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 ?
Some aspects that come to my mind:
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.