Questions: Society & Politics

You know:

• They regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with them.
• They engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.
• They used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
• They accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in excess of permissible amounts.
• They lied to the government
• They knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the investigation of their conduct.

To say there is no problem with heavy drugs in America and most of Europe would be a denial of reality. You have fentanyl killing a record high number of Americans and in decriminalized areas like The Netherlands you see the degragading effects on society with homelessness and needles laying around the parks and on the streets. You also see this on the west coast and other places in America.

Then you have places like Singapore where the drug problem seems relatively controlled if you're willing to stomach it when it's your loved one who gets the long sentence or hanged if they happen to be caught drug smuggling. Seems like many of the ones who end up being executed are people from the west and from the perspective of the native of these countries the harsh penalties are not so difficult to bare, especially when the lawbreakers come to your country and add to the problem for residents to bare when the punishments are well known to those willing to risk it. No amount of money could possibly be worth dying over. A person might find these penalties to be distasteful or even amoral, admittedly while I do not fall into this camp I at least have sympathy towards that way of thinking.

Well these people might say that penalties and the payoff are rarely considered by the people who end up being caught, at least not before the crime is committed. They'd argue other reasons find them in this nightmarish situation of being caught and finding yourself facing a death sentence for doing something that in the west might not result in more jail time than a year with a good attorney. Or possibly none at all.

It almost seems too fantastical to imagine a livable place where people are allowed the freedom to decide whether to do or not do the drugs in a society where people practice a true form of freedom. Consequences for using such things would be the effects of the drugs themselves which can far outweigh any other considerations.