> In the U.S., people lose almost 7 healthy years of life on average to drug use. In my home country of Bangladesh (which executes drug dealers) it's under 0.8.

There's so much ambiguity here. While Japan has a staunchly anti-drug culture and severe legal and social penalties for drug use, they don't execute drug users or dealers, and they have a lower DALY of 0.6. By your argument it should be higher. Singapore's is way higher at 1.1. If Japan was considering an execution policy, you could argue against it by saying "it seems like if you execute drug dealers, DALYs increase, and potentially even double".

It's also important to note that this dataset also considers alcohol use, and Bangladesh is a dry country for Muslims (AFAIK). That's a pretty big skew.

> You must become a culture that executes drug dealers.

Again I don't think the data show that this would be effective, but also this isn't responsive to my point: you'll kill a lot of people, disproportionately kids, women, immigrants, minorities, and poor people. Americans assume that drug laws and task forces are geared towards dismantling drug operations, but this is entirely false. The vast majority of people picked up for drug offenses are very low level. We're not arresting and incarcerating criminal masterminds, we're getting people who are coerced one way or another into pushing drugs.

It's also worth saying this is pretty dangerous work on its own! Many people in the drug trade assume they'll die "on the job". It strains credulity to think that the threat of execution would really factor into their decision making here.

Finally, a War on Drugs approach doesn't even work in Singapore. Here are some samples from their 2021 report [0] (emphasis mine):

- the proportion of new drug abusers arrested remained high at 34%

- the proportion of new drug abusers arrested who were under 30 years old remained significant at 60%

- In 2021, CNB arrested 2,724 drug abusers

- CNB made significant drug seizures in 2021. The drugs seized in 2021 were estimated to have a street value of about S$18.16 million. There was a 31% increase in seizures of heroin to 95.45kg in 2021, from 72.70kg in 2020. Cannabis seizures saw a 144% increase to 105.18kg in 2021, from 43.10kg in 2020. Seizures of crystalline methamphetamine (more commonly known as ‘Ice’) saw a 3% increase to 48.11kg in 2021, from 46.81kg in 2020.

I don't want to give a false impression, these aren't huge numbers, but they're pretty big for a country who says, "Singapore is winning the war on drugs" [1]. But we should also note that Singapore doesn't really execute that many people for drug-related offenses, it's < 50 over the last 10 years [2]. But if we ratio that to the population of the US, it's something like 3,000 executions a year. That would be a huge increase in the number of executions in the US annually, which is ~20/year. A 15,000% increase in executions is... well I guess it depends on your point of view. Another comparison is that it would be a 9/11 in executions every year.

And you can't say these numbers would go down! Singapore's had this policy since the early 70s. Actually I think what would happen is our numbers in the US wouldn't ratio to Singapore's after ~50 years of this policy, they'd ratio to when it started which--while I can't find a source--I assume was way, way higher.

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I think the truth here is that, like most things, the US is just a super weird outlier. The site you linked shows drug use in the US that's basically off the charts. If our reluctance to punish drug dealers is the cause, you'd expect the Nordic countries to have a way worse problem, but they don't. Hell you'd expect heavy drug-producing countries to have a way worse problem, but they also don't. I just don't see any evidence that harsher penalties for dealing drugs will improve the situation, on the other hand I have every reason to think it will be yet another horror visited upon the most vulnerable Americans by our carceral system.

[0]: https://www.cnb.gov.sg/docs/default-source/drug-situation-re...

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/singapore-is-winning...

[2]: https://data.gov.sg/dataset/judicial-executions

Edit: miscalculated; the US has 60x the population of Singapore, not 6x.