Still, despite this legal foothold, it isn’t likely U.S. attorneys will suddenly act on the president’s endorsement. Federal death-penalty cases are exceedingly rare, in part, because the Supreme Court has generally held that the death penalty only applies to cases where someone is killed. Absent a new policy device to ramp up its use, Trump’s endorsement was “a little less than it seems,” as a Washington Post explainer put it.

Indeed, the death-penalty threat could have little effect on the behaviors of dealers. “The idea behind this is that if you blow a lot of smoke about the death penalty, it will deter people from taking those actions,” said Mark Osler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor. But “that’s a pretty weak theory of deterrence.” In fact, it may be the weakest theory. As Vox’s Dara Lind notes: “The deterrent effect of being sentenced to death, as opposed to a long prison sentence, is either so small it hasn’t yet been captured in the research or it’s totally nonexistent.”

But it would be a mistake to think that Trump’s rhetoric—even if that’s all it amounts to—is meaningless. The federal government has a major role in shaping national consensus, especially at a time when public opinion has only recently begun shifting toward treating drug use as a public-health issue.

“My sense is that he’s certainly using rhetoric in a way that he hopes to galvanize the public around this issue, and attempt to show that he’s addressing it,” said Lindsay LaSalle, a senior attorney with the Drug Policy Alliance.

Trump’s reinforcement of the most Hammurabian pieces of drug policy could, over time, derail the new public-health understanding. Even if it doesn’t stop dealers from their work, it could affect how individual Americans think about drug policy, how juries consider drug cases, and how legislators (not to mention law enforcement) react. In other words, just as activists have begun pushing the pendulum away from the most punitive excesses of the ongoing drug wars, with the right amount of influence government could move Americans toward supporting those punishments again.

For example, the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was critical in the proliferation of so-called Len Bias Laws—named after the standout Maryland college-basketball player who died from a cocaine overdose in 1986—in states across the country. Those laws allow for state death-penalty prosecutions for suppliers whose drugs lead to overdose deaths. Since a flurry of those measures passed in the 1980s and 1990s, they have gradually fallen out of favor. But as the opioid epidemic has worsened in recent years, they appear to be on the rise again. It’s difficult to track death-penalty prosecutions for drug-induced homicide—because some states simply started pursuing them under existing murder and manslaughter laws—but according to the Drug Policy Alliance, some measures indicate they’ve spiked over the past five years. “In 2011, there were 363 news articles about individuals being charged with or prosecuted for drug-induced homicide, increasing over 300% to 1,178 in 2016,” states a 2017 report from the group.