> Costs are way higher and users are lower in number
According to a 2023 Straits Times article [0], 3g of cannabis in Singapore costs S$50, which is about US$37.
So a death penalty quantity of marijuana would cost about S$8300, which is about US$6100. (Probably less than that actually because, as with everything, the larger the purchase the lower the per-unit price.) Still nowhere near being "large scale".
Because, we are talking about a government killing people – I myself will say murdering people – over a plant. All your quibbles and defences are just irrelevant when you look at the big picture of what they are doing.
We're not talking about a defense of the law, we are talking about Singapore's rationale of why they came up with those quantities.
And I would have thought when I said "I don't disagree that the marijuana death penalty is excessive." it was pretty clear I don't agree with it. I personally feel that killing someone over smuggling is absurd. Jail them if you feel they need punishment, but killing them isn't justice.
But I wouldn't compare the Singapore drug market to the US one. They are nowhere close to the same.
Costs are way higher and users are lower in number. You don't see seizures of tons of cocaine like you do in the US, it's likely hundreds of grams.
If they set "dealer quantities" of those drugs to be the same as the US, nobody would be a dealer.