The US president wants to execute drug dealers as part of his plan to combat addiction. Trump will also ask Congress to lower the minimum quantity of drugs sold that triggers mandatory prison sentences.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/D. Reuter
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In a proposal to fight opioid addiction scheduled for delivery in New Hampshire on Monday, US President Donald Trump will announce plans to execute drug dealers and traffickers when "appropriate under current law," Andrew Bremberg, director of the president's Domestic Policy Council, told reporters. Dealers spared the death penalty would face stiffer prison sentences under Trump's proposal.
More than 2.4 million Americans have become addicted to opioids, which include street-dealt heroin and fentanyl, but also physician-prescribed pharmaceuticals; 42,000 died using the drugs in 2016, and overdoses have become the most common cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. Opioid-related hospital visits rose 30 percent from 2016 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier in March.
Trump's plan directs his Justice Department to prosecute doctors, pharmacies and opioid manufacturers that break the law and calls for increased research and development through public-private partnerships with other manufacturers of the drugs. The plan includes proposals for reducing opiate prescriptions by a third within three years and improving treatment for addicts. The embattled US president also plans a campaign to educate people on the dangers of opioid abuse.
Germany, the original drug lab
Many recreational drugs cooked in hidden labs around the world today were origianlly desigend by German chemists, the military and German firms.
Off to war
The Nazis sent doped-up soldiers to the front in Poland in 1939 and to France the following year. During the invasion of France, a whopping 35 million tablets of the methamphetamine Pervitin were distributed to soldiers, who named the miracle pill "Panzerschokolade" ("tank chocolate"). It wasn't just the Germans, however: the Allies gave their troops drugs, too.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa-Bildarchiv
Alert and fearless
A Japanese chemist created a liquid version of what was to become the German Wehrmacht's miracle pill. The Berlin-based drug firm Temmler refined the drug and took out a patent in 1937. A year later, Pervitin was sold over the counter. It left people alert, fearless, and without need of food or drink. Pervitin is still on the market - illegally - and under a different name: Crystal Meth.
His own best customer?
Historians disagree over whether the Führer himself was addicted to Pervitin. Files kept by Hitler's personal doctor, Theo Morell, show a scribbled "x" in reference to a cocktail of medication he was given on any given day - but it isn't exactly clear what it refers to. We do know, though, that Hitler was on a mix of powerful drugs.
German chemists' inventive talents go back even further than the Nazi era, however. "No cough thanks to heroin," was the ad slogan for a cough medicine produced by the German drug company Bayer in the late 19th century. Heroin was prescribed to patients - adults and children - suffering from epilepsy, asthma, schizophrenia and heart disease. Any side effects? Bayer listed constipation.
Creative Chemists
Felix Hoffmann is perhaps best known for inventing Aspirin. But that's not all. He also developed heroin while experimenting with acetic acid. Hoffmann combined the acid with morphine, an extract from the poppy pod. Heroin was legal in Germany until 1971 when it was finally outlawed.
Cocaine for opthamologists
In 1862, the Darmstadt-based firm Merck started producing large amounts of cocaine as a local anesthetic for ophthalmologists. German chemist, Albert Niemann, had previously isolated an alkaloid he named cocaine from South American coca leaves. Niemann died shortly after discovering cocaine - of lung problems.
Image: Merck Corporate History
Euphoria and vitality
Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and the "father of psychoanalysis," consumed cocaine for scientific purposes. In his Cocaine Papers study, Freud described the drug as harmless. He observed "euphoria, more vitality and [a] capacity for work." His enthusiasm waned, however, after a friend died of an overdose. At that time doctors prescribed cocaine for headaches and stomach problems.
Image: Hans Casparius/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
MDMA patent
American chemist, Alexander Shulgin, is widely believed to have invented the party drug ecstasy. But in reality, he rediscovered the compound. The German firm Merck had originally developed and filed for a patent for a colorless oil under the name 3,4-Methylendioxymethamphetamine - MDMA - in 1912. Back then, chemists thought the substance had no commercial value.
Image: picture-alliance/epa/Barbara Walton
The past casts a long shadow
These German chemists' inventions are still having an impact today. According to estimates by the United Nations about 190,000 people died worldwide in 2013 because of illegal drug consumption. However, alcohol, a legal drug, is responsible for far more deaths. The WHO says 5.9 percent of all deaths in 2012 were due to alcohol consumption - that's 3.3 million people.
Image: Imago/Blickwinkel
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'The ultimate penalty'
Trump has previously proposed capital punishment for dealers, and even praised his Filipino counterpart, Rodrigo Duterte, whose war on narcotics has led to the deaths of thousands of people, as doing an "unbelievable job on the drug problem." The Philippine president recently withdrew the country from the International Criminal Court after the tribunal opened an investigation into extrajudicial killings as part of his war on drugs.
Still, at a recent White House summit on opioid addiction, Trump mused that "some countries have a very, very tough penalty — the ultimate penalty — and, by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do." However, changing the law would require an act of Congress, and, with lawmakers skeptical of how killing street dealers might help reduce a largely institutional addiction, Bremberg didn't say how Trump would manage to employ his own drug war's ultimate penalty.
"We will not incarcerate or execute our way out of the opioid epidemic," Senator Ed Markey, of the Democratic Party, said last week in a response typical of the president's skeptical opposition.
