I Didn’t Expect Canada to Be This Ridiculous About Drug Crime

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On March 19, Canada condemned China’s use of the death penalty on four Canadian drug traffickers. In response, China defended its strict drug laws—earning widespread support from its citizens. Here, a Chinese netizen explained how ridiculous Canada's stance on drug crime is.
March 28, 2025
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Top picks selected by the China Academy's editorial team from Chinese media, translated and edited to provide better insights into contemporary China.
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A man holding a Canadian Flag with a marijuana leaf celebrated legalization of Cannabis in Canada.

The news that China had sentenced four Canadian drug traffickers to death quickly climbed to the top of trending on Chinese social media, where thousands of netizens posted messages thanking their police. However, some Western media outlets shifted the focus, suggesting that human rights should take precedence over national sovereignty.

This isn’t the first time Western media has taken such a stance. Back in 2019, Canadian citizen Robert Schellenberg was sentenced to death in China for smuggling 222 kilograms of crystal meth. The verdict sparked an outcry from Western media, with claims that China’s judicial process lacked transparency.

Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg was convicted of drug smuggling in China in 2018.

Six years later, China’s decision to sentence four more Canadian drug dealers to death has once again drawn criticism from Ottawa. The Canadian government protested the move. In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning highlighted that cracking down on drug crimes is a shared responsibility of all countries. She also stated that China applies its legal standards equally to all defendants, regardless of nationality.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning

China has long maintained a tough stance on drug smuggling. In 2023 alone, Chinese courts concluded 109,000 drug-related cases. Between 2017 and 2021, 33 anti-narcotics police lost their lives in the line of duty.

The devastating impact of drugs is a reality that most countries around the world are already grappling with. According to United Nations data, hundreds of thousands of people die from drug-related causes every year. Since Canada legalized marijuana in 2018, drug-related crime has surged by 34%. And yet, despite the acknowledged dangers of drug abuse, cases involving Western nationals are often politicized—sometimes to the extent that human rights are argued to trump a country’s legal authority.

Some Western media argue that capital punishment is a violation of human rights. By that logic, it’s akin to claiming kitchens shouldn’t have knives. China’s harsh penalties for drug crimes are deeply rooted in its long and painful history with narcotics, which cost countless lives. In fact, thanks to stringent law enforcement, both the number of drug-related cases and the number of defendants in China have been on the decline for eight consecutive years since peaking in 2015.

Chinese police seized three tonnes of the drug crystal methamphetamine

In contrast, Canada’s drug problem has worsened since the legalization of marijuana. According to data from Addiction Help, 60% of illicit drug users in Canada are between the ages of 15 and 24.

Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly stated that the four executed individuals held dual citizenship, adding that Ottawa would seek clemency for other Canadians facing similar fates. However, Chinese law does not recognize dual nationality. Furthermore, China applies a consistent legal standard to all foreign nationals involved in drug crimes. According to the country’s case law database, 36 foreign drug traffickers have been sentenced to death over the past five years.

In 2018, the Canadian government, citing a request from the United States, arbitrarily detained Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, a move that sparked a series of political and judicial disputes between the two countries. Canada’s recent alignment with U.S. tariff hikes on Chinese goods has further strained bilateral ties. In 2024, Ottawa imposed tariffs of 100% on Chinese electric vehicles and 25% on Chinese steel and aluminum products. In response, China launched an anti-discrimination investigation, targeting Canadian exports such as canola oil and seafood—striking at the heart of Canada’s trade with China. This combination of economic confrontation and judicial tension has plunged China-Canada relations into a stalemate across political, economic, and legal domains.

In fact, China’s latest death penalty ruling sets an example for the global legal community. If Western media continues to twist China’s justice system, they might first need to consider three simple questions: What if those 222 kilograms of drugs had ended up in an elementary school in Vancouver? What if the traffickers had laundered money through the dark web using Bitcoin? And what if the victims were their own children?

Editor: Li Jingyi

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A Chinese blogger on Zhihu, often referred to as China’s version of Quora
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Top picks selected by the China Academy's editorial team from Chinese media, translated and edited to provide better insights into contemporary China.
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  1. Don’t go to other countries and break their laws. It’s that easy.

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  2. 。。

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  3. Thank-you China! I’m a Chinese Canadian living in Metro Vancouver Canada. We have seemingly weekly gang shootings with signature burnt out cars. We live in strange intersections of distorted reality bubbles! 🤯

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  4. Since legalising marajuina crime has surged by 34%” along with alien spaceships sightings. This is simply not true. China needs to stop lying about drugs

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    • T

      A distorted mind is as dangerous as the lying propaganda from western media. That’s YOU!

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  5. Answers to the questions: That would be a very well endowed private school; that’s why a socialist government would I think outlaw crypto (and nationalize banks and strictly regulate money); vengeance doesn’t bring back a single dead child and the death penalty is not an effective deterrent because crimes like drug smuggling are social and economic pathologies as well as individual disorders…and irrationality cannot prudently calculate. If prisons do not deter, bullets can’t either.

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    • G

      With the death penalty on drug traffikers, China has SHOWN the way to prevent child deaths. You can remain in a delusional and declining society. Enjoy denial. So sad.
      There is no need to “bring back a dead child” when there is no dead child. But in North America, you can choose to continue to work on ways to bring back dead children. So phoney. So irresponsible.

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  6. I think China was entirely right in its actions, and i do not criticize the Chinese attitude towards drug crime or their policy around it at all. I will just say that drug use, crime statistics and the like in Canada aren’t as simple as just comparing a before and after legalizing marijuana, you need to look at the actual history of drugs and related crime in the nation and how it was trending, not to mention the material conditions that exist which directly lead to many of these situations.

    China’s drug laws could not be effectively applied to Canada, nor could Canada’s to China! The biggest problems in the understanding of this specific case are that most Canadian individuals are completely ignorant about China, Asian history and the cultural and social differences (and there are also a few who are at least partly aware but just don’t bother to consider these things), and a government that is ideologically opposed to China and sees it as an existential threat and therefore will take anything and even nothing to create tension and justification for hostilities towards China and the smearing of the nation in the minds of Canadian citizens. This isn’t to say that they overall think China is a threat like they want to invade or something of that nature, the threat is the people of the capitalist nations seeing that there are other successful ways of doing things than what they live under and then wanting more for themselves as well.

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  7. We stand with China in dealing with drugs problems.

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  8. Good. If they can be sentenced to death a hundred times, a hundred times it will be.

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  9. In Canada we don’t have the death penalty. So for many of us no crime warrants death. So if a Canadian citizen is being sentenced to death the government will speak out. It would be a trying to take care of our own type of thing. Even if that person was being a dumb ass and would face a strong sentence here as well. The relationship between the two countries is also strained due to western propaganda (which a whole generation of people have grown up with) and our over reliance with trade from the US which makes our politicians inclined to appease them.

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    • G

      Perhaps you are not a parent. When I see a man deliberately brainwashing children or teens, and lead them to destruction and death, just for a small sum of profits, I believe such selfishness deserve the Death Penalty.
      Well then again, many US Politicians are indeed doing exactly that, but not with drugs, instead with lies, manufactured hatred, unnecessary wars, and Genocide.

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  10. N

    I respect the right of countries, including China, to choose their own paths in dealing with drugs. Nothing about them is simple. E.G., the US made alcohol illegal in the 1920’s and that policy is generally considered a failure. But making alcohol illegal seems to work in some countries, and it’s not at all obvious to me that the harms caused by alcohol consumption are less than the harms of marijuana consumption. People can argue that a lot of domestic violence is linked to alcohol, and I’d agree; people can argue that moderate drinking helps many people socialize who would otherwise be more isolated, I would have to agree. It’s more instructive to look seriously at the policies and outcomes being tried in different countries, rather than choosing a couple of data points and pretending that the correct solution is obvious and has been discovered by one particular country, in this case China.

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