” like a killing associated with drug trafficking, but no death sentence was handed down for a trafficking charge alone. However, the increasing tendency for US jurisdictions to define overdoses as homicides leaves troubling room for doubt.
“The justification he uses will make discussions around abolition harder in retentionist countries—it will give these countries one more argument to defend use of the death penalty.”
Girelli also worries that Trump’s rhetoric will give license to law enforcement to take an even more punitive approach to drug users—and the impact won’t be limited to the US.
“At the international level, a direct consequence is it tarnishes the US and its self-proclaimed position as a protector and promoter of human rights,” she told Filter. “If there were executions or death sentences for drug offenses, the US would join a very extreme [group of] authoritarian governments … Unfortunately I don’t think the Trump administration is particularly concerned with this image around the world.”
Trump’s embrace of the death penalty could slow down efforts to abolish it in other countries, where there have been examples of progress. In 2023, Pakistan became the first country in a decade to abolish the death penalty for drugs. Saudi Arabia temporarily halted executions during the COVID-19 pandemic. And in Singapore, the Supreme Court overturned a drug death sentence as civil rights lawyers and advocates demanded an end to further executions.
“The justification he uses will make discussions around abolition harder in retentionist countries,” Girelli said. “The fact Trump is aligning himself with retentionist countries—that claim the death penalty is effective in reducing drug use or drug crime, and a very punitive approach is necessary—it will give these countries one more argument to defend use of the death penalty.”
There’s no question Trump is a fan of executions in general. In his first term, he was the first President since 2003 to resume executions for federal convictions. From 2019-2020, at the urging of then-Attorney General Bill Barr, the Trump administration oversaw 13 executions.
Reporting from ProPublica illustrated how the administration rushed to implement its cruel plan.
“Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases,” wrote Isaac Arnsdorf. “They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as ‘moot’ because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret pharmacy that failed a quality test. They hired private executioners and paid them in cash.”
President Joe Biden reversed this: Months into his term, his DOJ reinstated a moratorium on federal executions. Biden was the first president to publicly oppose the death penalty, and promised in his 2020 campaign to abolish it. Yet he failed to introduce any bill or executive order to do this, and his own DOJ sought the death penalty for the perpetrators of mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo. In his final days as president, Biden did give commutations to 37 of the 40 people then on federal death row, converting their sentences to life in prison.
On his first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to take all “necessary and lawful action” to provide states with enough lethal drugs to carry out executions. He also ordered the DOJ to once again seek the death penalty in federal cases.
We don’t yet know whether Trump will succeed in executing anyone for a drug conviction. But his words and related actions have already done great harm.
Photograph of Trump by Gage Skidmore via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
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