Well of course he does. Donald Trump has a long history of opining on which criminals—or innocent people—he would like to have killed.
According to five sources who've spoken with Trump about the subject, he often leaps into a passionate speech about how drug dealers are as bad as serial killers and should all get the death penalty. [...]
Trump has said he would love to have a law to execute all drug dealers here in America, though he's privately admitted it would probably be impossible to get a law this harsh passed under the American system.
Trump's unlikely (and grotesque) alliance with Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte tells us as much. He specifically praised Duterte's campaign of state-sanctioned street murders of accused drug dealers and users as doing an "unbelievable job on the drug problem."
As usual, a White House spokescritter was quick to explain that Donald Trump did not really mean the things Donald Trump said, with Kellyanne Conway asserting he only means high-volume dealers. Let the record show that Kellyanne Conway, however, lies about everything all the time, and Axios' other sources do not seem to paint the same picture.
This appears to be the closest we're going to get to a Trump Administration "action" on the opioid problem. They don't intend to allocate more than a trivial amount of money, and they are contemptuous of treatment programs and of providing medical assistance in general, but when it comes to the explicitly authoritarian solution—start executing people—he can get behind that. Depending on whether this is intended as trial balloon (or, more accurately, a signal of Manliness to be distributed to the rubes) or a genuine leak, we may soon hear Trump voice a demand for more executions as his deflection when he's asked why he's not doing anything more substantive on reducing drug use. Conservatives like that sort of thing.