I bet THEY have won their war on drugs. This how you fight a war you want to win, if you are serious about it.
While I understand how people could be against the death penalty, these same people don't seem to care nearly as much about the destructive consequences of certain illegal and usually heinous activities that give rise to the death penalty.
They asked a Singaporean official once about the death penalty and how many people were executed. His reply was something like, "we don't know how many, and don't care...keeping track of such things is a waste of paper"
Sane people realize that executing the nonviolent doesn't exactly lessen the amount of destruction.
They haven't won their war on drugs, they've simply driven it further underground, driven the prices up, at the cost of human lives - people who didn't need to die, who less "ruin lives" than a beer distributor.
This guy wasn't even staying in their country - he was just passing through. This is a totally gratuitous execution.
Uh, not really. They still have drugs in Singapore but it has been pushed just a little further underground. There are plenty in the Singapore government who buy in that market, and so a little trade is allowed if it is kept low profile and you have some connections. It is the way these things have always worked in countries that severely restrict access to a desired product.
There are interesting studies in countries (e.g. the UK a century or two ago) where severe penalties are exacted for even relatively minor crimes. What tends to happen is not that the level of the crime is reduced but that people stop reporting crime and exact their own informal justice because they believe the official justice system to be inordinately or unacceptably harsh. This effectively disempowers the government to determine justice. If society does not believe the official justice system is fair, they won't use it.