BANGKOK Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra suggested Sunday that persons sentenced to death for drug offences should be executed quickly as a deterrent to others.

The premier was speaking at a national two-day anti-drug conference in Chiang Rai, some 550 kilometers north of the capital Bangkok.

Currently, 140 drug convicts are on death row and Thaksin advocated to have them put to death on a daily basis, with the executions televised nationwide.

He said he would consider an amendment of current laws to ensure that executions could be carried out six days after final court verdicts have been handed down, and provided the convicts were not granted a pardon from the king.

Only two drug convicts have been put to death in Thailand since 1997, while many of the others have been on death row for years.

Thaksin suggestion is seen as a desperate attempt to fight widespread drug abuse in Thailand, which seriously endangers the country's social fabric.

It is estimated that currently some five million Thais, 80 percent of them teenagers and children, are addicted to a wide range of drugs ranging from the amphetamines to heroin.

(DPA)