COMMENT: It’s time for Singapore to relook its war on drugs

Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.

48-year-old Foong Chee Peng and 36-year-old Tang Hai Liang were both hanged at dawn on Friday morning. They are the first two to have been executed in Changi Prison since an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty began in July 2011.

Both men were Singaporeans, convicted on drug trafficking offences. As far as we know, most of the inmates sitting on death row are there because of Singapore’s never-ending war on drugs.

The resumption of executions sends a chilling message to the inmates as well as to anti-death penalty campaigners. With two already hanged and cremated, will there be more executions next Friday, and all the Fridays to come? Is the three-year reprieve now over?

There are many problems with the death penalty and its application. In Singapore, we have highlighted issues with the mandatory nature of the death penalty, and how it continues to restrict the discretion of the judges even after the amendments have been made. We have pointed out that the current system greatly disadvantages drug mules, while kingpins avoid the noose. We have expressed our concern with the process of issuing Certificates of Cooperation, an opaque and confusing system that appears to grant a huge amount of power to the prosecution.

Beyond that, there is an even wider concern that our current war on drugs is failing. Even with our best efforts, the drug trade in Southeast Asia has not decreased, but has instead increased. Continual arrests, death sentences and even extrajudicial killings over the years – carried out not just by Singapore by other ASEAN countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand – have done little to alter this fact.

It is understandable that we would want to live in a safe society where drug crime is low. But it doesn’t make sense for us to cling on to old methods that appear to have a limited impact on the regional drug trade, in the hopes that it will suddenly work much better and keep drugs off the streets.

We will need new solutions and new innovations to deal with this problem, and we won’t be the first. Other countries and states have already started looking at alternatives to what has been an expensive and bloody war on drugs throughout the world, reforming their drug laws and shifting mindsets to allow for more rehabilitative and restorative methods of dealing with drug crime and drug addicts.

Portugal was one of the first to decriminalise drugs and treat drug users as patients rather than criminals. Some analysts say that decriminalisation has actually not led to an increase in drug consumption, while other reports actually suggest that drug crime has actually gone down.

Singapore might be small and worried about our vulnerability, but we cannot keep our heads stuck in the sand. We cannot keep sacrificing lives in the hope that it will one day pay off. It is high time we gather up the courage to explore new ideas and new solutions.