The Death Penalty for Drug Offences: Global Overview 2010

[bp]

http://www.ihra.net/Assets/2538/1/IHRA_DeathPenaltyReport2010.pdf

[wastedyouth]

I read the report feeling very neive to the fact that you could accually get the death penalty for drug offences, i knew in certain countries you got heavy sentances but i didnt think it got as far as the death penalty. Although the report did say that some countries did use the capital punnishment as symbolic and didn,t accually follow through.  Although obviously this isn't the case for every country with singapore they gave out 138 death penalties and 110 of them were for drug offences, i found this shocking.

I would just like to say i found this report as a very big eye opener and very informative, it is a very in depth report but i would urge anyone that is interested in this subject to read the report.  There is so much information in it with a break down for different countries.

I would just like to say thank you to the Alliance for the link because without it i would never have come across it, this is one of the reasons i come onto the forum to have my mind widend

[Lelee]

Hi Wastedyouth

You're right, it is shocking. I was also fairly naive until I had to travel to Singapore in 2007 to rescue my son and experienced a regime like this first hand. 

My son was silly enough to have three puffs of a cigarette in the toilet of a plane on Singapore airlines while en route to Australia. When he got off the plane in Singapore on transit he was arrested. As he didn't have  the 3,000 Singapore dollars needed to pay the fine he was thrown into prison for 12 days. He had organised his subutex and diazepam prescription and had all legal requirements but they don't accept subutex in Singapore so this was confiscated along with his diazepam.

He was kept in solitary confinement, in sweltering heat,  shackled with a mat on a concrete floor to sleep on and in acute withdrawal. Needless to say he had a breakdown and when he was finally moved to immigration and locked in a room there he smashed a window and tried to cut his wrists.

I flew out the next day and my son was on a mental health remand unit by then. The psychiatrist told me that my son had been charged with vandalism (for smashing the window) and that carried a mandatory sentence of up to nine lashes of the cane and three years in prison.   

The lawyer I hired told me that a teaspoon of heroin in that country will get you hung and it's a mandatory sentence so no chance of miitigation or leniency. (I have since googled and researched and the information I found is heart breaking and shocking.)

They even questioned me about being a drugs trafficker because my son had told them I was a 'drugs worker' and they misunderstood his accent. It wasn't until I told them I trained at the Royal College of General Practitioners for my certificate in drug treatment that they backed off.  It was a very stressful time and when you're in a foreign country you have to make sure you know their rules or it can cost you your life. Most of the police there are plains clothed.

My lawyer managed to get my son's charge lowered and I paid another fine and got him home the day his case was heard again but a lot of damage had been done to him and he's not been the same since.

The regime in Singapore is brutal and the sad thing is crime is still high there so it's relatively ineffective. Maybe people travelling through there are also naive and don't know about the fatal consequences if caught drug trafficking. The day I went to court it was packed with people waiting to be sentenced and I witnessed young people being sentenced to lashes of the cane and imprisonment for what we would class as petty crime. It was shocking.

Having said that, the people I met while in Singapore were among the kindest, hard working, most polite and helpful people I've ever met in all my life. If you asked someone for directions they'd practically take you there even if it was out of their way.

This was a huge wake up call for me and I joined Amnesty International  to to do something posiitve to change things.  I realised that this planet is such a small place really and we all live here together. We may live in seperate countries on different pieces of land but we're all of one race, the human race, and if there are atrocities happening on any part of the planet it's happening to our kin, to our children.

We need to be aware. 

Linda



 

[wastedyouth]

Hi Lelee, i just read your story about your son and i am shocked, it accually makes me frieghtened of travelling to certain countries, since being on methadone i have never been abroad(so thats 9yrs, never mind the years i was using)simply because i am scared that my methadone will get lost, spill open, or confiscated it just wouldn't be worth the worry for me.  My friend recently went abroad, Spain i think anyway she got caught up in the whole ash cloud thing and couldn't get home, 4 days she had to go without any medication, she tried several doctors and she said they would either act like they didn't understand what she was asking for, others were shouting that they did not prescibe THAT kind of medication eventully a doctor gave her an address of basically the equivelent of a crisis centre, she basically gave up and had to struggle through, but she now has second thoughts of ever travelling while on methadone.

The thought that these countries can get away with taking away someones personnal medication is outragous then to put someone in a mental health unit is shocking, when any doctor looking at him would have known he was just(not just, but you know what i mean)suffering from withdrawls and it could have been easily resolved with medication.  I can totally understand why your son did what he did, i think i would have been in a simmilar place under the circumstances.  Then they think that it's ok to give the cane to someone who supposedly has mental health problems, it;s a contradiction in terms.  I hope your son has recovered from this and is doing well he obviously went through alot i think he was lucky that you were there and could take care of him when he got home

Take care WY

[tpvalley]

singapore used to be a slave to opium and the british, opium made it the whore of the world, many deaths etc, thats why they r so harsh but for smoking a fag?!!
we should have forced them to free him.