The looming threat of opioids

We’re wasting our time if we don’t get tough with drug dealers, and that toughness includes the death penalty,’ said the President of the USA, with typical bluster in a speech in late March.

He added: ‘The ultimate penalty has to be the death penalty. Maybe our country is not ready for that, it’s possible, it’s possible.’

Mr Trump was not positing a solution to a boom in crack cocaine such as the one observed in the 1980s, or rattling his sabre at the narcos of central America. In fact, he was referring to an epidemic of what one may find in any medical practice around the world. But which has been described by some as the greatest public health crisis since the AIDS epidemic in 1980s: The opioid crisis.