Framing the debate: The death penalty for drugs in Singapore

So goes the shockingly dreary children’s story that escalated very quickly. I don’t recall this from my own childhood — although some friends remember it being distributed in postcard form while we were in school — but it’s just one of a number of cautionary tales used in Singapore to teach young children about the dangers of drugs.

It’s highly representative of the public discourse around drug use in Singapore: you take drugs, you die. Any suggestion otherwise can trigger a moral panic and accusations of wanting Singapore to become a drug-addled, crime-ridden society. Consequently, there is little public discussion about differentiation (between types of drugs), experimentation, addiction, abuse, rehabilitation, or regulation.

It’s this mentality upon which K Shanmugan, the Minister for Law and Home Affairs, builds his arguments in favour of the death penalty for drugs. Speaking to students of the Nanyang Technological University, he recently said that the death penalty is “a question of choice”.

Not for the first time, he asserted that the drugs carried by traffickers could sustain the habits of hundreds of people (and, following that Singaporean logic, presumably result in their deaths). He bemoaned the lack of literature on “the death penalties that drug traffickers impose on society”. He pointed out a large reduction in the number of arrests (he didn’t specify particular crimes but it was most likely for drug abuse/possession, rather than trafficking), drawing a causal link between this reduction in numbers and the use of the death penalty. He ended (as far as we can tell from the transcript in the press) by saying:

So where are your sympathies, are they being misplaced? … As I said we used to arrest 7,000, now it’s down to 2,000. Our law enforcement has remained the same, that means 5,000 lives have been saved every year, over a period of 10 years. Do you weigh that as being important, or would you want to spare the life of a drug trafficker who wants to destroy our lives? There’s no right and wrong – you choose.

If one follows the Minister’s line of reasoning, the choice is between sympathy and mercy for one trafficker, and the salvation of hundreds and thousands. With the argument framed this way, there is little surprise when people come to the conclusion that capital punishment is a harsh but necessary trade-off in service of the bigger picture and the greater good.

Yet this argument isn’t actually evidence-based. Nor does it accurately describe the movement against capital punishment for drug offences, of which I count myself a member.

The campaign against the death penalty — in particular relation to drug offences — is not based on the question of where one places one’s sympathies. It has never been about feeling more sorry for drug traffickers than drug abusers or victims of drug-related crimes.

While advocates might highlight the difficult and heartbreaking predicaments of death row inmates and their families to show the human impact of state-sanctioned killing, the campaign against the death penalty for drugs is underpinned by one important message:

It doesn’t work.

Shanmugam complained about the lack of literature on the “death penalties” imposed by drug traffickers. But there is a simple answer to account for that: the link between drug pushers/dealers/mules/traffickers and drug-related deaths is not as clear as he depicts it to be. There are many variables that come into play between someone buying drugs and dying from drug abuse (if one dies at all). One might as well bemoan the lack of research tying bartenders to the deaths caused by alcohol abuse, or 7–11 cashiers to smokers succumbing to lung cancer. The link just isn’t that clear or simple, and we seem to recognise it, which is why no one is calling for the execution of bartenders or cigarette vendors as a well to curb alcoholism and smoking.

Similarly, a drop in the number of drug-related arrests cannot be so simply and directly attributed to the use of capital punishment. Crime, law and order are complex issues in which myriad factors come into play. The falling or rising of numbers can at any given point in time be affected by education, trends (such as moving from one type of drug to another), law enforcement efforts, etc. It’s an oft-repeated phrase: correlation does not equate to causation. Interestingly, the Minister seems less concerned by the lack of literature proving the effectiveness of the death penalty.

That’s not to say that no work is being done on how to deal with drugs and prevent people from becoming victims of drug abuse. It’s a question pondered by many experts around the world, and there are numerous discussions and meetings on drug policy. And a strong message is coming out of these meetings:

The War on Drugs — whether it’s deadly violence in Mexico, mass incarceration in the US or capital punishment for drug offences in places like Singapore — isn’t working.

It’s been stated by groups like Christian Aid, by reports signed by Nobel Prize-winning economists and by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, among others. According to many experts, the literature and research is clear: criminalisation, arrests, harsh punishments and prohibition are just not solving problems.

Picking up on the macabre children’s story I began this post with, openDemocracy spoke with an expert on drug policy about Singapore’s methods:

As Gloria Lai, a senior policy officer at the International Drug Policy Consortium, argues in the video, harsh policies — such as the use of the mandatory death penalty — not only fail to deter people from engaging in the drug trade, but also disproportionately target low-level drug mules and pushers (who are far more likely to be found in possession of contraband than the kingpins) and erase the socio-economic context in which drug crimes like trafficking and smuggling can occur.

This has been the experience of We Believe in Second Chances, a small campaign against the death penalty that I co-founded in 2010. For the past five years we have observed and tracked capital cases, sometimes working closely with the families of inmates.

Through this work we’ve met families struggling with dysfunctional relationships and/or financial hardship, and heard stories of young men led astray or tricked into bad decisions. We’ve met ethnic minorities with low levels of education and little opportunity in their hometowns in rural Malaysia. We’ve not come across anyone who’s disappearance into the execution chamber of Changi Prison would make a dent on the drug trade in Singapore or Asia — none of the inmates are high enough the food chain to have that sort of effect. And so the drug trade continues, and law enforcement agencies keep making big busts, and more low-level pusher and mules find their way into the docks, into the cells, into the long drop.

The argument against the death penalty for drugs is not merely based on bleeding heart sentiment, but on a desire to find better solutions to a long-time problem. It does not exist in a vacuum as the illogical brainchild of noisy-yet-misguided Singaporean abolitionists, but in a context of international research and scholarship on drug policy that points out the fundamental flaws and fallacies of our current system.

For anti-death penalty campaigners like myself, it is not a choice made by weighing the life of a trafficker with the potential lives of drug abusers and deciding where our sympathies lie, but a conclusion reached after looking at the evidence and best practices of other countries to better save the lives of both traffickers and abusers.