The death penalty for drug addicts: China & Canada.

madness yen there are profound
differences in the attitude towards work and personal responsibilities that differentiate China from Canada I display the fact that China has one of the most despised legal systems in the world one of em you know that the court system in China basically nobody gets a fair trial it's also fair to say that China has undertaken a series of social policies on drug addiction and drug use that are incredibly effective that get really impressive results even in the small towns that are right on the border between Myanmar and UNAM even adjacent to the Golden Triangle even an area that has local heroin production or heroin productions right there next door and those if those policies are way more effective than any drug policy ever undertaken in the history of Colombia or any other drug policy undertaken in the history of Canada and we should have the humility to learn from that to learn from that experience even if China is wrong about everything else guys even a broken wrist watch is Right twice a day it's not possible for China to be wrong about everything just because there are communist dictatorship the drug enforcement policy in China has a real price it'll gonna have a price in dollars and cents it's gonna have a price in you know employing police officers and many other things and it's gonna have a price in human blood we have to ask ourselves for the future of Vancouver for the future of Victoria for the future of these places that already have such enormous numbers of drug addicts stamping around on the streets what are we willing to do what price are we willing to pay and are we willing to learn from the full range of examples and case studies around the world whether that be the streets of Amsterdam or the streets of Yunnan China about us yen hey guys some of you watched my video that I uploaded yesterday we'll have guessed that I am in fact filming these videos sitting on the floor we just moved into our new apartment in Victoria British Columbia Canada our desks arrived today so our tables for this apartment today um our bed arrived just a couple of days ago but piece by piece something's being ordered in the Internet something's being bought in person in real life we're putting together the bare necessities but of course the first priority goes to the kitchen kitchen and baking equipment and what have you on which indeed I've spent the considerable sum of money all right with that having been said this video is a response to a comment from mod vegan on my patreon and I sure think I'm gonna make two videos today responding to two different comments from odd vegan so I think she gets a lot of value of her her one dollar donation to my patreon and I get a lot of value out of her one dollar donation to because it inspires a lot of a lot of my my content was responding to her yeah she enjoyed most of the video that we uploaded yesterday that discussed quite a number of different topics but she did not enjoy so much our endorsement in passing of Chinese anti-drug policy so we mentioned very briefly my girlfriend's off-camera here she can she can she have any time she wants to are you gonna put your head in baby anyway we were living on the border between China and Myanmar which is an area formerly known as the golden triangle the golden triangle is a bit of a misnomer I mean I guess we sorry know if you'll inaccurate we weren't right on the golden triangle it's a little bit further south but that is an area where the Burmese side of the border there has been long and intermittent warfare from a rebel group called the ki a the catch in Independence Army and a few other rebel groups - like the cocaine rebel group that I made a YouTube video about there their political situation it's an area where the trade in illicit guns illicit lumber and illicit drugs is well-known and of long-standing and as you can imagine a long-term situation of civil wars is going to be a part of that but where we were in that part of China the government has a very very tough very heavily enforced anti-drug policy and in a very tough very clear public education campaign about what the government's position on drugs is and what they expect to the public in terms of compliance we say in terms of sobriety that's really what this this comes down to and you know I should say beyond that historically the use of heroin there the use of opium really it is a traditional part of their their culture and when European empires first got involved in the politics of the region they used opium as their currency for those of you don't know heroin is a refined form of opium so it comes from the same plant it's the same poppy the same flower but there is a difference in terms of the processing between opium and heroin and in the old days of both the British Empire and the French Empire trying to control that region southern Yunnan and then the adjacent part of Myanmar and northern Laos and northern Vietnam balls there was a black rubber ball of opium and chests full of opium that really was the currency that made those empires function and indeed it was the main reason why they were trying to conquer that area trying to influence that area and why they were even trying to build railroads through that area this is a topic of done formal research on and that I have one formal publication on like something published on paper and in a book reflecting those years of my political engagement storica research and yet today with all of these factors I mean you know with all this historical background political context you might expect the streets of de Hong Mancha to be full of drug addicts and they are not on the contrary it's the streets of Vancouver British Columbia Canada that are full of drug addicts to our horror a world away Vancouver BC it doesn't have easy or direct access to heroin doesn't have easier direct access to cocaine either those drugs have to be illegally shipped they're over a huge distance whereas in the part of you name we were living in you can walk across the border to northern Myanmar and acquire all those things or they could be shipped the other way etc Maude vegan writes to me on patreon expressing her alarm that we would say anything positive about a country like China we're about 2,000 people a year are executed and many of those executions are for drug dealing offenses that generally speaking drug dealing drug trafficking in China is going to carry a death penalty offense now China is very far from the only country in the world that has a death penalty for for drug trafficking another example which is culturally linked is Singapore Singapore is a capitalist country but they also have death penalty for many different drug offences China's death penalty is mostly infamous in general the Chinese justice system the is infamous mostly for persecuting political dissidents and that sort of thing persecuting people to criticize the government that's the main thing we hear debated in the Western press is when you know some lawyer who represented somebody in a human rights case is being persecuted when someone who dared to publish articles criticizing the government is being tortured or interred or persecuted and I have made videos on this channel about that in the past the mean video I did about it I should do more on Chinese politics coming up on this channel as I know of access to a library in Canada and I'm living in Canada I'm not living in China anymore a lot of things with my own political position have changed a video on document number 9 of the new math line movement and that talks about political persecution and indeed the use of torture and unfair imprisonment and torture of people in China imprisonment interrogation torture etc in China however you do not hear a lot of complaints in the Western press or otherwise about the conviction and execution of drug addicts and drug dealers now it may simply be that I am more conservative than one freaking I may simply be that I am more judgmental or what-have-you or that I have a different perspective on you know drug law enforcement and and what have you I know that a lot of her experience a lot of her research is by contrast in South America in Latin America so places like Colombia Venezuela Brazil racine Bolivia also places that have their own violent history of drug dealing drug addiction and rebel armies low level revolution insurrection rebellion etc where the link between drugs and guns is very real with enormous political consequences and you'll be interesting maybe we should have mod vegan come on skype and discuss this with me maybe she really does have very good reasons for why she is terrified of a government imitating the the policies that China has in being so harshly repressive towards drug addiction illicit drug use however I've got to tell you when I contrast the reality on the street between Vancouver British Columbia Canada and the Hong mancha which is in Yunnan Province oh yes I choose the Chinese policy every time and I do so with an awareness that there's a body count attached to it there absolutely is here in Victoria I knew one guy he's also vegan who worked in rehabilitating drug addicts so I I won't describe exactly what his job was but he worked with hundreds and hundreds of different you know long-term drug addicts in helping them get housing helping them go to job interviews I think helping them go to recovery and treatment centers but also more kind of long-term he was more in the long term thing not the short term not not the immediate task of getting them getting them off drugs just for the first couple of weeks quitting but then trying to get them into a lifestyle long term that's sustainable for them and when I asked him and all do seriousness what percentage of his clients are success stories what percentage successfully recover and what percentage fail his answer was a hundred percent failure which shocked me and at first I thought maybe he was joking his tone was very sad and saying that he didn't seem like he was joking so asked him further we know he was not joking his experience after many years of working in this field was of a zero percent recovery rate that none of his clients I don't know how many hundreds or how many thousands he has worked with by now over many years working the field that none of them were covered none of them ever gone back to what could be considered a normal life of even working a minimum-wage job and paying their own rent that they remained variously permanently disabled permanently drug-addicted permanently in a perpetual cycle of relapsing onto drug use and so on that was his professional experience and it's it's very sad and it's bleak Dillon town Vancouver Canada Vancouver British Columbia Canada we saw two different men just walking the streets on the same night on the same night we saw two different men with the needle in their arm visibly as we walked past them so they were on major streets we're in a back alley openly for anyone to see under the street lamps for shop owners to see for parents walking home with their children we saw two different men with the needle in their arm during the moment of injecting heroin into their veins that openly I mean there are security cameras around and so on and of course we saw many many more drug addicts staggering around once they had already shot up heroin once they had already gotten high but on the same night you saw a two different man with the the fled the skin of their arm out and the needle in their arm at that moment and this does indeed reflect as my girlfriend said somewhat vaguely briefly in the earlier video an attitude of Canadian law enforcement that I cannot in good conscience call tolerance I think it has to be called indifference that there is an indifference to these people destroying their lives and frankly probably destroying the lives of others having a very negative impact on a lot of people's lives around them a small number of drug addicts in downtown Victoria how sir pardon me downtown Vancouver we're talking about this would also be true of Denton Victoria but in downtown Vancouver how many hundred drug addicts of this kind do you think you're talking about are you talking about five thousand people are you talking about five hundred people you know real social science work can come up with an accurate estimate these things are not impossible to know but a small number of people are having a tremendously negative impact on the lives of millions of people around them in the city as a whole and I think that is something to be taken seriously so mod vegan raises raises the warning that China this is her statistic I haven't checked it but she claims that China currently executes about 2,000 people a year now obviously that will not all be for drug offenses I don't know we could look up how many of those people are executed for drug offenses but I pointed out in riposte China's population is so enormous that if we look at this proportional in proportion to the Canadian population we might be talking about Canada executing 50 people a year now again how many executions will we be talking about being for drug addiction can Canada do a better job than China well would it be reckless recklessly optimistic to say yes there are many fields of human endeavor where the Chinese now do better than Canada face up to it what is Canada the best in the world in right now maple syrup maple syrup and not much else if Canada took seriously its role in trying to eliminate drug addiction at least this type of extreme hard drug use and drug addiction how well could we do could we do half as well as China could we do twice as well as China I think that really is debatable I'm not some kind of Canadian nationalist whose blinded with optimism or perhaps even optimism rooted in racism that somehow if Canada undertook similar policies we'd have better outcomes with a lower cost in blood a lower cost in human lives maybe we'd kill twice as many people proportionate to our population and we'd have half as much of a positive effect I don't know I'm quite open to the possibility that Canada will never do as good a job in this area of human endeavor as China is already doing I think Canada is never gonna build a railroad half as good as the railroad that connects China to Tibet right now which is one of the best railroads in the world if not the best rail the world I think Canada is never going to manufacture iPhones equipment the way China does there are many reasons for that there are many different things China is better at than Canada I'll just give you one other random one that isn't based on them having low salaries when you go to China and talk to a university professor in any specialized field in my experience specialized field like Buddhism specialized field like history politics languages indigenous ethnic minority politics anthropology I've dealt with professors in many different fields when you talk to a specialized professor within China they are connected to and know useful things about every other professor in China and to some extent every professor in the world working that field working in that field when you talk to a university professor in Canada by contrast it's a useless dead-end they have none of those connections then under that Guana see Guan see is the is the term and in Chinese they don't have that kind of useful cooperative attitude this is one example but if you have a lot of experience working in Chinese society at any level whether it's on the factory room floor or in academia there are profound differences in the attitude towards work and personal responsibility that differentiate China from Canada China anyway there are many many ways in which China actually does have advantages over Canada culturally educationally etc but despite the fact that China has one of the most despised legal systems in the world one of em you know that the court system in China basically nobody gets a fair trial I was just saying to my girlfriend offhand as equip in the United States of America some people get a fair trial some in general multimillionaires get a fair trial in America the American justice system works very well for rich people and it works very poorly for poor people that's a general rule of thumb I say it's America but some people get a fair trial in America some in China it is fair to say nobody gets a fair trial however it is also fair to say that China has undertaken a series of social policies on drug addiction and drug use that are incredibly effective that get really impressive results even in the small towns that are right on the border between Myanmar and Yunnan even adjacent to the Golden Triangle even an area that has local heroin production or heroin productions right there next door and those if those policies are way more effective than any drug policy ever undertaken in the history of Colombia or any other drug policy undertaken in the history of Canada and we should have the humility to learn from that to learn from that experience even if China is wrong about everything else guys even a broken wrist watch is Right twice a day it's not possible for China to be wrong about everything just because there are communist dictatorship it's not possible for Iran to be wrong about everything just because there are crazy Muslim dictatorship I mean I'm sorry semi dictatorship they have their own degree of democracy and in Iran they do have some democracy and some role for elections admittedly but you know the Iranian government's wrong about a lot of things but they can't possibly be wrong about everything and this is a situation and it's maybe not the only one where we have to have the humility to set aside our biases and whether you're looking at this as a political scientist or as a layperson as a concerned layperson say yes you know the drug enforcement policy in China has a real price it'll gonna have a price in dollars and cents it's gonna have a price in you know employing police officers and many other things and it's gonna have a price in human blood we have to ask ourselves for the future of Vancouver for the future of Victoria for the future of these places that already have such enormous numbers of drug addicts stamping around on the streets what are we willing to do what price are we willing to pay and are we willing to learn from the full range of examples and case studies around the world whether that be the streets of Amsterdam or the streets of you nan Jie [Music] ablution