May 3, 2010

Opium dens for King and Country?

I was last in Singapore in 2005, that wonderfully well-run city-state, having flown on what was then (and might still be) the world’s longest non-stop flight: Singapore Airlines’ 18 1/2 hour Newark to Changi hop. As always, after having enjoyed the superb service and hand-mixed S’pore Slings, I was struck by the bold lettering on the landing cards handed out on the plane: “DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS”. It wasn’t always so — in fact, prior to the Second World War, some 50% of colonial Singapore’s government revenue came from the tax on opium sales for recreational use.

In the Straits Settlements (which included Singapore, Penang and Malacca), the seedy opium den with its glass-eyed drug addicts was in fact a key pillar of the state — so much so that British colonial officials had a bad conscience about what critics called the funding mechanism of “Empire on the cheap” in Asia. An Opium Replacement Reserve Fund was created to prepare for a phasing out of both the tax and the legal, but not medicinal, use of opium. In 1946, the colonial government made use illegal, and the successor Republic of Singapore eventually undertook one of the few successful “wars on drugs.”

In the rest of world, where the war on drugs has been distinctly unsuccessful, the older model of taxing drug use (whether legal or illicit) has been receiving lots of attention, for all the obvious reasons. Did you know that some 20 US states now require drug dealers to buy tax stamps for their packets of drugs, on pain of higher penalties including the extra crime of tax evasion if caught? To date, the stamps have mostly been bought by collectors, at least in some places. Nebraska apparently has a stamp design that incorporates a skull and syringe. Still, one hesitates to be too dismissive.