Assuming this is a good faith question I'll broaden the scope a little. I think the spectrum we're working on here is basically: "society is more important than the individual" and "the individual is more important than society", or more concretely: "society exists to serve the individual" and "the individual exists to serve society".

I'd like to avoid debating the extremes, but I think the example of "I'm not willing to put up with a San Francisco level of sanitation, public drug use, and petty crime in lieu of executing users of drugs, including marijuana" is a pretty extreme position. I think it's clear that marijuana doesn't pose the same societal risk as other illegal (in the US) drugs like cocaine, meth, and opiates, or even other legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine, so I don't think using it merits execution: the most severe penalty we impose.

Maybe the weed thing is a red herring, so I'll include users of drugs that do pose a significant societal risk. It's well established that drug use is a pathology and addiction is a disease, and that severe penalties have had little effect in discouraging use. US drug policy has failed its (facial) goals of:

- reduce economic dependence of foreign countries on drug production

- reduce domestic drug consumption

- reduce drug violence

(The starkest example of 3 has been the unrelenting violence in Chicagoland, which conservatives attribute to a failure of liberal governance, but which is a clear failing of national US drug and gun policy.)

Or, put another way, I would hope that if a US administration learned that in 2024 a drug would be released on the market that would have all the effects that the War on Drugs has had (overdose deaths, mass incarceration and surveillance via parole, violence in foreign countries, the HIV epidemic, domestic gang violence) we would act with some urgency to suppress it, but we're actively supporting it to the tune of ~$47B a year.

I think the policy position you're advocating is to ramp up the War on Drugs, your evidence is that execution for even minor drug offenses stops drug use as shown in Singapore. This is a pretty common conservative position: if we executed drug dealers--and maybe even drug users--we'd solve the drug problem in the US. The problem is we're soft.

My belief here is that would lead to the execution of many, many Black people and children. Lots of kids use drugs! I did and my friends did. Lots of gangs use kids in the drug trade. There's huge overlap between users and sellers of drugs. I and my friends also did this. This is a hard problem, I don't think the US is a society that will tolerate executing kids, but you will absolutely see gangs pressing children even more into service with these policies (just like they do with other vulnerable groups like women and immigrants).

So from my point of view, the War on Drugs has failed and not because it didn't go far enough, but because its core conceit was flawed: laws are not effective deterrents. Conservatives really want to think they are, but they are not. They don't even work on educated perpetrators of white collar crime who usually don't even need the money, they certainly don't work on the people in the organized drug trade.

Conversely, we've seen success in treatment programs. It's certainly not perfect and there's more work to do, but Portugal is a pretty good example of where this has worked (Oregon is an example where it hasn't, but I think they're starting to rethink how they're getting people into treatment--currently it's entirely voluntary and that dynamic is inadequate).

So to come full circle to our society vs. individual here. I think your position is "we must sacrifice individuals who fall prey to drugs and thus become a drag on society for the good of society." My position is "society must help individuals who've fallen prey to drugs so they don't become a drag on society." This is because following your position to its conclusion likely means ratcheting up the War on Drugs--a policy that has failed expensively and beyond doubt--and following my position to its conclusion pursues treatment and decriminalization, an approach that's shown success at least sometimes. I also believe there are fundamental human rights issues when it comes to incarceration (especially given the rates of violence in the US carceral system) and execution, and it's hard for me to accept that drug use merits either of those punishments.