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Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? I mean, it is self-evidently obvious that at some level of enforcement, you can actually control the problem. T
by AbrahamParangi 3y ago
Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? I mean, it is self-evidently obvious that at some level of enforcement, you can actually control the problem.
The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.
- oatmeal1 3y ago> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. I think the question is how do we make prisons less cruel and dangerous, and lower recidivism. Of course there is a backlash against enforcement when the solution is locking people in cages.
- pas 3y agoobviously by spending money on it. but the US in general is vehemently against doing that.
- pravus 3y agoAfter the outrage I saw when a US citizen was caned in Singapore for a vandalism violation, I'd say no, the people here probably don't look to Singapore as a guide for enforcement.
- spamuel 3y agoMinds have been changed on a lot of things that are pretty wild lately, in a short span of time. If this stuff continues, there might be further pretty wild changes of mind.
- chimeracoder 3y ago> Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? Considering that thousands of people are arrested for drug possession every year in Singapore, to say nothing of the number of people who use drugs in Singapore and avoid legal action, then yes. > The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Drug use is rampant even inside prisons, which are literally the most surveilled and draconian environments on the planet. If a carceral approach to preventing drug use doesn't work even within prisons, what makes anyone think it can work in society at large, even if people were willing to turn all of society into a police state?
- postmeta 3y agoA few thousand arrests for possession in Singapore is nothing compared to the USA, NYC has that many people die of drug overdose every year: https://www.snpnyc.org/opioid-crisis/ https://www.snpnyc.org/opioid-crisis/ vs Singapore arrests for possession or use: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1007331/dug-abuser-numbers-singapore/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1007331/dug-abuser-numbe...
- hugh-avherald 3y agoBy that metric, criminalizing murder is a policy failure.
- whimsicalism 3y agoSingapore is a dictatorship, count me out.
- nonrepeating 3y agoNo, it is not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy_in_Singapore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy_in_...