Seems like it is much harder to get drugs in Singapore than in Seattle. Prohibition might not be absolute, but it seems effective at reducing the number of people using drugs. Is that a good or bad policy goal, and is it worth the costs? That a political question, but the answer to that is separate from whether prohibition works or not.

>That a political question

That's not political, it's science, statistics, facts. Prohibition = more overdoses, more violence, more untreated addiction, younger users, richer criminals, more abuse from the police, more corruption, less incentive to educate yourself/learn a trade when you come from a poor area, more likely to be BORN addicted to drugs because your mom was terrified of getting help before/when she was pregnant, more likely to get aids, more likely to have your life completely and permanently ruined.

This whole debate can end in one word: Portugal. There is no debate really, only ignorance.

And btw it's not hard to get drugs in any city. I don't know a place on earth where you can't get drugs in an hour or two, besides rural areas.

It's unclear that the numbers are in your favor. As far as I can tell, as of 2018, the US had 600 opiate users per 100k, Portugal had 250, and Singapore had 30.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/singapore-is-winning...

So Portugal has twice as less addict than the US, even though drug users don't risk anything legally, while in the US using drugs once can mean decades in jail.

"Singapore has the world's highest percentage of millionaires, with one out of every six households having at least one million US dollars in disposable wealth." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore

Singapore is a 5 million people country.

Prohibition isn't the important factor here.

Dealers get shot on sight in Brazil or in The Philippines, that's not just prohibition, that's state-sponsored murder, at scale and that doesn't stop anyone.

It's not unclear if you're not looking at an extremely small subset of extremely rich and privileged people.

Singapore wasn't always rich, but it's always had harsh laws with regards to drugs.

"Always" as in 1972 - after nearly a century of suffering the aftereffects of the opium wars. The Singapore Economic Development board predates the harshest drug laws by a decade and when the law came into effect, Singapore was already well into its economic miracle.

Singapore has only been independent since 1959. The date you gave is when the Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced. They still had harsh punishments prior to that through the legal system. Like I said earlier in the thread, whether the benefits are worth the costs is a political question, but prohibition appears to work in Singapore. By the way, since you brought up the Opium Wars, Mao also basically eliminated the production and use of opium by using harsh repressive measures as well. It's why most poppy production now takes place in the Golden Triangle. Just prior to 2001 the Taliban also basically eliminated poppy production in Afghanistan, but the US invasion led to the reversal of that.

Yet, Singapore had a death rate due to opioid overdoses of 0.16 per 100'000 inhabitants and Portugal 0.25 per 100'000. I'm sure if you'd include the draconian punishments in Singapore, then there is a clear winner in which country does the least harm to its citizens.

The US had a rate of 13.69 per 100'000.

The harm we are reducing is decreasing the amount of drug users, and the attendant crime and degradation that comes with them, within the environment that non-drug users have to live in.

We'd be reducing the harm to them and in a subjective way, to the overall community. That some people's "harm" will increase is obvious but this is a price many are willing to pay to achieve a better society for themselves.

In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice, and the solution to the "harm" that needs to be decreased.

> it doesn't seem to stop them

Sure it does, it decreases overall drug use, where it is harsh enough.

>that didn't stop most people from trying it.

Did it decrease overall drug use vs when these laws were relaxed? Yes. Mostly though the penalty for drug dealers needs to be harsher. Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.

>In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice

Most of the harm coming from drug use is coming from prohibition.

Hanging drug users or drug dealers is not justice, it's a bigger crime than any type of drug deal.

>Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.

And this have absolutely nothing to do with drugs dealers. This problem was created by the likes of Purdue Pharma. Jailing drug dealers does absolutely nothing to stop Americans from getting hooked on opiates

Hanging drug dealers isn't worse than the harm they cause to the community, and many individual lives.

>Purdue Pharma

Regulation against them and restrictions on opiates has helped to decrease that form of opiate use.

Obviously, Purdue Pharma executives should be harshly punished, much more than they have been. Why shouldn't they? They perpetrated a great crime and suffering, willingly lying and causing addiction, to so many people. That they should suffer for it and that there is a great need to deter other drug companies / doctors from doing the same is abundantly clear. It is not mutually exclusive from also targeting street drug dealers of fentanyl and other synthetic opiates which is the problem now though.

So, what, that guy that sold weed before legalization caused more harm from his actions than hanging him would cause, and yet we've legalized it and everyone is fine with it now?

Or perhaps It's all arbitrary and decided by laws and the actual harm doesn't necessarily map directly onto illegal activity. If that's the case, maybe we should be careful about statements that hanging a drug.dealer causes less harm than they cause to communities.

Direct sale of water could be regulated, making people that sell it without license criminals. You'll have a hard time convincing me that selling water provides harm, but there would be just as much reasoning behind a statement saying as much.

Let's deal with the immediate problem of opiates, meth and other hard drugs, the addiction of which is ravaging cities where drug users are a blight on society with their tent cities, needles, feces, crime, vandalism, assaults, robberies, etc.

You don't want to focus on that you want to misdirect to weed and.... water? What the hell does this dumb analogy have to do with anything in reality?

I point is that you say "drug dealer", when that's an arbitrary label that's dictated be laws and societal norms and acceptance, and then talk about it like there's well known harm from "drug dealers". The fact of the matter was that until a few years ago people selling weed were treated like those selling much harder drugs, and Federally they're still not in the clear. The fact that the label you're using is so loosely defined and applies to such a disparate set of people, and the crime they are saddled with is often so arbitrarily decided should give you pause when using it in a general statement about reducing harms.

Saying "drug dealers" and "drug users" without quantifying which drugs and how harmful they are is just an easy way to ignore real aspects of the problem so it can be reduced to a simplistic model that is easy to make statements about, even though we all know that to actually follow through on the suggestions is folly, because the real people and real specifics of their problems make that untenable. So why bother with the simplistic arguments that we all, even you, know are bullshit and can't be followed through on?