| fatslob-:O said: Frankly, we wouldn't need to decriminalize possession of drugs if we could effectively control the external sources ... "International law" is empty and the UN can't tell a sovereign nation what to do. Yes, enforcing death penalty for drug crimes does work according to UNODC's compiled data ... Nations such as China (0.25%), Vietnam (0.27%), Thailand (0.2%), Saudi Arabia (0.06%), Singapore (0.01%) and Indonesia (0.16%) have low opioid prevalence rates between the ages 15-64 ... For comparison nations that don't give death penalty for drug crimes and/or have more lax laws such as Costa Rica (2.8%), USA (5.9%!), Afghanistan (2.92%), Russia (1.64%), Ukraine (1.16%), Estonia (1.52%) and New Zealand (1.1%) have relatively high opioid prevalence across age ranges 15-64 ... The only reason why death penalty doesn't work in Iran is when their neighbors from Afghanistan are constantly smuggling drugs inside that territory. If Afghanistan ever enforces death penalty for drug dealers then prevalence of opioid usage will also drop ... There might be some nations who have better rates while decriminalizing drug usage but most of those nations actually do worse than the listed East/South East Asia nations and most developed nations are especially sad in that regard when a similarily developed nation such as Singapore with as comparable resources per capita are running circles around them but most important of all is that they still hand out death penalties for these crimes ... |
Blunt comparisons don't really do much good, especially when you choose them as poorly as you did here. Pretty sure you purposely picked all of the countries with abnormally high rates if they didn't have the death penalty and countries with low rates if they did. Kind of blatant bias there.
Now, first of all, as you said, yes, there are different circumstances for different countries outside of whether or not they have the death penalty or not, but that doesn't only apply to Iran. Every country has different factors contributing to drug use. That is why statistical calculations use controls to identify how much impact different factors have allowing you to look at how one single variable effects drug use. As I said before, I am not aware of any statistical calculations backing your hypothesis. (More on this as it relates to the USA later)
So, what is the next best thing? Well, if there is a clear pattern in countries compared to their neighbors, it isn't perfect, but it does say something. So what do we see?
China/Malaysia/Indonesia/Singapore/Thailand/Taiwan/Vietnam: These countries all have some degree of enforcement of the death penalty and they are all included in the East/SouthEast Asia block. Is there a clear trend here? Not really. Malaysia has some of the highest rates of executions in the region and they also have some of the highest abuse rates. On the other hand, Cambodia, South Korea, and The Philippines do not execute for drug crimes and they have some of the lowest rates in the region.
Side Note: The data for China is taken in 2005. Since then, number of registered drug users has doubled. Taking this into consideration alongside estimates of an addict population of about 13million (for a limited range of drugs) and about 50% of the addict population being addicted to heroin, the 0.25 number jumps up to about 0.5.
Iran/Kuwait/Pakistan/Saudi Arabia: These countries all have some degree of enforcement of the death penalty and they are all included in the Near and Middle East/SouthWest Asia block. Is there a clear trend? Not really. While Saudi Arabia's rate of 0.06 is pretty low, Pakistan (0.7) and Iran (2.26) more than make up for that. Then you have Jordan with the same rate as Kuwait and UAE with a rate even lower than Saudi Arabia's. Also, as far as Iran, I think it works pretty well to show that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent. If the idea is to kill everyone involved with drug trafficking, that will never work unless the problem is 100% internal (and even if it is, the hubs will just move elsewhere and continue to feed your country if you crack down on it). You need the death penalty to scare people away from committing crimes and clearly in the case of Iran, it just doesn't work (Similar comments were made by the Malaysian government and many countries are moving away from the death penalty because it just doesn't work as well as they hoped).
Egypt: Egypt is the only country in North Africa which has a degree of enforcement of the death penalty. Is there a clear trend? Yes, actually. Egypt has significantly higher prevalence rates than the rest of the countries in that region.
Overall: There's really no overall pattern. While you can make a pretty convincing point by cherry picking data, the same can be said in the other direction. When you actually bring in some context, those patterns more or less disappear.
For data on which countries have the death penalty, I used Harm Reduction International's classifications. High and Low Application are considered positive for the death penalty while Symbolic application (it is in the books but it isn't acted upon) is considered negative.
https://www.hri.global/files/2015/10/07/DeathPenaltyDrugs_Report_2015.pdf
So, if not the death penalty, what is the problem in the USA? Well if you look into the data, the problem is actually pretty clear. Prescription drugs. The majority of the opioid problem in the USA is prescription drug based, which implies an issue with how our medical systems deal with these drugs. If you look at only Opiate use (which excludes prescription drugs), the addict population drops to 0.57, which is pretty close to the global average (and pretty close to the revised estimates of usage in China) and this is with demand being fed by addicts who lost their prescription or access to prescriptions.
The evidence is simply not present to bring forth human rights violations of this caliber, especially when there are clear problems present which have clear solutions which do not violate human rights
Overall, there is more to say about general ideas about why the death penalty is often not an effective deterrent (especially for crime categories driven by organized crime such as drug trafficking), but I'll leave things here for now.
