Singapore is one of the healthiest and safest country in the world.
It’s extreme approach to drugs is very controversial in the West.
When anyone’s caught using an illicit substance, they’re arrested and sent to compulsory rehabilitation. They take your phone and put you inside a drug rehab facility. Only your family can visit you.
Recently, Billionaire Richard Branson urged Singapore to avoid executing drug dealers.
The Government of Singapore said this:
The European Union has an ideological focus on the death penalty, but I would like to ask them if they have a better solution.
The chief of the largest police union in Netherlands says that Netherlands is effectively a narco state. The gang violence in Sweden is such that it has become a major elections issue. 257 bombings. Nobody talks about this.
So, when the European Union is able to tell us there is a better solution, we will listen.
In the 1990s we were arresting about 6,000 persons per year for drug abuse. Today, with the explosion of drugs in the region, the increase in our GDP and purchasing power, we should be arresting more people. Assuming our law enforcement agencies are equally effective, there should be more people. We are arresting 3,000 people. Half the number. So that is thousands of lives saved. It is not that we have gotten less effective. Less people are taking drugs, proportionately. Even though the line should be the other way.
Mr Branson is entitled to his opinions. These opinions may be widely held in the UK, but we don’t accept that Mr Branson or others in the West are entitled to impose their values on other societies. Nor do we believe that a country that prosecuted two wars in China in the 19th century to force the Chinese to accept opium imports has any moral right to lecture Asians on drugs.
Our policies on drugs and the death penalty derive from our own experience. We are satisfied – as are the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans – that they work for us.
Nothing we have seen in the UK or in the West persuades us that adopting a permissive attitude towards drugs and a tolerant position on drug trafficking will increase human happiness. Where drug addiction is concerned, things have steadily worsened in the UK, while things have steadily improved in Singapore.
What do you guys think ?
I say let people live their lives, it’s up to them what they do with their bodies, providing they aren’t bringing harm to others. Put in place rehab and assistance, and legalise babey!
I don’t agree with their approach, but I’ll admit that their argument is sound.
Particularly the part about rejecting the opinions of an outsider.
I don’t want to live in Singapore, bit if this is genuinely how Singaporeans wish to run their society I do not consider it my place to meddle. Especially because, as they note in the response, all of us should focus on getting our own houses in order before prescribing to others.
I’ll admit that their argument is sound
Not in the slightest: did you miss all the fallacies?
Yeah, I liked how well spoken and well reasoned it was; they politely said something they could have said in a much more acerbic way.
(Not saying I agree with them either.)
I think it’s based on a discredited view of addiction; I think the intentions are less about reducing human suffering than social engineering.
It’s not about health or safety because if it were they wouldn’t still allow the most dangerous and destructive drug to be sold, yet you can buy alcohol as young as 18. It’s all about social control. Their preferred drug is legal even though it’s the least healthy and most unsafe of the commonly used recreational drugs.
I don’t believe there is any situation in which a penalty of death is ethical.
Even putting aside the morality of killing someone, you can never rule out mistakes, miscarriages of justice, or political abuse.
Every human has the right to live. This right cannot be taken away by a judge. In a state such as Singapore, with very restrictive laws and an authoritarian state, this is doubly important as proper legal conduct may be compromised.
Besides, using the actions of a state comprised of people of whom none are alive today to disregard criticism against a vast portion of the global population goes against any and all good rhetoric conduct.
I prefer the approach of the Netherlands and Portugal, where drug abuse is treated as a medical issue rather than a criminal one.
Wide gulf between having a permissive attitude to drugs and going full draconian like Singapore. Being draconian like that is a huge rule of law issue IMO, you can put someone in prison by smearing some drugs on their shoes.
IMO the issue with the west isn’t that they’re too soft, but that they often don’t go all the way - even the Netherlands, which is known for letting people legally buy and sell cannabis, doesn’t actually allow growing cannabis. There’s no way to legally acquire cannabis for the sellers in NL, it’s incredibly stupid.
In perfect Dutch tradition of the law being quite wishy-washy even what you say is now not fully true anymore: some cities have signed onto a national experiment where the coffee shops are only allowed to purchase from a set of legally licensed growers.
So the current situation is that cannabis is illegal but there is officially an unofficial policy of tolerance, saying they only care about it selectively and most people can have and use it without worry. Most cannabis sellers have to grow it illegally or purchase it illegally, which is tolerated. And now some cannabis sellers, whose product still remains illegal, are only allowed to purchase from legally licensed growers. Who have a legal license to produce and sell a product that remains illegal.
It’s great to consider while high.
Source (in Dutch language): https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2024/12/10/experimenteerfase-van-het-experiment-gesloten-coffeeshopketen-wietexperiment-start-in-april
Other source: I live within 20 meters of a coffee shop and frequently partake. And bought a bunch right before the deadline to switch over to cannabis grown under license, because the coffee shops were dumping their old inventory while they could still sell it in its Schrodinger’s legal-state.
Draconian and heavy handed
Some aspects that come to my mind:
- Is the safety of Sigapore exclusively liked to strict drug regulation or aren’t there many other confunding factors which might have an even bigger influence?
- Given we see this approach as successful and therefore legitime (assuming that in 1 the policy is the main/only driving factor): Would this be applicable to other countries? Singapore is a verry wealthy city state… comparing it to a country like Britain with more area, less population desity and also lower ecomonic performance per area seems missleading. Prosecution becomes more difficult and costly the bigger the area gets I guess.
All-in-all if the approach is sucessful for Singapore: Excellent! Accunsing other countries with different prerequisites of failing on this basis seems to be nonsense as comparing countries and societies in a single aspect while ignoring the gaszillion other factors at play itself is a pointless approach besides populism.
The Netherlands being called a “narco state” by some elements, while in essence has a core of truth in it, comes more from the lack of punishment on hard crime, not the tolerance of soft-drugs (harddrugs are still considered highly illegal and criminal to traffic afaik).
The Netherlands has closed many a prison in recent years, not because there was no crime but no properly paid staff to fill them. And a lot of the criminals that do end up in prison get, in the public’s view, extremely lenient sentences or just house arrest with an ankle bracelet.
Even high profile criminals who shot political candidates (for prime minister?) or very public figures, were given a short prison stay and then house arrest with privileges as long as they played nice.
Also, from what I heard, a lot of the narco-criminals that do get caught are often not of Dutch origin and for some reason that is considered to give a lot more trouble on giving them a hard sentence. The bigger boys will get extradited to their country of origin with no real continuous followup if they’re still fulfilling a prison sentence.
And for example drug-runner teenagers, who break into shipping containers in the large ports grab the goods and try to get it to their bosses, are often barely punished.
It just seems The Netherlands punishes crime from the view of the person, (ie. you’ll be locked up for 5 years of your coming ~55 years of life) not on what society deems appropriate for the crime committed.
If someone believes that drugs are bad and need to be eliminated completely, then I suppose they would think that Singapore is doing it right. They have less drugs and drugs are bad, less bad things is a good thing.
Now, anyone who thinks drugs are good, is going to have the opposite opinion. An oppressive government that won’t let us have a good thing. Less of a good thing, is bad.
Let’s say they had the same rule for video games. After all, people get addicted to them, dump tons of money into new bigger better games and systems and spend all day playing them. It keeps them from going outside, getting exercise, and contributing to the community.
Would you agree with arrest and rehab for players and the death penalty for game designers?
The general population will be healthier, but does that justify punishing people for doing something they enjoy?
The European Union has an ideological focus on the death penalty, but I would like to ask them if they have a better solution.
Mr Branson is entitled to his opinions. These opinions may be widely held in the UK, but we don’t accept that Mr Branson or others in the West are entitled to impose their values on other societies. Nor do we believe that a country that prosecuted two wars in China in the 19th century to force the Chinese to accept opium imports has any moral right to lecture Asians on drugs.
Nothing we have seen in the UK or in the West persuades us that adopting a permissive attitude towards drugs and a tolerant position on drug trafficking will increase human happiness. Where drug addiction is concerned, things have steadily worsened in the UK, while things have steadily improved in Singapore.
Man they are absolutely cooking here. Both in calling out the white supremacist attitudes of the west and in being rational.
