US President Donald Trump is exploring options including the use of capital punishment to battle a new and deadly epidemic of drug abuse. So many Americans have died while abusing the world's most powerful opioids that the outbreak has reduced average US life expectancy by two years. The trafficking of drugs like oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl and the like has resisted standard "war on drugs" enforcement, and the US government is floundering and grasping at promised solutions.
If history is a guide -- and Mr Trump should use it -- the death penalty will have little effect, if any. The president has cited Singapore as "proof" of success. Even that is arguable. In the past three weeks, Singapore has executed two convicted drug dealers, and the hangings continue. So does the drug trafficking.
Closer to home, the death penalty was common from the 1960s through the 1990s in Thailand. During that time, drug trafficking and abuse both rose. Modern cartels emerged, leading to today's gangs that produce and smuggle drugs into and out of Thailand -- particularly from Myanmar. The public has supported every campaign against illicit drug sales and smuggling, but the problem has only got bigger.
Mr Trump's call for an expanded use of the death penalty, like the murderous campaign against corner drug peddlers under way in the Philippines, will reopen the arguments for and against the death penalty in general. The truth is that the amount of crime in Thailand seems to have been unaffected by judicial or extra-judicial use of the death penalty, including Thaksin Shinawatra's murderous "war on drugs" in 2003. That was also when Thai authorities stopped carrying out death sentences, with a single exception in 2009.
The Thai penal code provides the possibility of the death penalty for 35 crimes. During debate in 2015 and 2016 about the new constitution, there were serious proposals to add more crimes to the list, most notably corruption involving state funds. Activists also have campaigned to widen the scope of capital crimes for offences such as rape, particularly of a minor.
The truth, however, is that the country last executed a prisoner nearly nine years ago. On Aug 26, 2009, two men were taken from their cells at Bang Kwang prison and executed by lethal injection. They were convicted drug traffickers, and authorities said they had ignored several warnings to stop dealing drugs inside the prison.
Since then, and actually for six years previously, the Thai justice system, prosecutors and courts included, have shown little stomach to resort to capital punishment. To be sure, Criminal Court judges continue to pass death sentences for heinous crimes such as rape of children. In central and provincial prisons, about 450 men and women are officially on Death Row.
Most of the Death Row cases are under appeal, while many prisoners have petitioned for clemency. Royal pardons have released convicted killers sentenced to death. Thailand is rated by Amnesty International, arguably the greatest international voice against capital punishment, as "likely to abandon the death penalty" in the future.
Thailand, like Indonesia and the Philippines, has had its stomach-full of the extra-judicial death penalty. Then-prime minister Thaksin turned the police loose for a "war on drug dealers" in 2003. The police killed an estimated 2,500 people. Some were obviously innocent, and no major trafficker was caught in that regrettable violation of law, human rights and common decency. One hopes that the shameful programme will never be repeated.
Mr Trump's call for the use of the death penalty is wrong-headed. He sees it as a sure-fire method of halting drug trafficking and opioid abuse. But capital punishment is certain to be more placebo than panacea. It will only make frustrated law enforcement and politicians seem to be doing something about a serious problem. Time has proved conclusively that there is no single or simple step that will ease the drug abuse epidemic.