Last year alone more than 2,000 people have been executed around the world, including hundreds of prisoners convicted for drug related offences. Under International law capital punishment is allowed for the most serious crimes, such as murder, but sentencing someone to death for possession or selling of narcotics represents breaching of the law of nations. Still a few countries carry out execution of drug offenders on regular basis without showing serious intention to reform their legislation and abolish death sentence.

Currently, there are 33 countries whose laws impose death sentence for drug related crime. Of these, seven carry out executions almost every year, while others rarely or never execute prisoners convicted of drug-related crime. In some places, like America, death penalty for drug offences exists only in books and it is never applied in reality. On the other side, countries which sentence to death and execute drug offenders often justify such harsh punishment by insisting that they represent effective way of deterring people from criminal, even though there is no solid evidence which could support it. Even Iran, which has been one of the leading executors of drug offenders and which has killed more than 10,000 drug offenders since 1988, admits that the country’s drug legislation did not yield desired outcomes.

If you want to find out more about leading executors in the world, read this Insider Monkey’s article Top 12 countries that have the death penalty or use capital punishment for drugs, which presents places that impose death sentences for crimes such as possessing, selling and producing narcotics. In Insider Monkey’s ranking you can read that countries like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam… put hundreds of drug offenders on the death row every year.