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Hey man, you can't learn things unless you are willing to experiment.
Drug decriminalization seemed like a good idea at the time. Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.
China was an experiment in sweet sweet capitalism inducing democracy that appears to have fairly clearly failed.
Is this specifically meant to be a reference to the incarceration rate of black men?
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Anything can seem like a good idea at the time if you're a fool. There are videos of men sticking their hand into a lion cage, clearly they thought it was a good idea at the time.
Instead of fighting a war on drugs and losing, why not win instead? It really isn't that hard to find the drug dealers and get rid of them. If the demented drug zombies can find the drug dealers, so can well-trained and organized police. People often raise civil liberties as a defence here - civil liberties disappear anywhere near an airport, where a giant, expensive and ineffective protection theatre reigns. If the TSA can feel up or browse through the genitals of the general public, surely the police can whisk away the drug dealers and break up distribution networks. America wasn't an unfree police state back when the crazies were locked up in mental institutions.
China policy was taking a huge and unnecessary risk relying on a dubious and unproven idea. Since when has capitalism induced democracy in a large Asian dictatorship? It didn't happen in Japan, capitalist democracy transformed into a military dictatorship aiming for regional hegemony. It kind of happened in South Korea and Taiwan - small US allies. But China is a big, nuclear powered US adversary. They fought against America in the Korean War and Vietnam. They famously conducted a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students in 1989. They had another Taiwan Straits crisis in the 1990s. I can't imagine why anyone thought they were going to turn into a democracy and this would solve all the US problems faced. Even if they became a democracy they could still be rabidly nationalistic and throw their weight around.
It was total delusion. Nobody should ever need to learn not to stick their hand into a lion cage.
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Singapore has excellent results on controlling drug usage by beating or executing people, but we didn't try that route.
Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.
Singapore's policies aren't going to apply to the USA without accounting for scale.
That said, I'm pro public caning as a punishment rather than incarceration.
How does any of that matter in this respect?
No drugs will ever be produced in Singapore herself, and the borders are relatively small, densely populated, wet and easy to police.
Wealthy Singaporeans who want to sin travel to other nearby countries to do it.
Whereas in America, there's always going to be drugs coming in because you have huge borders and massive empty areas to police. And there's always going to be $$$ demand for party drugs from rich people, which will trickle down.
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It’s worth noting that everyone else who’s tried Singaporean drug policies has succeeded in solving that specific problem- these countries are brutal dictatorships, but the evidence behind ‘send everyone with enough drugs to be a dealer to the chair, and enforce strong penalties against private consumption’ is very strong if your goal is to get rid of drugs.
I don’t think the U.S. is capable of doing this but if we were we wouldn’t have drugs.
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