Many people believe in redemption and the human capacity to grow and change and to repent for your misdeeds. Prisons used to be called 'penitentiaries', and rehabilitation is one aim of imprisonment. It appears you guys would prefer to string up any prodigal son instead of celebrating their return from a sinful life.
Apart from the fallibility of the justice system, and the abhorrence some feel for States authorizing themselves to kill people as a punishment, and even the brutalization of those who must usher these distressed people to their death and kill them, these particular executions were carried out after 10 years of prison for crimes which are in a sense 'nominal' crimes anyway, since which drugs are legal and which are illegal is largely an arbitrary distinction. You could collect your heroin from the local chemist in Australia in 1953.
No-one raves on about executing all the publicans who regularly fuel the terrible road carnage and violence of thousands of murderers, rapists and bash-artists who get so intoxicated from alcohol abuse that they don't even remember committing their crimes.
Widely advertising the penalty does not justify it. By all means, in the absence of some more rational drugs policy, which at one end of the spectrum is progressing in relation to tobacco by heavy taxation and restrictions and which will eventually spread to alcohol, continue have penalties, even harsh penalties, but they should not include the death penalty - which misterS thinks should not even be applied to people who persist in referring to themselves in the third person.
