Antiseptic “hysterical, lynch-mob mentality quite clearly”

You are the only one who is talking lynch mobs.

There is no suggestion of any “lynch mob” in

“they are illegal drugs of dependency and the illegal dealers who trade in them are deserving of a death penalty."

Show me where “death penalty” equates to “Lynch mob” before you make your purile accusations.

I firmly believe people are accountable for their actions, regardless of circumstance (although sometimes “circumstance” is a mitigating influence).

Those who profit form dealing, illegally, in a drug of dependency with the full knowledge that the trade will significantly diminish the life expectancy or the “customer” if not the immediate death of the customer is a callous and calculated act which is no different to the actions of a serial killer and as such is deserving the same punishment as a cold blooded serial killer.

Regardless of your arm-chair analysis of my motives, everything I have written is in support of a law and order approach to using the death penalty as a sentencing option.

By your posts, you seem more interested in floating the idea of legalization and free access to narcotics and drugs with a high level of dependency. Maybe smoking your whacky tobaccy has addled your cognitive skills, the hysteria is all yours, plainly though you are in denial, another symptom of paranoia (= hysteria on steroids).

Actually whilst on the topic and to expand on the addictive properties of modern drugs, the impact of contemporary marijuana, over the older varieties which were around 100 years ago or so is the same impact as heroin to opium, an accelerated impact on the senses and a significantly more rapid degeneration in personal control and stability. Whilst picture of Arabs smoking hashish through a water pipe are nostalgic, the impact of the stuff they smoked was a lot less than inhaling the fumes from a cone of the current product these days.

Same applies to Crack Cocaine over the original product

Banjo: "on. Your use of the term "she got hold of" was used to imply that she was the only one involved in procuring the drugs. She found them on the street or picked them off a tree? Her death was an accident?"

ITYM you INFERRED it to mean that. If so, you would appear t have difficulty with English comprehension; the wording is quite explicit. There are several ways she could have got hold of the drugs that don't involve her buying them directly from a "dealer" and there is every chance that if she died from it, the stuff was actually of higher purity than she realised. There was a spate of such deaths a few years ago when there happened to be a glut of heroin on the market. Quite a few people died, but not because they were getting anything mixed with their drug, rather because they weren't.

BTW, it is rare for anything overtly toxic to be mixed with heroin or other drugs, since dealers have no incentive to kill their customers. So yes, her death was most likely a tragic accident, albeit a long, slow one that could have probably been averted at any time. If the sale of these substances was properly regulated, the issue of variation in quality would disappear and the price could be kept low enough to make illicit transactions unattractive. Voila! No more "evil dealers".

Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but I tend to think both options (death penalty for dealing, or legalisation) are worse than the status quo.

As it stands, we have a system of enforcement which leaves users of most of these drugs alone, (more or less. Unless they're stupid about it).
Dealers still receive penalties. Granted, this will ultimately mean it's an ongoing problem, but I'm of the view that you'll never wipe out the drug trade completely.

I wouldn't mind seeing tougher penalties (not the death penalty) in regard to heroin and methylamphetamines, but I think in relation to marijuana and standard amphetamines, the balace is about right as while these drugs can cause dependencies, they don't carry the same punch in terms of addiction. For these ones, I'm of the view that the police should just continue to target the dealers.

I concede all the points made in regard to legalisation. What I offer in response, is the fact that on a societal scale, the two most harmful drugs are cigarettes and alcohol - the legalised ones.

OK, I just want to take a step back and look at Col’s initial question,

“If we assume the legal system only convicts those who are guilty we come back to the question, do some crimes warrant a death penalty?”

For moi et al, the answer is that we object to the DP for principal reasons. For Col et al, some crimes do warrant a DP.
In the framework of this debate, it makes no difference to me what the crime is, so I’m not sure if I see merit in continuing to discuss drug dealers and drugs.
Whether illicit drugs are more destructive than legal ones won’t change my view on the death penalty. So I can’t see merit in further discussing drugs (unless it was a drug debate separated from the DP issue).

The most convincing argument that could have me rethink my DP stance would be whether the DP would be a significant deterrent and would guarantee safer communities and a more civil society.

Perhaps Banjo and Col are right that discussing other countries is somewhat irrelevant to Australia, but Australian statistics even support overseas ones.
Over the last 20 years in Australia, the homicide rate has fallen from nearly 6 per hundred thousand to less than 4.4, and experience overseas supports this Australian evidence.
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi03t.html

BTW I don’t think that it is unreasonable to think that the DP could be a deterrent because there wouldn’t be many criminals who, given a choice, would prefer death over the alternative- life imprisonment without parole.
But this view is not supported by evidence because in reality DP does not appear to be a deterrent.

So I’ll leave it at that for now- I first want to find out whether any of the supporters of DP have convincing arguments to show me that it is a deterrent and I’ll take it from there. I have looked for evidence myself to no avail.

Good call, Celivia. The discussion has been hijacked by the hysterics.

Col Rouge, poses a hypothetical, eh? I wonder if he has some slippery slope planned for us if we support the death penalty given perfect justice.

I detest the idea of justice as vengeance - and eye for an eye and all that. It is a waste. I view justice as necessary evil required to make society work. The costs of lawyers, judges, police, courts, prisons - the list goes on and on, are just horrendous. Almost invariably the cost is more than the crime itself. This huge cost can not be justified simply as the righteous way to gladden the victims heart by giving them vengeance.

And so the idea of a crime deserving the death penalty sounds twisted to me, as it implies the penalty is societies vengeance for the crime. Take o sung wu's colourful example, "Alan BAKER and Kevin CRUMP, two of the worst *@&$#* maggots that ever walked upon this earth". To pose my own equally absurd hypothetical, let us assume if their crime went unpunished we could be sure they would not break the law again, and nor would it inspire anyone else to do so. What should we do? I say let them go, of course, because I am not after vengeance. Let them become productive members of society. That is the beauty of posing hypothetical's. Set the starting conditions right and you can end up anywhere.

But I am meant to be discussing Col's hypothetical, not mine. We are apparently perfectly certain they are guilty and we are certain they will strike again, or inspire someone else to do so. They must be removed from society, there is no other option. But to incarcerate them places imposes a huge cost on us, and they contribute nothing. So obviously they must die.

If only the real world were so perfect, it would all be so simple. But in real world people can be rehabilitated, justice isn't perfect, and the death penalty is no better at deterring crime than jail. In the real word my answer is different.