One follows the other. Those people would haven't suffered (as much) if there was drug trade. They suffered because there was drug trafficking. Killing these guys does very little to nothing to halt drug trafficking, thus the endeavour is fruitless and a waste of resources, while also courting the very real risk of eventually executing an innocent.
The same follows in the next point, your contention is with the illegal recreational drug industry, which derives its power from the illegality. Remove that element and you curtail power. The indication of chemical classification is a quick way to show how absolutely arbitrary the standards for "what an illegal drug is" are, thus adding to the reason to get rid of them.
A lot of people are harmed for plenty of reasons, it is up to us to pick the method that most decreases harm. Given that the death approach involves executing people via an imperfect justice system (which carries its own risks, as already mentioned), and that you'd be hard pressed to find studies that back repressive approaches as the most effective ones, alternative approaches should be pursued.
This is a much better post, and I agree for the most part. I don't agree that all drugs should be legal - if that's your line of reasoning.
While we could sit here and debate the "hardness" of a drug (which I won't do) there is a reasonable scaling of somewhere. For example, the effects both physiologically and sociologically of marijuana are not the same (and in my opinion not comparable) to say that of Heroine or Meth. If we assume that heroine is a hard drug with little or no social or medical value it's reasonable that communities would want to ban them. It's also reasonable that communities would not want to be the sites of the manufacture (whether legal or not) of some of these drugs.
Now, what I think is reasonable is to simply treat hard drugs as a mental health issue (as Portugal is experimenting with).
As far as these 6 go, my stance, from the beginning, is that they shouldn't be executed, but my attitude is "fuck 'em" because they reasonably knew what they were getting into and there are bigger injustices in the world to worry about. Furthermore, whether or not a liberalized drug legal regime would lower suffering in the long term, the drug trafficking perpetrated by these individuals has a proximate effect on people now, and those people's lives shouldn't be denigrated.
MDMA is hardly 'disruptive to society', the Dutch man that was executed for running an alleged production plan received an unjust sentence.
Reminds me of that American man that was the sole producer of qualitative LSD in the 90s, after he was caught by authorities low-quality LSD was a much bigger blight.
I agree on the severity of the drug itself, but having a ecstasy factory very well might be.
