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sundin13 on 30 October 2017
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fatslob-:O said:
sundin13 said:

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.

Not really because the majority of the countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan and United Arab Emirates have similarly low opioid prevalence rates among the age groups 15-64 ... (Actually death penalty is still legal in South Korea and for drug crimes too but for now it's on a moratorium and there's still prisoners on death row.) 

You may not like it but death penalty does work in the vast majority of the countries where data is available ... 

Similarily the Philippines used to have death penalty for drug crimes and it used to have low opoid prevalence along with it when the data was collected but ever since the death penalty was suspended in 2006 the nation was hit with a drug epidemic of massive proportions that lead to the election of Rodrigo Duterte ... 

You say that prescription opioids are the main problem problem in the US but that is not true since non-prescription opioids supply such as heroin or synthetic opioids are increasing at a faster rate and accounts for more deaths than prescription opioids ... 

You really aren't responding to what I am saying about geographical trends (or really much of anything I said for that matter). When you look at the data, countries with a high prevalence of the death penalty don't really show any outstanding trends making it impossible to determine without in-depth statistical calculations whether or not there is any effect at all. The countries you are listing don't show any outstanding characteristics, and many of them are symbolic application states (like the USA) where executions for drug crimes either don't happen or are incredibly rare, making them poor poster-boys for your argument. 

As for prescriptions, again, just look at your data. About 90% of the use of opioids comes from prescription drugs in the USA. Actually, I'm not going to argue this point. Read your own sources:

"The opioid epidemic has its roots in the explosive growth of prescription painkillers."

"Unfortunately, as the supply of painkillers has dropped, many addicts have turned instead to heroin (see chart), which is cheap and plentiful. "

It is exactly as I said. People get hooked by prescription drugs and when they are unable to continue their prescription or find prescriptions, they turn to heroin (or other street opioids). Prescription drugs funnel addicts to street drugs (as I said earlier).

Last edited by sundin13 - on 30 October 2017