Other countries, including the U.S. and European countries regulate who and who cannot come into their borders all the time. Youre entirely free to smoke weed and not visit Singapore. Who are you to dictate what laws they set on their own soil?
Re sucide: you should probably fact check that, because the criminality of suicide was recently repealed in Singapore.
But even if it wasnt, I find your stance hyperbolic considering lots of countries still criminalize suicide. Places in the U.S. considered suicide criminal all the way up to the 90s.
Singapore is somewhat unique in that it's a country with very restricted freedoms, which have been given up in exchange for security/safety. It's extraordinarily rule-bound, and, in many ways, is the antithesis of the United States, in which freedoms reign. In such a structured, government controlled and monitored society, all sorts of rules can be laid down, and enforced through strict punishment. I wouldn't try and use it as a model for other countries.
But - hey, might be worth executing anybody who uses drugs to see what happens. But I hope you're going to start with the really destructive ones, like Alcohol and Nicotine before you start looking at the less harmful ones such as cannabis.
It's not the rules that keep me out of Singapore it's the disproportionate response for breaking them. I don't mind if a place I'm visiting doesn't want me to chew gum or has a law about flushing the toilet, and I think for both of these the punishment is (high) fines so it's only money. But death penalty for drug possession? Count me out. Not that I would bring drugs there, but in any civilized nation the worst thing that could happen if I were falsely accused and could not prove my innocence is a variable amount of jail time. In Singapore, I would die. You might argue that this could be said of any country with capital punishment and you'd be correct, however for Singapore it applies to more crimes and is administered more freely.
Nobody is getting executed by having a few gr of weed on them, one needs to actively distributing it and in large amount (500 gr). Singapore is very strict but they’re not executing their citizens for consuming drugs.
Ah yes countries where you face long prison sentences or, in the case of Singapore, the death penalty, for weed possession. This is the kind of society you want to live in?
As ridiculous as death sentences for drug trafficking are, they're in place and [far more] frequently carried out in all the surrounding South East Asian states too. I'm not sure where you've got the idea Singapore habitually lets murderers free either; judges only got the discretion to impose life imprisonment instead of the death penalty for murder in 2012/
The government has a near zero tolerance for drugs (it reminds me of the US government in the 80's). There are very large drug busts every couple of weeks so there is a thriving drug trade, but it's forced underground and the government makes sure it always appears they have it under control. Drug problems are much reduced in Singapore compared to the West, but almost much of it isn't publicly visible either.
Singaporean citizens and PRs can be (and are) randomly drug tested when coming back to Singapore and if found guilty can be fined and/or receive a prison sentence. Yes, you can go to prison for flying to Thailand and smoking legal marijuana.
As for the death penalty, my guess is Singapore will eventually stop mandatory death penalties. Global pressure and stigma will eventually be too much. Even their neighbor, Malaysia, has stopped all executions since 2018.
However, if they end executions, they'll make sure to spin it as their idea and will give no hint that they bowed to international pressure or opinion.
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.
I consider Singapore less than ideal to live in, but not because some websites are blocked. While free speech and access to information is almost always a good thing, people raised with western values should not overlook that the east does things a little differently; not all countries started from the same place and lifting people out of hardship is the primary goal. As they prosper (as Singapore did), it'd be good if priorities are realigned and they become more open. But it's a process and it takes time.
Now the second part. Singapore has some barbaric laws incompatible with modern society. Many times a year, they put to death people for drug related offenses (even cannabis), almost always poor people. It is tragic and heart breaking that such a wealthy country with a well-educated population (80% supporting death for drug offenses) gets behind execution for non-violent crimes. Most recently - 6 weeks back Tangaraju Suppiah was put to death for carrying 2 pounds of cannabis [1].
It's a well manicured garden, but I'd stay away from that place. Especially if you're raising kids.
Singapore sounds ruthlessly authoritarian. Mandatory death sentence for drugs is barbaric. I would legitimately rather live in a city like you describe (and probably do by your standards, Seattle) than that.
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.
Singaporean law forbids their citizens and residents from using drugs in other countries. So if a Singapore resident goes to Amsterdam or Portland and smokes a joint there, they are complying with local laws but still breaking Singaporean laws. Laws with this sort of extraterritorial jurisdiction aren't without precedent. Particularly, other countries, like the US, UK and many others, have similar laws concerning some forms of sex tourism.
> Just because it might be a very pleasant place to live doesn't mean it isn't also totalitarian.
With that I agree, but I think a better word to describe Singapore is 'authoritarian.' Totalitarianism is an extreme form of authoritarianism, in which the government exercises a near total control over every aspect of your life. Singapore regulates many aspects of their citizens lives, as do all functional governments to at least some degree, but I think it falls short of totalitarianism.
You're missing a few big ones. Like, a murder sentence is more lenient in Singapore than a drug trafficking sentence, which is death by hanging. Many murderers go free in Singapore after a few years of prison, while someone caught with a a backpack of pot can be killed legally, and someone with only a couple grams of marijuana can spend 10 years in jail.
Having lived in Singapore, I'm ok with this. I can't judge foreign countries by my Western values when all the countries that agree with those values face crippling drug problems. If this is the extent of it and it isn't abused, I think it's fair for a country to take this stance.
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.
Re sucide: you should probably fact check that, because the criminality of suicide was recently repealed in Singapore.
But even if it wasnt, I find your stance hyperbolic considering lots of countries still criminalize suicide. Places in the U.S. considered suicide criminal all the way up to the 90s.
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