I dont agree with the death penalty. But on this planet, many countries/states would consider this amount trafficking. Its >4g in the state of Georgia, Florida, NC, etc.
Only if it's 100% pure heroin. If it's typical street-level purity, it's more like 300 doses. Either way, these seem categorically like personal use quantities to me.
Even though Singapore's war on drugs is ruthless, it seems to actually work. Supposedly Singapore only has 30 opiate abusers per 100k citizens, compared to 600 per 100k in the US.
Singapore is a tiny island. The U.S. has a gigantic border with Mexico, a place with drug cartels as powerful as many small countries’ armies. The difference in sheer difficulty of controlling their respective borders is enormous.
The US could put a major dent in the drug trade if it wanted to. US sends billions to Ukraine, NATO, Israel, etc, for their defense and security. There is no will. Inbound drugs and illegal labor is good for business.
Not to mention the outbound guns. It’s two way trade at this point, and one reason our official gun ownership statistics are so skewed (no, 25% of Americans don’t own 10 guns each, those guns are just in Mexico and Central America).
You could also say the same thing about health care or any of the myriad other problems the US faces. Supporting Ukraine and outrage at Russia's invasion are among the most bipartisan issues the US has had in years.
But honestly, the US's problems are shared by many other Western democracies, albeit on a smaller scale. Polarization is happening in many different countries, even ones that lack the two-party system of the US.
Portugal cut the funding for the rehabilitation programs that were part and parcel of the decriminalization plan. It was a success for some time before that occurred.
It's not ruthless, it's humane. Singapore is a tiny resourceless nation. They cannot afford a societal breakdown due to drugs like 'the west'. Maybe if singaporeans invade the americas, stole all the land and resources, they can afford a societal breakdown or two due to endless amount of resources. Til then, maybe singapore knows more about how to form their own society and doesn't need our borg-like imperialist western 'values'. Hopefully more and more nations around the world will stick to their values and stop being intimidated by the west. We love diversity except where it matters.
Many people enjoy being able to walk around a downtown in total safety at any hour of the day or night. Or being able to leave a laptop on a coffee bar table to reserve a place while you go to the bathroom. Are these things related to harsh punishments? Probably to some degree.
So your solution is to murder drug addicts and mentally unstable unhoused people? Years ago we took a different approach to solving these problems, and put them in state subsidized mental institutions. While not perfect, that seems like a more humane way of treating the situation than jumping straight to the death penalty.
No they aren't. Here in this country (Poland) I enjoy all these things in most places and there is no death penalty. Many people argue our criminal penalties are far too lenient for violent crime, but there is still relatively little of it.
How safe or unsafe a place is has very little to do with the harshness of its laws and everything about the values of the people that leave there. Is there a general acceptance for law breaking? Is the law enforcement seen as corrupt? Are laws applied selectively? Are people seen as lawbreakers that "made it" seen as an example to aspire to? Is successfully "gaming the system" something one can use as a status symbol? Also, the level of poverty, how bad or good are the living conditions, access to (mental) healthcare. All these things are way more important that the harshness of penalties applied.
I have that now without the killings but whatever.
Not to mention leaving your laptop unattended is littering, and clean streets are also worth killing people. Or leaving your laptop unattended is being accomplice in cyber crime, and since they executed a guy for weed he never touched or was ever in posession of, guess you better never leave that laptoo on that table after all.
This entire argument is so gross and ugly it boggles any functioning mind.
Fascism has the effect of instilling a lot of order on public spaces, but the concern is that historically, cages are never truly built for just one group.
A lot of people calling for the death of drug dealers assume that they themselves would be safe, but it doesn’t take much for the movement of state sponsored killing to become a lot more broad.
Violent for sure. However Singnapore seems to have a lot of other societal problems under control via the threat of harsh punishment. Same as the UAE (or they’ll just kick you out, since many aren’t naturalized citizens)
I don’t agree with the harsh punishments, though many western cities are being over taken by drugs, crime, and homelessness.
The current policies we have in places like LA and Seattle do not work, it’s plainly evident. Should we be more brutal in our punishments? Not necessarily. But we’ve tried this experiment since asylums were shut down decades ago, and it doesn’t seem to have produced the outcome expected.
Note sure if other people got confused by the title. This is not the first time in 20 years that a person got executed for drugs charge. There has been 14 of those in the last 6 months. She is the first woman to be executed in the last 20 years for this specific crime.
Having lived in Singapore, I'm ok with this. I can't judge foreign countries by my Western values when all the countries that agree with those values face crippling drug problems. If this is the extent of it and it isn't abused, I think it's fair for a country to take this stance.
Where do you draw the line? Murdering a women is okay because she had a chemical she was going to use personally. Would removing body parts like cutting off an arm for stealing be acceptable? Or rape for adultery?
Judging life by western standards seems like a sensible thing to do if you come from the west.
the woman was trafficking. It's not only for personal consumption but for others too. If a trafficker sold heroin to your child, would you be as lenient about it?
Yes because I wouldn't blame her for my childs addiction. Arresting her means your child gets it from another source potential more dangerous. You need to treat the addiction not kill the messenger.
My child is probably more like her than I would want to believe. Both struggling mentally and needing help. Killing her means I'm okay with killing my own child because they shared with a friend.
Following up on my other comment to say I appreciate how personal this topic is to you, and I mean no disrespect.
That said I don't think moving 30 grams of Heroin is 'just sharing'. In Singapore, this kind of crime is the absolute worst of the worst, similar to and in some cases punished worse than murder.
Just important to think of how relatively serious these crimes are in other places. It's not like the US or Europe.
Your personal standards and everyone elses in the western world make up the totality of Western standards. So you would go with your local version which are Western standards because you are western.
I don't think you're making much of a point besides that there are other crimes you should consider separately from this example. I was pretty clear that I am ok with the example this post is about. The law in Singapore that illegal import of Heroin (any amount) is punishable by death. As far as I know there are no huge movements happening to repeal Singapore's drug laws by their citizens.
> Judging life by western standards seems like a sensible thing to do if you come from the west.
Only if you have no awareness of your own surroundings and upbringing. Those of us with the opportunity to widen our worldview understand that applying one country's value system to another is comparing apples to oranges. The hubris in thinking that your country/culture's values apply to another population across the world is maddening and a big contributor to the anti-West sentiment around the world.
I agree. On my view, it's ultimately a quantitative question.
E.g., if we had a system where 1 unjust execution avoided 1 million being killed by drunk drivers, I'd chose the unjust execution. But if those numbers were reversed, I wouldn't.
But if I'm being honest, I can't justify why someone should prefer my ethical framework over some other. So I'm not sure my opinion means much in the end.
Innocent people do get sentenced to imprisonment. There is one incident that I can remember from the recent past. This individual was fortunate to get her conviction overturned by a pro-bono lawyer's efforts.
The death penalty should be abolished entirely, even though it may indulge the public thirst for "justice", driven by superficial motives. Adhering to a modern and enlightened worldview, the consumption of drugs should be the choice of each individual. Sentencing someone to death for the mere consumption and possession of drugs has nothing to do with protecting the public, but with ideological cleansing, especially regarding certain drugs
Spoken like someone who is not at 2x the risk of being accused wrongly and then given no actual chance vs their neighbor of the wrong ethnicity or political stripe.
I am not sure if you are aware of this. But Singapore has even housing policies designed to deter racial discrimination. I would be extremely surprised if race played any role here.
> "There is no evidence that the death penalty has a unique deterrent effect or that it has any impact on the use and availability of drugs," said Amnesty International's Chiara Sangiorgio in a statement.
Oh really? Then please explain why there are few death by drugs in such countries while there are hundreds of thousands of deaths due to overdose with opoids in the US as we speak where their use is completely decriminalized?
You don't get to say "X does not work to fix Y problem" without doing any kind of homework. Or then, make a statement that "death penalty is bad no matter what", but saying that it's not a deterrent is a very debatable question for drugs.
In Minnesota I would say it’s de facto decriminalized. I bought a house from a guy who had more than 3 grams of fentanyl and half an ounce of meth when he got busted. His fourth strike with this level felony and overall at least his 10th time in jail. He got a sentence of 14 months in prison. Not exactly hard time for someone who is literally out there killing people. And yes I’m still looking for money buried in the yard
The death penalty specifically doesn't have a deterrent effect, but as part of a society so strict that wants to use it for almost everything (obviously an exaggeration, but still...) you have plenty of people living in fear and unlikely to try anything. At a great cost even if proponents won't admit it.
In what state other than possibly Oregon could you say opioids are "completely decriminalized"?! The Virginia general assembly[0] just classified illegally produced fentanyl as a weapon of terrorism, and the attorneys general of Florida and Connecticut are pressuring Biden to label it a weapon of mass destruction.
They are effectively decriminalized up here in Seattle even if they aren’t officially. The police won’t arrest you unless you are a really big dealer, use in public is tolerated, and king county jails won’t accept arrests for anything less than murder.
Another source mentions that it's 1Kg? This is a recurrent recent problem with Western media that's cherry-picking details to advance an agenda. At this point they lost all credibility.
> Saridewi Djamani, who was charged with trafficking a total of 1kg of drugs containing 30.72g of pure heroin, also claimed she was suffering from persistent depressive disorder and severe substance use disorder.
It appears she might have had 1Kg of drugs but only 30g of heroin. It would be more interesting if the BBC does some real investigative work on whether different races in Singapore are treated differently by their justice system. The defendant here being racially Indian.
"1 kg of drugs containing 30 g of heroin"? So is that 30 grams of heroin plus filler, or is it 1 kg of something else that's been adulterated with heroin? What does "drugs" mean?
> "There is no evidence that the death penalty has a unique deterrent effect or that it has any impact on the use and availability of drugs," said Amnesty International's Chiara Sangiorgio in a statement.
Arguing about whether the death penalty acts or not as a deterrent can distract from the primary point. If one believes the death penalty is wrong in principle, then that should be the central argument. Debating its effectiveness opens the door to counterarguments and can weaken the stance. I believe that the focus should be on the moral and ethical reasons against it.
I posted stats elsewhere, but those saying the death penalty is not a deterrent would have to show the true cause of such a significantly lower per capita deaths by overdose in Singapore vs western countries.
My current feeling is that there is a limit we should be willing to spend, as a society, on someone who chooses to actively inflict harm on or enable harm to come to others. I struggle to see the humanity or benefit to society in sending someone to prison for the remainder of their natural life that satisfies either the condemned or the victim. Capital punishment has become significantly more expensive than life imprisonment, which may be one of the strongest arguments against it, imho.
You have to compare similar situations a small island with a heavily controlled and under surveillance society is not comparable to western countries with much less controls and bigger borders easily crossed.
Tangential: The BBC writes on alleged public support in Singapore for the death penalty - 'But anti-death penalty advocates refute this'.
There are strongly held views on either side of this contentious debate but a refutation, if that's what it is, would settle the issue for most rational people. Since to refute is to disprove by argument, the existence of such a refutation would imply the Singaporean Authorities have circulated false data. I don't think the BBC believes that or is even implying it. They mean there is a vigorous debate.
I travelled to Singapore on business once, and the immigration form had a warning about the death penalty for drug-related offences printed in red, all caps lettering. It was definitely jarring.
There has been more than zero times in my life when I discovered I was in posession of something I was unaware of.
Not often drugs specifically, but I can't say for sure never that either. In my 20's I had friends that spanned a full spectrum, and not all activities were organized and orderly. You go on a camping trip, or even just a night in someone's back yard, you come back with mystery items in your blanket/towel/bag/cooler/coat.
I don't smoke and yet I somehow have been in posession of many lighters at different times.
If someone doesn't understand how that happens, I can only feel sorry that they have lived so little that they never lent a girl their coat at a party or provided the blanket that everyone else sat on etc. But then they end up in a position to decide what constitutes fair and reasonable expectations for everyone else.
And that is why I'll personally never go to any country that has a death penalty for something so stupid as "being in possession of X". We're not even talking kilos of the stuff with a potential to impact hundreds of people's lives. No, it is an amount consistent with her explanation she was "stocking up for a month". Yes, she admitted selling some of it. But, a death penalty for something like this is not just inhumane. It is uncivilised and extremely backwards. It reflects badly not just on Singapore as a country, but on all the countries that allow this to happen. Unfortunately there are a lot of state-sanctioned atrocities in the world. If we compare sentencing a small time drug trafficker to death in Singapore with mass organ harvesting from political prisoners in China the former seems less important. However the fact is, the western world has far less influence over China than a country like Singapore. Where are the threats of sanctions? Where is the mass condemnation in media? Kudos for BBC to write about it t, but their article should call a spade a spade, not dance around it.
Devil’s advocate: There are around 20 death sentences for drug dealing per year in Singapore and an annual overdose death rate of 1.18 per 100k and approximately 0 death penalties for dealing. In the US, the overdose death rate is >20 per 100k. The penalties are severe, but if they contribute to the reduction of general population deaths, may be less worse than western approaches in terms of lives saved. (Obviously there are lots of factors that go into those stats, geography, access, culture, etc. and punishment cannot be the only variable evaluated)
Edit for more scale: there are around 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US vs 60(!) in Singapore. A metro area of 5M in the US (the approx population of Singapore) would have >1,000.
If there is a causal relationship between those who sell drugs on the black market and deaths from those drugs, I don’t know if the means aren’t justified. Could I give my life to save 20, I’d consider that an honor.
I think there are many factors for this. I'm not sure which year you picked up for the 100k numer, but it sounds insane. Are you sure this is correct? In the entire EU (comparable population to US) there are approximately 6k overdose deaths per year(5800 in 2020). In one member state Poland (I'm picking it as its my country, not because of any better/worse rate) it's around 240 people annually (2006-2016). That's 0.6 per 100k people. Half that you quote for Singapore and we have no death penalty.
I suspect there must be something else at play here. Perhaps they (Singapore and USA) count all drugs like Tylenol/Paracetamol and EU/Poland only counts illicit drugs. I can't believe there would be such a huge difference unless there is a mistake in data somewhere.
It seems the difference really is that huge. US 32.6 per 100k in EU it is 1.83 per 100k(18.3 per million) so similar to Singapore. Within EU there is large variability between countries. In US it seems the number of overdose deaths raised 5 fold recently! Recently. In EU they say it raised recently in some countries but dropped in others so overall the trend is growing, but not that quickly.
After reading how they report this data there is one component that seems different. US includes suicides in its count (about 4% of reported overdose deaths) while it is unclear if EU does the same. So we should probably lower the US numbers by that 4%, but still the difference is an order of magnitude.
To me this data illustrates the point I made very well. Death penalty is not a crime deterrent.
Coming back to this huge number I was interested in finding out if it's US that has more than average of these deaths, or is it EU that has less and it's difficult to find reliable data for many other places. So I looked at India for example and I found an official report that claims all causes accidental deaths(including suicides) per 100k is less than just drug overdose deaths in US.
I wonder if there is any research that tries to answer why this is so. I'd love to find out.
Rereading this, the comment about zero death penalties for dealing was supposed to be after the US stats, obviously not Singapore. Failure by my part to edit or proof read correctly whilst mobile.
Tangential, but why is richard branson featured so much in this? (The one sentence OpenGraph link description also mentions him). Why promote some random billionaire opinion? It’s like they’re trying to inculcate the idea that somehow wealth confers authority on societal issues.
[Sir] Richard Branson has been a pretty vocal opponent of the death penalty for many years now. To exemplify: it’s literally a part of his Wikipedia page too.
Besides, the article is from the BBC, so there’s always going to be a slight British touch in the reporting.
105 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread* Gibson's article was "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", but Disney World fitted better with the "planet" theme.
https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/
But honestly, the US's problems are shared by many other Western democracies, albeit on a smaller scale. Polarization is happening in many different countries, even ones that lack the two-party system of the US.
How safe or unsafe a place is has very little to do with the harshness of its laws and everything about the values of the people that leave there. Is there a general acceptance for law breaking? Is the law enforcement seen as corrupt? Are laws applied selectively? Are people seen as lawbreakers that "made it" seen as an example to aspire to? Is successfully "gaming the system" something one can use as a status symbol? Also, the level of poverty, how bad or good are the living conditions, access to (mental) healthcare. All these things are way more important that the harshness of penalties applied.
I have that now without the killings but whatever.
Not to mention leaving your laptop unattended is littering, and clean streets are also worth killing people. Or leaving your laptop unattended is being accomplice in cyber crime, and since they executed a guy for weed he never touched or was ever in posession of, guess you better never leave that laptoo on that table after all.
This entire argument is so gross and ugly it boggles any functioning mind.
A lot of people calling for the death of drug dealers assume that they themselves would be safe, but it doesn’t take much for the movement of state sponsored killing to become a lot more broad.
I don’t agree with the harsh punishments, though many western cities are being over taken by drugs, crime, and homelessness.
The current policies we have in places like LA and Seattle do not work, it’s plainly evident. Should we be more brutal in our punishments? Not necessarily. But we’ve tried this experiment since asylums were shut down decades ago, and it doesn’t seem to have produced the outcome expected.
Social safety net, mental health services, and other forms of dignity in civil society being some of them.
Judging life by western standards seems like a sensible thing to do if you come from the west.
My child is probably more like her than I would want to believe. Both struggling mentally and needing help. Killing her means I'm okay with killing my own child because they shared with a friend.
fascinating take here. granted a very empathic one, but also extremely naive
That said I don't think moving 30 grams of Heroin is 'just sharing'. In Singapore, this kind of crime is the absolute worst of the worst, similar to and in some cases punished worse than murder.
Just important to think of how relatively serious these crimes are in other places. It's not like the US or Europe.
There's considerable variety in Westerners' beliefs.
> Judging life by western standards seems like a sensible thing to do if you come from the west.
Only if you have no awareness of your own surroundings and upbringing. Those of us with the opportunity to widen our worldview understand that applying one country's value system to another is comparing apples to oranges. The hubris in thinking that your country/culture's values apply to another population across the world is maddening and a big contributor to the anti-West sentiment around the world.
Executing drug traffickers for Singapore, causes the amount of drug use to decrease and saves many more lives.
My main reservation is that, at least in the US, we've had a problem with executing people who may have been innocent.
E.g., if we had a system where 1 unjust execution avoided 1 million being killed by drunk drivers, I'd chose the unjust execution. But if those numbers were reversed, I wouldn't.
But if I'm being honest, I can't justify why someone should prefer my ethical framework over some other. So I'm not sure my opinion means much in the end.
https://www.home.org.sg/our-updates/2020/9/7/parti-liyani-an...
thankfully Singapore doesn’t have this problem /s
Human life should be considered precious, and not discarded with just to set an example of strength.
Study of ethics transcends culture.
Oh really? Then please explain why there are few death by drugs in such countries while there are hundreds of thousands of deaths due to overdose with opoids in the US as we speak where their use is completely decriminalized?
You don't get to say "X does not work to fix Y problem" without doing any kind of homework. Or then, make a statement that "death penalty is bad no matter what", but saying that it's not a deterrent is a very debatable question for drugs.
Does decriminalized mean something I'm not aware of? Do you mean that prescriptions are not criminalized? Use? Possession?
[0]: https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?231+ful+CHAP038...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12131455/Inside-Phi...
> Saridewi Djamani, who was charged with trafficking a total of 1kg of drugs containing 30.72g of pure heroin, also claimed she was suffering from persistent depressive disorder and severe substance use disorder.
It appears she might have had 1Kg of drugs but only 30g of heroin. It would be more interesting if the BBC does some real investigative work on whether different races in Singapore are treated differently by their justice system. The defendant here being racially Indian.
Arguing about whether the death penalty acts or not as a deterrent can distract from the primary point. If one believes the death penalty is wrong in principle, then that should be the central argument. Debating its effectiveness opens the door to counterarguments and can weaken the stance. I believe that the focus should be on the moral and ethical reasons against it.
My current feeling is that there is a limit we should be willing to spend, as a society, on someone who chooses to actively inflict harm on or enable harm to come to others. I struggle to see the humanity or benefit to society in sending someone to prison for the remainder of their natural life that satisfies either the condemned or the victim. Capital punishment has become significantly more expensive than life imprisonment, which may be one of the strongest arguments against it, imho.
There are strongly held views on either side of this contentious debate but a refutation, if that's what it is, would settle the issue for most rational people. Since to refute is to disprove by argument, the existence of such a refutation would imply the Singaporean Authorities have circulated false data. I don't think the BBC believes that or is even implying it. They mean there is a vigorous debate.
https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/press-releases/findings-fro...
Not often drugs specifically, but I can't say for sure never that either. In my 20's I had friends that spanned a full spectrum, and not all activities were organized and orderly. You go on a camping trip, or even just a night in someone's back yard, you come back with mystery items in your blanket/towel/bag/cooler/coat. I don't smoke and yet I somehow have been in posession of many lighters at different times.
If someone doesn't understand how that happens, I can only feel sorry that they have lived so little that they never lent a girl their coat at a party or provided the blanket that everyone else sat on etc. But then they end up in a position to decide what constitutes fair and reasonable expectations for everyone else.
Edit for more scale: there are around 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US vs 60(!) in Singapore. A metro area of 5M in the US (the approx population of Singapore) would have >1,000.
I suspect there must be something else at play here. Perhaps they (Singapore and USA) count all drugs like Tylenol/Paracetamol and EU/Poland only counts illicit drugs. I can't believe there would be such a huge difference unless there is a mistake in data somewhere.
0 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db457.htm#:~:te....
It seems the difference really is that huge. US 32.6 per 100k in EU it is 1.83 per 100k(18.3 per million) so similar to Singapore. Within EU there is large variability between countries. In US it seems the number of overdose deaths raised 5 fold recently! Recently. In EU they say it raised recently in some countries but dropped in others so overall the trend is growing, but not that quickly.
After reading how they report this data there is one component that seems different. US includes suicides in its count (about 4% of reported overdose deaths) while it is unclear if EU does the same. So we should probably lower the US numbers by that 4%, but still the difference is an order of magnitude.
To me this data illustrates the point I made very well. Death penalty is not a crime deterrent.
Coming back to this huge number I was interested in finding out if it's US that has more than average of these deaths, or is it EU that has less and it's difficult to find reliable data for many other places. So I looked at India for example and I found an official report that claims all causes accidental deaths(including suicides) per 100k is less than just drug overdose deaths in US.
I wonder if there is any research that tries to answer why this is so. I'd love to find out.
Besides, the article is from the BBC, so there’s always going to be a slight British touch in the reporting.