I think you mean to say “the ends justify the means”

Posted by admin on June 17th, 2006 filed in General

As the Director for Corporate Communications says over here :

In fact, he would not have been of any interest to CNB otherwise; it was his drug abuse which led CNB to investigate him in the first place.

When Yeo was asked if he had any drugs, he volunteered to take drugs to the hotel where he was subsequently arrested with Ecstasy, ‘Ice’ and Ketamine.

Yeo was, therefore, not a law-abiding person enticed into committing an offence by CNB.

I think I’ve seen this in the movies before. It’s called “Minority Report”. Or “1984″.

The more interesting part however, is the justification for pre-Crime tactics.

Drug abuse is a serious threat. The battle against drugs in Singapore faces a new challenge - even as we succeeded in addressing the serious heroin problem of the past, today we face a growing potential problem of synthetic-drug abuse.

A majority of those arrested for synthetic-drug abuse are first-time offenders. One of the concerns this trend raises is the mentality of certain segments of our society who think that synthetic drugs are ’soft’ drugs which should be tolerated as they are acceptable as part of a modern ‘cool’ lifestyle. This is a dangerous attitude which we must not allow to take root in our society.

Ok, dear Director for Corporate Communications of Home Affairs, since you say drug abuse is a serious threat, tell me who the threat is directed against. Is it you? No one’s forcing you to take drugs. Is it your family members? No one is forcing your family to take drugs either. Or the average Singaporean? No one’s forcing anyone else to take drugs.

The question is, some guy decides to take drugs, regardless of whether it is cool or not, or whatever the prevailing attitude society takes with regards to self-destructive behaviour, where does the harm actually occur?

It starts to get quite amusing when even people in government have to bend over backwards to come up with something that doesn’t even bear any semblance of logic to justify stupid policies. This reminds me of the time some dude said “we identify them and label them as White Horse SO THAT they don’t get special privileges”. Right…

AsiaOne - Entrapment necessary for law enforcement