China's anti-covid policy "worked" as well. One way to fix the homeless "problem" in San Francisco would be to execute all the vagrants. This would also "work".

But if it really "worked"--why would there still consistently be prosecutions and executions of dealers, traffickers, etc? If Singapore's strategy really worked, it would have stopped this. Yet it didn't. So does it work?

The humanity of the addict that drives you to want to save her in the face of her own choices to resist being saved, is the same humanity of the dealer that you ignore in your drive to want to kill her.

In another way, are they also not jointly responsible? Without addicts there would be no dealers. Without dealers, no addicts. If we're going to kill all dealers, why not all addicts, too? In a more sophisticated way, isn't drug policy the real one responsible for the harm? If drugs were not "illegal", cartels would not exist, and all the violence from them would not exist. If drugs were not illegal, purity could be controlled, and so could dosage, and so could price, and not only would illicit market be far smaller, but less lives would be ruined through drug debt, disease, social exclusion, and, jail.

Prosecutions snip the leaves, but not the trunk or root. The leaves are often driven to crime by the same forces that drive people to be addicts. The standard of personal responsibility should be equally applied: people choose to become addicts, and they choose to commit crimes.

In both cases, there are other forces at work, but we must not treat one class of people as agent-free helpless fake victims, and others as planful, deliberate, fully-responsible perpetrators. We must apply responsibility equally to all, for their choices and situations.

I think the "moral panic" argument to justify lynching is a way to hack human psychology and has always been effective (heretics, witches, slaves, and now...I guess...drug mules?).

Put it another way: what if it was your sister, who was visiting you in Singapore, but she didn't speak the local language, and the eSIM she bought at the airport turned out to have been used by drug traffickers a few months before. Then out with friends, someone spikes her drinks, her friends lost her, and police later find her wandering the street in a confused state, and arrest her for "drug consumption". While detained, she refuses drug tests, and while checking her phone, they discover the "her involvement". Despite the fact that she just landed here, a court rules that the phone number belongs to her, and she is sentenced to death for "her part" in the months-prior drug trafficking. Are you still asking "what about the countless addicted people who lose their lives to drugs every year? how can such a menace be rehabilitated" and saying "The state of their nation suggests that their solution works well." It's an exaggeration, but how plausible is it? How plausible is the guilt of the guy they will execute? What if not your sister, but you? Someone switches bags with you at the airport, in a part of the airport where no cameras are...you have no proof, and you are sentenced to death for being "such a menace"? Do you still feel "their solution works well?" I mean, did you deserve to die for something else and this is what got you?

I think it doesn't work, and even if the questionable "war on drugs" was really a good goal (and not one that ended up lining the pockets of both 'sides', while denying people access to a lot of safe mood modifiers), then a better LE strategy would be executing the leadership of the organization.

Put it another way: in human trafficking cases, do we arrest the leaves (the girls and boys who are trafficked for sex or slave labor), or do we arrest the kingpins? The socioeconomic things driving those kids to become criminals are very similar for drugs, and for sex / slave labor.

Finally, does the prosecution and sentencing of many mainly black men in USA for small drug crimes (another example of a solution whose punishment seems exaggeratedly incommensurate with the crime), "work well"? Or is the problem that it was "not tough enough" -- we should have been executing people for this stuff...? :(