gentoobro on Nostr: In Vietnam, minor drug use carries a death penalty. They execute around 200 people a ...

In Vietnam, minor drug use carries a death penalty. They execute around 200 people a year for drug crimes, mostly smugglers near the Cambodian and Laotian borders. When I visited in 2019, and went to some shitty slums too, there were no people like American bums. There were utterly destitute people, but they tried to make the best of what they had and were all working in whatever capacity they could. There were people with no legs sitting on a skateboard on the sidewalk wearing very old clothes, but they wore them as best and neatly as they could and generally tried to keep washed up to the degree they could, and were always selling something on a little blanket in front of them (many normal vendors sold things this way in such areas too). There was this legitimately crazy old woman who kept trying to come grab me because she thought I was some sort of white Buddha god or something (there are zero foreigners of any kind in some areas) but she was moderately tidy and apparently sold things nearby, from what I could gather (Google Translate struggles with ghetto dialects of tonal languages).

The only person who ever begged from me was some brat kid in normal clothes, and after some fumbling with Google Translate and horrible pronunciation, I managed to tell him to go get a job, to the chuckling approval of adults nearby.

Thailand was similar.

Banning all drugs under penalty of death would probably save millions of lives, even including the initial wave of executions. Not that I'm per-se advocating it; just something to think about.