“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well. Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”
There's the Singapore solution. "Singapore executes man for trafficking two pounds of cannabis", April 23, 2023.[1]
SEA countries regularly execute drug mules. Does it work? Do they have drug problems? Is there any reliable data at all? How big is the deterrence effect?
Take the recent cases of human trafficking through the EU border (the Serbian-Hungarian in particular), over the past years about 600 traffickers were picked up by police and sentenced to so and so years in prison. And ... did it do anything to the trafficking numbers? Unlikely, because these low-level mules are also desperate individuals, not the ones organizing things and collecting the money.
The opposite of this is the UK where you can go to a festival and have any drugs you bought tested to make sure they are genuine and then handed back to you, no questions asked.
Obviously, the solution is somewhere between these two extremes. The softer end seems to be loosing though.
There's the Singapore solution. "Singapore executes man for trafficking two pounds of cannabis", April 23, 2023.[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/asia/singapore-cannabis-execu...