Quote Originally Posted by Catiline View Post
Flights to Thailand and Bali are cheap.

As with everything in life you can find such things in SGP if you want to, and indeed here in Dubai as well. In both cases you'd be crackers to get involved. In Singapore you need fairly large amounts of drugs to face the the death penalty, but you're going to jail for a long time regardless. Singapore is not a place to get sentenced to death - you get one appeal trial, and one appeal to the President (who in 50 years has granted less than 10). Then they execute on a Friday morning. 4 days notice if you're Singaporean, a couple of weeks for foreign nationals.


In Dubai it's the death penalty if you've got enough to constitute intent to supply - about 30g in their eyes. Well, death penalty if you're British, counseling if you're Emirati. When Grooverider tried pretty much exactly the same thing as Snoop in the story above and got 4 years in an Emirati prison - served about 7 months before the Ramadan pardons.
Every now and then I read about Dutch people incarcerated in foreign countries. Drug offenses, specifically, and mostly in Asian countries. While I think that the punishments they deal out over there are draconian I don't feel much sympathy for them. Most of them are middle-class tourists or business travelers that, for some reason, take a risk in violating the law of the land and act indignant when they're caught. If you can't go for a few days or weeks without your substance of choice, don't go to countries that frown upon it.

IIRC there was this guy who got convicted in Thailand for having a personal stash of cocaine; our government managed to broker a deal where he'd serve out a (reduced) part of his sentence in the Netherlands. I read an interview with some family members where they complained that our goverment didn't A) broker a better deal, or B) wouldn't break their agreement and set the guy free unilaterally as soon as he reached the Netherlands. Big facepalm there.