Singaporeans are told from a young age that we can’t be soft. There’s always some threat, whether foreign or domestic, that hovers over our tiny country. We have to always be on high alert and can never let our guard down. This is a zero-sum game: we must “steal other people’s lunches” before they come for ours. We have to recognise “hard truths” and make “pragmatic” decisions instead of giving in to feelings or idealism. As Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, once said: “You've got to grow calluses on your heart or you just bleed to death.”

The calluses have grown thick and hard over the years. The result is seen all over the country: in the way we subject low-income households to humiliating means-testing processes before they can access modest amounts of financial assistance, in the way we prioritise profit over the well-being of low-wage migrant workers, in the way citizens force ourselves to work the longest hours in the region because we know there’s little mercy for those who fall behind. But nowhere do we see our hardened hearts as clearly as when it comes to the war on drugs.

Standing solemnly before the House on 8 May 2024, K Shanmugam, Singapore’s minister for home affairs and law, reiterated the government’s commitment to the war they’d been waging for decades.

“I am talking about a war against those who profit off the drug trade at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives,” he said. His ministerial statement painted a picture of great success, while characterising those seeking an end to war as endangering the country: “Everyone who is asking us to go soft on drugs, or remove the death penalty, is in fact advocating for a different Singapore, where there will be more people dying, there will be more children affected, there will be more unfavourable outcomes, particularly on people of lower incomes.”

By “everyone”, he meant me and my abolitionist colleagues at the Transformative Justice Collective. Perhaps this essay might be taken as further evidence of my ‘betrayal’. But there are things that must be said.

When I first became an anti-death penalty activist in 2010, I just wanted to save one boy. His name was Yong Vui Kong. He was born in 1988, just like me. He’d been arrested when he was just nineteen and sentenced to death for trafficking 47.27g of heroin. The first time I saw him in court, he was a skinny twenty-two-year-old; in another life he could have been one of the boys I’d attended Nanyang Polytechnic with, playing video games at cybercafés and swearing in Hokkien. Instead, he’d grown up poor in rural Sabah, Malaysia, experiencing deprivation and abuse in a family beset with troubles. He’d run away from home at a young age and fallen in with the wrong crowd. He hadn’t had much of a formal education; at the time of arrest, he’d been mostly illiterate. It was only in prison that he’d taught himself to read and write, and became a devout Buddhist.

Vui Kong’s story was compelling—a perfect example of a young man who needed a second chance instead of the gallows—and drew me into Singapore’s tiny anti-death penalty movement. He was eventually spared; after Parliament passed amendments to the mandatory death penalty regime, he was re-sentenced to life imprisonment with fifteen strokes of the cane. By then, I’d learnt more about how capital punishment is used in Singapore, and how the problem was far more egregious than I’d imagined.

To the state, those condemned to death—the majority of whom have been convicted of drug offences—are known as “PACP”: Prisoners Awaiting Capital Punishment. A blog post, published without byline on the ruling People’s Action Party’s official platform, goes a step further, describing them as “scourge of the earth and proxy murderers who do not deserve our sympathy”. But to their families, they are whole: brothers, sons, husbands, cousins, best friends—imperfect people who are, nevertheless, loving and loved. As I listen to family after family, as one year of anti-death penalty work turned into more than ten, I find common threads unravelling out of a tapestry that’s never been about just one boy or one man, but a system of pain in a society that has hardened its heart to suffering. 

Experts working with people with drug dependence have long highlighted the connection between trauma and substance use. As Dr Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician, wrote in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: “All drugs—and all behaviours of addiction, substance-dependent or not, whether to gambling, sex, the internet or cocaine—either soothe pain directly or distract from it. Hence my mantra: The first question is not ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’”

Why the pain? When I ponder this question, I think of Abdul Kahar Othman and Nazeri Lajim, both in their sixties when Singapore hanged them in 2022. I interviewed Kahar’s younger brother, Mutalib, in March 2022, just days before the state executed the sixty-eight-year-old. A couple of months later, I sat for hours in Nazira’s home as words about her beloved brother Nazeri tumbled out of her mouth, out-matched only by the speed of her falling tears. These grieving siblings told me of childhood deprivation and neglect, of impoverished families that had simply been under too much stress to provide the safe and nourishing environments needed for children to flourish. Both Kahar and Nazeri began using drugs when they were just teenagers, looking for an escape from homes that, despite the best intentions of their over-stretched parents, had become sites of pain, hunger and emptiness. Their widowed mothers had been too preoccupied with the daily struggle of putting food on the table to care about the emotional and psychological needs of these adolescents. “There was no love in the family,” Nazira told me, describing herself and her siblings as having been like “strays”. It reminded me of Mutalib, who’d conveyed a very similar sentiment about how he’d grown up: “We were like wild plants in the forest.”

I try to put myself in Kahar and Nazeri’s shoes… and I can’t. I can’t imagine how it feels for anyone to grow up with neither the certainty of being loved nor the conviction that home will always be a safe place. I can’t imagine the pain these men experienced in their lives, just like how I can never fully comprehend the pressure some of the previously incarcerated people I work with labour under. Every day is a battle to not only rebuild their lives outside prison, but also resist the seductive whispers of addiction. One conversation with an ex-prisoner highlighted the role drugs can play in a life otherwise shaped by never-ending stress and anxiety. “You know, Kirsten,” they said during one of our phone calls discussing their family and financial woes, “if I took drugs, I can just forget about this for hours, for one whole day… just not have to worry and worry so much, I can forget and be free for a while. I promise you I’m not going to take drugs. But I’m so stressed.”

I said encouraging things about their resolve. I reminded them of how unpleasant getting caught for using drugs had been, how many problems the subsequent imprisonment had caused. I urged them to think about all the people they wanted to stay free to care for. But even as I said all this, I couldn’t help thinking about how understandable it would be if they’d relapsed out of a desperation to escape the crushing burden of their circumstances. The magnitude of their need was overwhelming; whenever we talked about their life—plagued by unemployment, poverty, ill health, abuse, surveillance and social stigma—I’d get the sensation of drowning slowly. I could walk away from the building panic at the end of every conversation and return to my own comfortable life, but they had nowhere else to go. If you were trapped in a city far too expensive for you to live in, yet deeply judgemental about your life, if every waking moment was a struggle… would it really be so surprising or reprehensible to grab on to a way to escape, however temporary that release might be?

My personal problems are nowhere near as desperate, but I don’t have to think too hard to recall the times I’ve resorted to escapism. These days, when my fears and anxieties creep up on me, I turn to an online shop or go to the mall for an impulse buy that’ll give me a dopamine hit and help me momentarily forget my troubles. I’m lucky that my coping mechanism is approved, even encouraged, by the capitalist system under which we live, and I can so far afford to live with the negative consequences of my financially irresponsible consumerism.

I share this not to draw false equivalences between serious drug dependence and my frivolous shopping habit, but to send a reminder that we’re all trying to make what we believe to be the best decisions for ourselves, at any point in our lives. It doesn’t mean we always get it right, or that we should bear no responsibility if we choose poorly. But if we want to address harmful drug use and its associated problems—or any other addiction that harms individual and collective well-being—we need to get rid of the calluses on our hearts that tell us to dismiss suffering as excuses. We need to start seeing people, not as failures, criminals or enemies, but as people, with needs and motivations. If we want people to change their behaviour, we need to change the conditions that might make such choices seem more attractive to some.

Vui Kong, Kahar and Nazeri’s are only a few of the stories I’ve shared over the past fourteen years. Over and over again, I hear stories of poverty and deprivation, loss and worry, traumas and stressors that have eaten away at souls. Most death row prisoners are from working class, ethnic minority backgrounds. Most have never enjoyed the same range of options and opportunities that I had growing up. And they aren’t the ones raking in millions from the drug trade.

Like most other businesses, the drug trade functions on demand and supply. As long as there are buyers, there will be sellers willing to provide, for a price. And drug wars make this enterprise very, very profitable. Criminalisation means that there’s a lack of regulation; as long as they can get their product in, drug syndicates can act with impunity. Conflict is not dealt with via civil legal proceedings, but through lawless, sometimes violent, criminal action. Supplies can be tainted, putting lives at risk, and prices manipulated in any direction. The low-level drug mules and sellers who get caught don’t make a dent in overall operations; their arrests, and the product seized off them, are written off as business costs, covered by the profits these transnational criminal outfits reap at the end of the day. The bosses at the top of the syndicates—the real profiteers—neither know, nor care to learn, the names of these pawns. In the ongoing war on drugs, neither the Singapore government nor the cartels care about the little people living and operating on the drug trade’s least rewarding rungs.

“You remove the death penalty, drug trafficking will go up significantly,” Shanmugam claimed in Parliament. “There will be more robberies, house-breakings and so on because drug abusers will need money to buy drugs. There will also be, evidence shows, more sexual assaults, more homicides, and definitely, many more people will die in Singapore.” My country’s government claims that, when people are arrested for non-violent drug offences, when some are led into rooms where officers paid with tax dollars kill them, it’s all part of a “harm prevention strategy” to protect Singapore and Singaporeans.

This strategy operates by determining who’s worthy and who isn’t. If you demonstrate enough remorse and fit the criteria of someone the state deems ‘redeemable’, you might one day be celebrated as a successful “ex-abuser” and used in propaganda campaigns to perpetuate the drug war. But if you stumble or falter, you could just as easily become a “repeat abuser” sent to a Drug Rehabilitation Centre that, despite its name, is in effect a prison. And, if you’re found guilty of drug trafficking, you become “scourge of the earth”, no longer worthy of being recognised as a human being.

One interviewee in the Transformative Justice Collective’s report on prison conditions likened the process of being arrested and thrown into the Drug Rehabilitation Centre (DRC) to kidnapping. They hadn’t been allowed to use their mobile phone to contact their family after their arrest for cannabis consumption. “People who are in your life have no idea where you are… the only person whose number I memorised was one of my colleagues… And it was through my colleague that these people are being informed but they were also in the dark ‘cos how the hell do they reach me?”

Another interviewee said this practice of mandatory drug detention, without trial or conviction, leaves people “psychologically in a state of shock”: “First of all you are trying to deal with your personal addiction and demons, then to be tagged with the idea of prison sentencing, [the prison guards’] typical answer would be like, ‘This is not prisons, it is DRC.’ And you’re like, how is that different, right? So, it makes you feel very dirty, that you are very wrong, the stigma.”

The stigma is draped on a person like a heavy cloak, one they can’t easily shrug off no matter how stifling it gets. Beyond the disruption and trauma inflicted by arrests and incarceration, this stigma impacts relationships, employment, social acceptance and self-esteem. It is a label that marks one out as a turncoat in Singapore’s drug war.

“Sampah masyarakat.” It means “trash of society” in Malay. That was how Nazeri Lajim described himself to Nazira one day. They’d been in the middle of a fight, during one of the rare periods of his adult life not spent in prison. He’d relapsed again; she’d found out and got upset. She still remembers how he’d grabbed a knife and threatened to end his life. “Naz, society looks down on me,” he said. “I’m the worst person in society.” The notion had embedded itself deep in his bones. Years caught in the cycle of arrest and incarceration hadn’t ended Nazeri’s drug use. It had only taught him to think of himself as tainted and unwanted.

None of this is new information. There’s no shortage of books, articles, reports and position papers penned by healthcare professionals, researchers and policymakers pointing out the failure of the war on drugs around the world, and the need for more compassionate and people-centric approaches. In Singapore, I’ve written story after story about those who end up on death row, urging everyone to look at the people behind convictions and sentences. But the calluses over Singaporeans’ hearts have grown over our eyes too, blinding us to any path except the punitive one we’re already walking down. In a 2022 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Shanmugam acknowledged Singapore couldn’t catch the drug lords at the top of the supply chain even as he doubled down on punishment and death for the small fry. “Now, if I say I don’t catch traffickers and wait for the kingpins, basically my drug policy will be out of the window, ” he said. “Are we only catching the small guys and not the big guys? It’s a non-question because, you know, the big guys don’t come into Singapore for good reasons.”

Even so, the drug trade persists. The global illicit drug market is now worth hundreds of billions and continues to grow. In Singapore, the number of people arrested for drug use last year was 10% more than the year before, and, despite mandatory death sentences for trafficking more than 500g of cannabis, the number of arrests for cannabis consumption has hit a ten-year high. In a February 2023 press statement, the Ministry of Home Affairs observed that “drug syndicates are becoming increasingly adept at altering chemical structures of existing [new psychoactive substances]” circumventing criminal penalties as legislation struggles to catch up. The statement also said the narcotics police had observed in recent years that “syndicates are willing to deal in larger quantities of controlled drugs in each transaction”, a change that could correlate with “abusers purchasing larger quantities of drugs in a single transaction, instead of multiple smaller quantity purchases”. Their solution to this, after years of capital punishment, imprisonment and mandatory detention? Amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act providing “more deterrent punishment” for drug possession.

Somewhere along the way in Singapore’s decades-long drug war, we developed an addiction to punishment. We fool ourselves into thinking of punishment as a solution and mistake our own people for enemy combatants. We feel a grim satisfaction at catching these ‘criminals’, but quickly realise that mandatory detention, prison sentences or even hangings are nowhere near enough to secure victory. Before we know it, we’re hurtling back into more policing, more surveillance, more laws, always hunting for that elusive ultimate “deterrent punishment”.

Dehumanisation is key to all wars. You can’t afford empathy. You need your people to see the ‘other side’ as less than human, unworthy of sympathy or regard; it would be hard to hurt and kill them without reservation otherwise. This is why my government accuses me and the Transformative Justice Collective of “glorifying” drug traffickers, when all we’re doing is telling the stories of their lives. They can’t have us showing everyone that these individuals aren’t child-eating monsters, but people. It angers them that our work reminds Singaporeans it’s not possible to wage war against inanimate substances; we can only wage war against living beings.

Lee Kuan Yew worried about bleeding hearts bleeding to death. I worry about the bloodletting we’re willing to do in service of an unwinnable war, and what it means for my country. We see examples, around the world, of governments and societies moving away from drug prohibition towards alternative methods that better prioritise care, support and social infrastructure. Yet Singapore clings on to old narratives of deterrence and punishment, painting fellow humans as undesirable and discardable. I worry about the damage this will continue to do. As long as we refuse to consider the possibility of a different approach, more and more people will be trampled by the merciless forces of stigma and blame. As long as powerful people choose cruelty and repression as their response to those who don’t conform, we will always be doomed to turn against our own.

As long as we refuse to treat the calluses on our hearts, Singapore will always be at war.