4 ms·

I wonder, would there be an opportunity to flush any substances down the toilet, at that point? Sounds like a potentially terrifying situation, considering the

I wonder, would there be an opportunity to flush any substances down the toilet, at that point? Sounds like a potentially terrifying situation, considering the number of stories I’ve heard from friends and family about accidentally flying with marijuana that they were unaware of was left over in a backpack or whatnot.

Mizza 6y ago
You would have to use the airplane toilet. Immediately after stepping off the plane, you are scanned by some kind of scanning IR(?) camera, which I assumed was looking for drugs. I actually had some vitamins in a baggie which I was shitting bricks about, but the actually immigration point was very polite and chill, much moreso than, say, JFK.
- schoen 6y ago
  I think the IR camera was more likely to have been looking for fever than drugs. I don't mean to say that Changi doesn't have drug-detection mechanisms, but the commonest use of IR cameras at international airport gates is to try to find passengers who are showing signs of infectious disease.
- mnky9800n 6y ago
  I travel internationally a lot for work, well I used to anyways, lol. Going to America is always the worst experience. It's longer from point a to b, there's more security theater, and I always get some snide remark from the border crossing person about being an American not living in America.
dehrmann 6y ago
I know someone who accidentally brought a joint into Singapore but wasn't caught. The thresholds seem high enough that there aren't random tourists getting hung over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore)#Thresholds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore... I also wonder what would happen if you declare the drugs. Would they assume good intent (because you declared the drugs), and let you surrender them without penalty?
- lordnacho 6y ago
  A friend of a friend wasn't so lucky. Went to Thailand, had some drugs left over, forgot to dump it. Executed.
  - Mizza 6y ago
    Woah. Can you elaborate a bit on that? What drugs? How did he get caught? Did his nation try to intervene on his behalf?
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm going to call BS. Thailand has executed 3 people since 2004[1]. One was a robbery gone bad. The two in 2009 were drug traffickers with $1M in meth from arrests in 2001[2]. I couldn't find a source, but their names look Thai. Apparently a bunch are waiting to be executed, though. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Thailand 2: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Bangkok,-drug-traffickers-executed-by-lethal-injection-16147.html http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Bangkok,-drug-traffickers-exe...
      - JimDabell 6y ago
        Perhaps I’m wrong but I understood the comment to mean that the person went from Singapore to Thailand, bought drugs there, then forgot to get rid of them before returning to Singapore. So Singapore executed them, not Thailand.
        dehrmann 6y ago
        Rereading it, that could be what they meant, and the thresholds for cocaine and heroin are low enough for that to happen.
        lordnacho 6y ago
        This is correct. Pretty banal, just a short trip from Singapore to Thailand to have some fun. Not a drug kingpin. Left some very shocked friends.
objectivistbrit 6y ago
The rationale for the drug laws is interesting: when Singapore gained independence in the 1960s, it was essentially a small third-world city without much of a local economy. Lee Kuan Yew realised that Singapore's future lay in becoming a trading city. They built a port, invested in infrastructure, and basically oriented all their policies around making the city-state as attractive as possible for foreign investment. One reason the streets were kept so orderly and well-maintained was to impress foreign visitors that Singapore was a reliable place to operate in (compare to many developing countries where the ride from the airport will pass ramshackle buildings, potholed streets, garbage everywhere, etc). They kept the British common law system because it's a good system to do business under. Etc. They also knew that, given the region (SE Asia) is a hotbed of drug trafficking, if Singapore became a successful port then tons of drugs would pass through the city. Drugs would mean organised crime. Organised crime would mean corruption. Corruption would scare off foreign investment. Singapore could have ended up looking like most other third-world countries, only too small to retain its independence, and could easily have been reabsorbed into Malaysia or Indonesia. The reason the drug penalties are so harsh is to scare away any possibility of drug trafficking happening there. Just to be clear, I'm not condoning Singapore's policies. Weed is certainly not the same as heroin or crack cocaine. Harsh sentences for carrying a tiny bit of marijuana is pretty draconian. (I looked up some news articles, and it seems as though foreigners are unlikely to get the death penalty for small amounts of weed, but you can still expect jail time and caning.) In a similar way, one rationale behind Singapore's censorship is a similar reason to the (effective) censorship many European countries have -- Singapore has some simmering ethnic tensions, and wants to prevent anyone publishing inflammatory rhetoric. (That's not the only reason, afaik, but it's one of them.) Still: it's worth remembering that Singapore started out in an unusual position with unusual constraints. Everything they have done has been with the aim of turning themselves from a third-world to a first-world country in a few decades. They've seen many other post-colonial countries go down bad trajectories, despite said countries receiving tons of foreign aid, support from international organisations, allowing Western NGOs to operate internally, etc. So they don't have much time for Western journalists/academics/etc who push them to change their policies, because they think the policies they're being pushed to adapt would have led them to disaster. If anyone's curious to learn more about the Singapore approach I'd point them to first look up Lee Kuan Yew's books, or interviews of him, to get an introduction to how he thought about governance and how he approached Singapore's challenges. My own takeaway is that Singapore stands out because most other developing countries have been run so badly. It's not that Lee Kuan Yew had a brilliant political philosophy that all countries should adopt (he claimed to be skeptical of political philosophy), it's more that he was both pragmatic and took a long-range view, and put into practice many sensible policies that other developing countries could have adopted in an alternative timeline. On the other hand, that is definitely not to say that all of his policies are justifiable. I gather that Singapore is slowly changing now that they feel more secure in their first-world status, but they're still pretty averse to adopting the kinds of policies Western nations and the UN usually push other countries to adopt.

Mizza 6y ago

You would have to use the airplane toilet. Immediately after stepping off the plane, you are scanned by some kind of scanning IR(?) camera, which I assumed was looking for drugs. I actually had some vitamins in a baggie which I was shitting bricks about, but the actually immigration point was very polite and chill, much moreso than, say, JFK.

schoen 6y ago
I think the IR camera was more likely to have been looking for fever than drugs. I don't mean to say that Changi doesn't have drug-detection mechanisms, but the commonest use of IR cameras at international airport gates is to try to find passengers who are showing signs of infectious disease.
mnky9800n 6y ago
I travel internationally a lot for work, well I used to anyways, lol. Going to America is always the worst experience. It's longer from point a to b, there's more security theater, and I always get some snide remark from the border crossing person about being an American not living in America.

dehrmann 6y ago

I know someone who accidentally brought a joint into Singapore but wasn't caught. The thresholds seem high enough that there aren't random tourists getting hung over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore)#Thresholds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore... I also wonder what would happen if you declare the drugs. Would they assume good intent (because you declared the drugs), and let you surrender them without penalty?

lordnacho 6y ago
A friend of a friend wasn't so lucky. Went to Thailand, had some drugs left over, forgot to dump it. Executed.
- Mizza 6y ago
  Woah. Can you elaborate a bit on that? What drugs? How did he get caught? Did his nation try to intervene on his behalf?
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm going to call BS. Thailand has executed 3 people since 2004[1]. One was a robbery gone bad. The two in 2009 were drug traffickers with $1M in meth from arrests in 2001[2]. I couldn't find a source, but their names look Thai. Apparently a bunch are waiting to be executed, though. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Thailand 2: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Bangkok,-drug-traffickers-executed-by-lethal-injection-16147.html http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Bangkok,-drug-traffickers-exe...
    - JimDabell 6y ago
      Perhaps I’m wrong but I understood the comment to mean that the person went from Singapore to Thailand, bought drugs there, then forgot to get rid of them before returning to Singapore. So Singapore executed them, not Thailand.
      - dehrmann 6y ago
        Rereading it, that could be what they meant, and the thresholds for cocaine and heroin are low enough for that to happen.
        lordnacho 6y ago
        This is correct. Pretty banal, just a short trip from Singapore to Thailand to have some fun. Not a drug kingpin. Left some very shocked friends.

objectivistbrit 6y ago

The rationale for the drug laws is interesting: when Singapore gained independence in the 1960s, it was essentially a small third-world city without much of a local economy. Lee Kuan Yew realised that Singapore's future lay in becoming a trading city. They built a port, invested in infrastructure, and basically oriented all their policies around making the city-state as attractive as possible for foreign investment. One reason the streets were kept so orderly and well-maintained was to impress foreign visitors that Singapore was a reliable place to operate in (compare to many developing countries where the ride from the airport will pass ramshackle buildings, potholed streets, garbage everywhere, etc). They kept the British common law system because it's a good system to do business under. Etc. They also knew that, given the region (SE Asia) is a hotbed of drug trafficking, if Singapore became a successful port then tons of drugs would pass through the city. Drugs would mean organised crime. Organised crime would mean corruption. Corruption would scare off foreign investment. Singapore could have ended up looking like most other third-world countries, only too small to retain its independence, and could easily have been reabsorbed into Malaysia or Indonesia. The reason the drug penalties are so harsh is to scare away any possibility of drug trafficking happening there. Just to be clear, I'm not condoning Singapore's policies. Weed is certainly not the same as heroin or crack cocaine. Harsh sentences for carrying a tiny bit of marijuana is pretty draconian. (I looked up some news articles, and it seems as though foreigners are unlikely to get the death penalty for small amounts of weed, but you can still expect jail time and caning.) In a similar way, one rationale behind Singapore's censorship is a similar reason to the (effective) censorship many European countries have -- Singapore has some simmering ethnic tensions, and wants to prevent anyone publishing inflammatory rhetoric. (That's not the only reason, afaik, but it's one of them.) Still: it's worth remembering that Singapore started out in an unusual position with unusual constraints. Everything they have done has been with the aim of turning themselves from a third-world to a first-world country in a few decades. They've seen many other post-colonial countries go down bad trajectories, despite said countries receiving tons of foreign aid, support from international organisations, allowing Western NGOs to operate internally, etc. So they don't have much time for Western journalists/academics/etc who push them to change their policies, because they think the policies they're being pushed to adapt would have led them to disaster. If anyone's curious to learn more about the Singapore approach I'd point them to first look up Lee Kuan Yew's books, or interviews of him, to get an introduction to how he thought about governance and how he approached Singapore's challenges. My own takeaway is that Singapore stands out because most other developing countries have been run so badly. It's not that Lee Kuan Yew had a brilliant political philosophy that all countries should adopt (he claimed to be skeptical of political philosophy), it's more that he was both pragmatic and took a long-range view, and put into practice many sensible policies that other developing countries could have adopted in an alternative timeline. On the other hand, that is definitely not to say that all of his policies are justifiable. I gather that Singapore is slowly changing now that they feel more secure in their first-world status, but they're still pretty averse to adopting the kinds of policies Western nations and the UN usually push other countries to adopt.