If we execute drug dealers, will we also execute gun dealers?

America’s theme lately is that whatever we do, it has to be tough. And that goes for the opioid epidemic and drug dealers.

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“And that toughness includes the death penalty,” President Trump said.

Many of you may be asking, haven’t we tried toughness? Yes, starting with Richard Nixon. He called it the War on Drugs. He saw drugs coming in from Mexico, so he built a wall and paid Mexico to kill poppies. Drugs started coming from Colombia instead.

President Reagan declared zero tolerance because if you get tough enough, drug use vanishes! Except they didn’t. But a lot of drug users did vanish, which helped our prison population become the largest in the world. So there’s that.

I did try to find evidence that the drug war worked. I even Googled the phrase “The Drug War Worked.”

The most positive search result I got was “The War on Drugs: Because Prohibition Worked So Well.” What that tells us is Google still can’t catch sarcasm.

The president did make the point that because you can get the death penalty for shooting someone, why not for selling someone drugs? After all, they are deadlier than guns.

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But if he’s talking about executing the drug dealer who sells the drug to someone who shouldn’t have it, that would be like executing the gun dealer who sells the gun to someone who shouldn’t have it.

My guess is the NRA would not endorse that.

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