Singapore is certainly an appealing model to a certain segment of the population. They have mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers. However, what most people don’t want to talk about is the robust social safety net that Singapore also has. In Singapore the police can arrest homeless people for sleeping on the streets. But they also have ample housing available for them. In San Francisco, there literally is no place for a homeless person but the streets. The waitlist can take months or years.
After decades of propaganda, far right media has convinced a large part of the American public that social welfare programs don’t work. Of course they did this after first defunding those social programs. So of course the only option left is punishment.
But if anything, the US “war on drugs” has only proven that punishment alone isn’t enough. Thankfully people are starting to wake up to that fact.
The problems with prohibition are well documented. There's a good reason we re-legalized alcohol, and we suffer those same problems with the current prohibitions (the creation of a multibillion-dollar organized crime market).
I think it's important that we define exactly what it is that we're trying to mitigate / accomplish with drug laws in general. If it's the reduction of harm, then we're going about it completely wrong.
The overwhelming majority of overdoses are from opioids [1] and yet we treat lsd, mdma, cocaine, and a whole slew of psychedelics exactly the same as heroin. There's evidence [2] that suggests that prescription opioids drive abuse behavior.
It's known that fentanyl adulteration drives a significant portion of OD deaths [3] even if it's hard to get good numbers on how many of these ODs are adulterated compounds vs just fentanyl because of how the numbers are reported. If we legalized everything but opioids, a significant portion of these ODs could be easily avoided.
The DEA has failed it's mandate, and it's time to disband them, end the prohibition, and focus on harm reduction techniques rather than incarceration. We could also spend a little more time reigning in "legitimate" organizations like Purdue Pharma, who cause unarguable harm in the guise of medicine.
After decades of propaganda, far right media has convinced a large part of the American public that social welfare programs don’t work. Of course they did this after first defunding those social programs. So of course the only option left is punishment.
But if anything, the US “war on drugs” has only proven that punishment alone isn’t enough. Thankfully people are starting to wake up to that fact.