Singapore Executes Drug Dealers, Like Trump Wants To. Does It Work?

Not sure if you heard the news, but Queens-raised real estate developer Donald Trump will be our president. For the second time!*

*Dismayed? Not? I’m curious how my audience breaks down politically, so please say in the comments whom you voted for.

How will he fight the fentanyl crisis? As with most things Trump, it’s difficult to guess.

During his first term drug overdose deaths surged, but he took the problem seriously, declaring a public health emergency in 2017. In 2019 he won a key concession from China, who agreed to ban all fentanyl analogues, and in 2020 Trump signed into law sweeping criminal justice reform.*

*Often it takes a Republican president to pass liberal policies (like Nixon establishing the Environmental Protection Agency) and a Democrat to pass conservative ones, like Clinton signing welfare reform and the crime bill.

Though drug deaths continued rising in the early 2020s, now they’re dropping quickly, leaving us scrambling to figure out what’s working. We should probably just keep doing what we’re doing, but on the campaign trail Trump promised to make changes including tighter border enforcement to try to stop drugs from coming from Mexico, which would do absolutely nothing.

He also pledged to start executing drug traffickers.

When it comes to capital punishment for drug crimes, the U.S. is what Harm Reduction International calls a “Symbolic Application State,” meaning we threaten the death penalty for trafficking, but don’t actually do it. Trump is proposing a change that would position the US more along the lines of countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and Singapore, who regularly execute drug criminals.

It would be a stretch to credit China’s anti-drug efforts. Besides the mammoth quantities of synthetic drugs produced there, its own citizens have widespread addiction problems with heroin and meth. This despite the fact that addicted users often receive mandatory “rehabilitation” stints that resemble slave labor camps.

Singapore also has very strict anti-drug laws. You can receive the death penalty for trafficking small amounts of any drug (including marijuana), and you can even be punished for consuming drugs abroad, if you come back home and fail a drug screening at the airport.

But the country has been extremely successful containing drug problems. It has one of the lowest rates of drug use in the world, and very few drug deaths.

So why do we never hear about Singapore’s successes? Harm reduction advocates usually point to Portugal, which decriminalized drugs for personal use in 2001, as a model. But…