It's sadly ironic that the West (mainly Britain and America) forced Opium on the Chinese for nearly a century, then within a matter of mere decades that knowledge was lost to history, and we brought that very plight to our own countries in slightly more synthetic forms.
China calls it the century of humiliation, what should we call it?
Just make pure and consistent heroine available cheap and they'll stop dying. People just need support through their low point and patience to make it through the other side.
Cynicaly, that requires empathy and helping other people so we'll just increase enforcement and crack down harshly and keep failing lol
I'm sorry but you are completely delusional. Singapore is a tiny island that sells peace, safety and cleanliness to top investors at the expense of everything else. Executing drug traffickers is just part of their investor pitch.
If investors decided tomorrow that they like pot, Singapore will go ahead and legalize it.
I’m sorry but you do not understand local culture and are fact free hallucinating.
This has nothing to do with investors and everything with the founding generation having seen the impact of opium dens (there were a lot here) and acting hard and fast on it.
The country has no natural resources, all the investments they do go into their people, especially though education. Drugs disable a part of that investment, they won’t have it. It’s not magical caring either, You just don’t get to do things that deprive the country of your labor. We just about decriminalized suicide here.
And because of the island with 5 points of entry situation, they actually can make it work for them.
People need to go light on chatgpt, it just mimics humans in their hallucinations
> If investors decided tomorrow that they like pot, Singapore will go ahead and legalize it.
Sale of chewing/bubble gum is still banned - possession isn’t a problem though.
Frankly, if pot was so profitable that the gov want a slice of it, they would carve out special areas just for it and restrict access by locals to those areas.
That’s kind of what they did with gambling. There is a legal casino but as a local you have to pay a $150 daily entry fee to enter the casino - although I heard there is also a $2000 annual entry fee.* You have lost money before you even start gambling. LOL
* And if they feel there are too many problem gamblers still, they will probably rise the fee further.
It is amazing to me how you could say this. That's how socialized alcohol is to people. It isn't even deaths as a metric... it is everything around it too. Sure there are a lot of news articles about people bent over on fenty right now and that is terrible, but that pales in contrast to all of alcohol abuse related issues.
Let's also remember that a lot of people (watch the interviews of people on YT) start using fenty because they want something stronger/cheaper than what they were previously using, like alcohol.
140,000 people a year dead from alcohol means nothing to you?
And it's not just the deaths, it's destroyed so many lives in so many ways, from car accidents to domestic violence. It's a dangerous drug and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best.
What's the point of executing people other then to be violent?
It's barbaric what those countries do becasue someone wants to use a substance.
Singapore has so much different then the US that you can't compare. Maybe they don't use drugs culturally? It's a small country, with tons of social safety nets for it's citizens. People might not hit the same lows. It's also a city on an island. You need to isolate the variables before saying executing is effective
Your post would be a lot better without the first sentence. You’re questioning the effectiveness, not the point. The point is clear, and your suggestion of the point is an obvious straw man even to people who agree with you.
They can’t do it again and it scares the crap out of people. That said, being an island with 2 airports, 2 bridges and 2 ferry terminals is the primary reason it works
As GP said, there is zero evidence that deterrent works. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that being rich and a good social support system have a preventive effect. Two things that are well represented in Singapore.
Lee Kwan Yew himself said that capital punishment for drug trafficking is necessary to keep his country clean, and I'll take his word over yours, or some agenda-driven soft-science academic working on studies who's never been around criminals.
Don't @ me with "appeal to authority", I admit it gladly. I don't worship at the altar of scientism (EDIT: scientism doesn't seem to be the correct word, it's not negative like I thought. I'm criticizing the "I Hecking Love Science (TM)" mentality that treat crappy non-reproducible soft-science studies as something that somehow has more value than common sense.)
You want to convince me, create better societies that are safer to live in than Singapore.
Maybe I misremembered, I recall LKY saying, to paraphrase, “Don’t tell me harsh punishment don’t work. I have seen it work very well during the WWII Japanese occupation”.
US drug overdose deaths breaks records. All those people died because someone produced the dug then sold it to victims for profit. «Kill Americans for joy and profit» doesn't look bad enough in your eyes?
You can grow your own poppies, it's very easy. Extraction is a little tricky, but just boiling the dried poppy buds and making a tea gives you a great high. There's nothing the govt. can do to stop people from growing a plant, if a significant number of people start doing it.
Yep. Let the people self-medicate as they see fit and provide education to help prevent abuse and to treat addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one.
The War on Drugs has failed miserably except for its original purpose: as a tool to oppress the drug users.
Sorry, but this is an insane approach. It will destroy society. Heroine is a drug of no return. Everyone who got hooked by it is pretty much a goner. You should never advertise it as support for depression. It's death.
I think it's interesting that people fight over legalization, safer methods, alternatives, etc.
Why is nobody really asking why our society is so broken that everyone is looking for an escape, even now knowing they may die, and how we even begin to address that?
I don't think you can. Faced with the hopelessness of this unjust world, heroin addicts just want to crawl back into the womb. Meth addicts want to fix the whole world. Neither of those are achievable but getting off heroin is achievable, getting off meth is achievable.
That's a funny expression. I just recently was talking to my own kid about how, theoretically, the best your life will ever be is in the womb. Free food, warmth, no bills, no worries. Then you're born and thrust into the world and it's all downhill from there...
Of course you're not. I was just speaking from quickly browsing this thread at time of writing.
It seems abundantly clear to me(and probably you) that something is deeply wrong with our society. I've known people who made good money and in large houses just OD and die out of (seemingly) nowhere. Why is everyone so unhappy? Or is it that we've always been, and now we just have the means to act on it?
I'm not an expert, or a drug user. But I -feel- like fentanyl has been in the news so much that users have to know the risks, and yet keep on keeping on. So any thoughts as to the why are welcomed.
China calls it the century of humiliation, what should we call it?