In 2019, in a very different situation, I was worried about the hospital bureaucracy that almost killed my mom. My mom was struggling with pneumonia and the antibiotics were not yet having any effect, but they scheduled her for surgery on her eye, and once the surgery had been scheduled, it was very difficult to try to stop it, the momentum to stick with the schedule was incredible, even though it seemed unlikely she would survive the surgery. I kept asking, can't we wait a week and do the surgery when she's recovered from the pneumonia? But there was a feeling, no, we must operate on her eye now, even though there was nothing to gain from the surgery, as they said they were unable to restore her eyesight. But I was able to stop the surgery and my mom is still alive today. I wrote about this in some detail in Regarding The Death Of My Father:
Wow. I’m curious where this happened because in the US it’s the polar opposite - any risk and it’s impossible to get the healthcare system to move, not stop. Glad to hear that your mom is alive today.
I didn’t know you could be put to death for non-violent crimes. Article says he was only charged with drug possession. This happened in Singapore, but according to Wikipedia “large-scale drug trafficking” is a capital crime in the US, too. Transporting 42g of heroin doesn’t sound even close to large-scale, but I can imagine getting swallowed up by a legal labyrinth anyhow, especially if you’re disadvantaged.
I don’t understand why more lawyers aren’t up in arms about the severe sentencing happening in the US. Guess it’s a similar situation to engineers being paid through the nose while pretending Big Tech is working for the greater good.
Not defending this at all but this does show you’ve never visited Singapore. Before entering you repeatedly get many many notices of a death penalty for drug traffickers regardless of the quantity and type. It’s even written in large bold letters on the immigration card.
I'm ashamed I have visited. Print those warnings in all the emphasized font you want, could Nagaenthran comprehend them and connect the dots to his coerced situation?
Everyone should at some point in their upbringing have a modicum of experience caring for someone with a mental disability
Singapore's actions and judicial system are vile and disgusting.
The US killed the Rosenbergs for espionage. That was technically a nonviolent act, although furnishing atomic secrets to the USSR could be seen as an accessory to mass murder.
Killing somebody for heroin? That is an entirely new level of depravety.
Legislation in the US allows the death penalty for drug trafficking alone, although AFAIK this has never been applied without violent offences as well.
It's a bizarre world. How can a person get a death sentence from 50 grams of cocaine. What an idiot regime and or public moral you must have as a country.
They look at the West with its respect for the human rights of drug dealers and notice that it seems to suffer from tens of thousands of drug overdoses every year as well as creating tens of millions of addicts inflicting crime and squalor on their communities. They notice that the streets of Singapore aren’t littered with needles like they are in San Francisco. They think you’re the moral idiot for tolerating this societal catastrophe in the name of human rights.
Singapore’s leaders believe that their severity is a small price to pay for keeping at bay the vices of the outside world. What would you say to them to convince them that they’re wrong?
That the US still criminalizes drug use. Portugal decriminalized in 2001 and "has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime."
We really want to reduce this to a littering problem?
After the NYTimes, about 159000 people were killed by drugs between 2015 and 2017 just in US. 591000 Americans had problems related with Heroine abuse in 2015, how many of this people are dead now, or will end dying under a bridge? Their predators will not stop just by asking nicely.
I don't agree with the punishment, but something must be done and either you send a very clear message of non tolerance with traffic or you allow the drug lords to take all, infiltrate in the government and corrupt everything in a few years.
The best solution would be to legalize, tax and regulate what could be regulated but in the meanwhile I don't have a lot of sympathy for this people. Better to save it for the real victims.
> We really want to reduce this to a littering problem?
We really are pretending that if there’s an opiates epidemic in some areas of the USA, then the whole West has a severe drug problem?
The person I replied to claimed western cities are littered with needles, then another one came and told me that he had bad news re: public parks in big cities.
Not condoning an execution, but I do find it a lot more idiotic and morally wrong letting 10s of thousands of your citizens die every year from drug overdose.
Freedom means that you should get to choose. Car accidents kill and injure a lot of people every year. In some demographics (young people) it's actually one of the leading causes of death. Should we ban driving and force people to either walk or use public transport? It'll save a lot of lives from car accidents after all.
I think what confuses you to make such a grotesque analogy between transportation and drugs is a belief that when it comes to drugs, people have the same agency and freedom of choice as they have for other things in life. But they don't. Once you follow that path, coming back is almost impossible. Addiction is very very hard to beat. Even if you somehow manage, it probably never goes away completely. You are not free to choose, drugs shutdown that part of the brain. I find it really immoral that we let vulnerable people have access to drugs like heroin. We are condemning them to suffer immensely.
And how easy is it to voluntarily give up using personal vehicles? You decide, against everything on our current society, to give up using cars. Do you think it would be easy? Cars might not be destroying our physical bodies directly, but they are harming nature.
I'm not in favor of banning cars. I'm in favor of people having the freedom to choose. I also believe that if drugs weren't so heavily criminalized then people suffering from drug issues could more easily get help. Portugal decriminalized drugs and saw a lot of positive change. But over the last decade they've been putting up more limits again and the situation is deteriorating.
Based on anecdotes here on HN, quite easily actually. They say that you only have to move to a city and you can be car free. I don't agree but it seems plenty of people here have achieved just that.
Honestly it is really hard for me to have a discussion about this since I don't see any similarities between cars and drugs. A car is tool like any other. Drugs are poison, very much like a virus. Once on drugs people don't have freedom of choice any more.
I think it is cruel to allow people easier access to drugs. Because most people who started taking them were already not in good place.
Drugs like heroin take away all your liberty whether you want it or not. Once you become slave of drugs there are no options or preferences only ever increasing desire for more.
having met some people wrapped up in drugs, i can tell you that sometimes people who sell drugs are doing it to support a habit, i’ve met people who started out on prescription pain pills that they got prescribed from their doctor due to a surgery.
the pills were then eventually stopped and they got desperate because for many it was the first time in their life that they felt happy, many were in extreme poverty or had mental illness before getting hooked to prescription drugs, they got locked up for something dumb or less offensive, the system put them on probation, where it made them toxic to employeers, so they turned to selling because they were already doomed as it was, the drug war just reinforces a separate class of people.
i don’t agree with people using drugs like heroin but, ive met many people who actually said that oxytocin and oxycoden is way better than heroin, and that they prefer it.
and i am almost certain that more people die from prescription opiates a year than heroin yet, whenever someone mentions it, the whole conversation disappears with hush money. the drug war really seems like a tax on the most vulnerable in which was fueled by big pharma and paid by the average worker (us).
johnson and johnson got called out on it and got a tiny slap on the hand, and later on was trusted enough to make a vaccine. which i am pretty sure johnson and johnson also had a baby powder lawsuit over their baby powder giving newborns cancer, but the problem is, the accountability is only on the people who cannot afford to pay the bill, the real criminals work for these companies, own these companies, lobby for these companies and or pass laws for profit at the expense of a healthy society.
it’s just weird, we lock up the poor but don’t punish the source. it’s legal patchwork, but i know some people on here probably work for someone like johnson and johnson and nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them.
the system here in the states needs to be fixed. it doesn’t have to be law based but it definitely has to have a better framework than what we have going on right now.
I was referring to the social norms around criticism of authority. There is a much greater expectation of tact and constructiveness compared to the West.
The Singaporean government is doing the wrong thing by executing this man, but GP's flippant remarks were not the way to express this.
> I was referring to the social norms around criticism of authority. There is a much greater expectation of tact and constructiveness compared to the West.
I've never been to Asia myself, but knowing some Asian people and knowing a little about Asian history i think you are wrong. Like everywhere else, Asia is filled with revolutionaries who despise authority and revolt in any way they can.
Just because some people respect authoritarian figures and their abuses of power doesn't mean everybody has to show "respect". I personally don't have any respect for most governments around this planet (including France/USA), because these governments don't have any respect for human lives and freedom.
I live in a country where it's illegal to criticize the police or insult the president. Some people live in a country where it's illegal to suggest the king may be wrong. People like you are just enforcing that kind of power dynamic which some of us are interested to dismantle in flames.
(Also worth noting: Asia is a BIG continent and you're making a huge generalization about billions of people... which i don't think holds at all)
It is pretty easy to criticize social policy like this in a vacuum but really the extremely hard stance regarding drug contraband in that region is at the very least understandable given the historical context.
A law passed in 1973 and amended in 1977 was based on the British use of force in China in the 19th century to sell opium?
Feels like a long bow, but go on, I'm listening.
The sources I can find state:
"Then Minister for Home Affairs and Education, Chua Sian Chin said (Sing., Parliamentary Debates, vol. 37, col. 34 (27 May 1977)) - unless drug trafficking and drug addiction [are] checked, they [will] threaten our national security and viability. To do this, both punitive and preventive measures must be taken. The [Misuse of Drugs] Act was thus amended to provide enhanced penalties for traffickers, including mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking and manufacturing”.
So I'm wondering what was going in Singapore in the 70s.
It isn't specific to Singapore, but the entire region. In the early 19th century there was huge demand for Asian goods in the west, which led to a huge trade disparity because China had little interest in western goods. The British East India Company was able to negate that through smuggling opium to such a degree that it was emptying the Chinese coffers and caused a drug abuse epidemic, which then forced China into conflict with Britain. This led to the Treaty of Nanking starting a trend of colonial subjugation and weakening of the Qing Empire and is considered the beginning of Century of Humiliation in China.
Then you have to take the additional context of how power coalesced in many of these Asian tiger economies through strong authoritarian governments during their modernization and independence. I do not think it is a stretch to think that other nations in the region, especially those with close proximity to China, or have large Chinese populations (like Singapore), saw how unbelievably poorly this went for China, which probably contributed to the extreme measures used to prevent recreational drug contraband from being used in their societies.
In South Korea today, you can be imprisoned for five years just for having any drugs in your system (follicle test) no matter where ingested & South Korean citizens can be punished for consuming drugs abroad where they would otherwise be legal:
Opium is important in the history of Singapore. The city was mainly developed for and by the opium trade, but also faced issues due to legal local consumption up to the 1940s. It's not what directly brought the draconian legislation in the 1970s, but it certainly contributed.
Fair enough. It's tone deaf and practically guaranteed to lead to zero change, but at least you - living comfortably in a country where you'll never have to deal with the real-world implications of harsh laws like this - get to feel good about being rude to someone on the internet.
Whenever I read articles like this one, I try extremely hard not to view it through an Orientalist lens. But sometimes it's extremely hard to do. I was born in the US, but whenever I'd visit Asia or relatives in India, I couldn't help but notice there is something "broken" about the psyche of Asians. The upper echeleons of society are typically the most degenerate, at least from what I've observed. They like to drink, gamble, do drugs, etc...but God forbid if the lower classes even do a fraction of what they do. They will thrown down the hammer of social and moral superiority. The modern Asian is still chained by the shackles of colonialism.
Westerners do all of that. Otherwise major sports teams, at least in Europe, wouldn't have as sponsors betting companies, drugs wouldn't be a multi billion dollar industry and drinking wouldn't be more widespread than anywhere in the world. Maybe Westerners don't flaunt it as much.
And the solution to this is executing mentally impaired poor buggers fir caring 50 grams of dope? Not even Russia does that today, they just throw you in jail for 10 years.
Singapore inherits its penal code from the British, and most locals find drugs abhorrent because they're acutely aware of both the Opium Wars in China, and the former extent of drug addiction and gang violence in Singapore itself.
I have seen same from my relatives who went/born in the us. They think the rest of the family is beneath them. I guess its a human thing and not Asian issue.
The boomer Western is still chained by the shackles of stereotyping. You see a pattern and fit it to one dimension (race/nationality) but miss that the pattern may be better explained along other dimensions (rich kids gambling and drinking in any culture maybe?). You take a week/month long tourist trip in a country and presume this tiny sliver of experience represents an entire culture.
This could be racism driven, even though SG is known to be heavily authoritarian against drugs regardless. East Asian countries tend to be very racist towards brown Asians (South East Asia and South Asia).
>East Asian countries tend to be very racist towards brown Asians
This is the most nonsensical statement I have ever seen on HN. By the lens of racialism (which is also scientifically invalid), Indians would be Caucasian, not Asian, East Asian countries being racist against Asians would not be racism at all, it'd some kind of ethnic discrimination.
I was kind of waiting to hear the guy had killed someone, so that I could invalidate the whole article. But then it’s 42g of heroin on someone that was undoubtedly suckered into doing it.
I get it, it’s their country, they can have their own laws. I’m not arguing they can’t. Give the guy a lengthy prison sentence, I won’t agree it’s fair or productive, but he’ll get out eventually.
But no, they’re going to kill this guy. Over marijuana.
Fair point, but are you really suggesting that it would be reasonable for his family to be on call for a potential two-week notice for over a decade? It seems to me to be a very clear power imbalance here between the parties, where one party with only minimal effort (giving maybe two or three months notice) would make matters substantially easier (and humane) for the other party.
Would that actually be more humane? They’d feel compelled to spend those three months with their family member, instead of getting to start grieving/move on.
I guess I still lean towards giving people a choice, but I’m not sure it’s actually better.
I would absolutely prefer to have 3 months notice that 2 weeks if my brother was on death row in Singapore (and I was outside Singapore), especially as as the article describes it's difficult for them to even manage to get there in that time.
If he were a murderer, that wouldn't have invalidated the whole article. Even if you subscribe to an "eye for an eye" type "justice" and agree with execution for murder, giving two weeks notice, during a pandemic, for family in another country with quarantine requirements both ways is inhumane.
So is killing other people. It’s one of the few cases in which I agree with such a penalty (in theory, in practice I’d still not want it for fear of making a mistake).
God bless all of these activists. They've made it possible for this family to visit their son, whose death is so capricious, and so capriciously scheduled. I'm in tears.
Wow- reading this I was like- well he shouldn’t have murdered his victim then. And then I realized he was being killed for possession of drugs. Wtf the headline should read- death for possession not the stupid complain of the bureaucracy involved in killing him
Han and her usual readers are well aware of the many unjust executions that have taken place in Singapore. The complaints about bureaucracy aren’t ‘stupid’—they’re actually quite important, since tempering the procedural aspect is more likely than eliminating the death penalty for possession, and they also might help to show Singaporeans the underlying bureaucratic tendencies that lead both to the use of the death penalty and the specific infelicities listed.
https://www.amazon.com/Regarding-Death-Father-Lawrence-Krubn...