The War on Drugs

The Issue With The War On Drugs

Everyone has in one form or another has been affected by illict drugs at some point in their life. Whether your young adult with friends who has lost someone to a drug addiction, a parent concerned about protecting children from drug-related crime, a concerned citizen worried about racially disproportionate incarceration rates, an environmentalist seeing national forests being severely damaged from drugs being grown and manufactured or just an American taxpayer, you have a reason to see an end to the drug war. Drug use has only increased in the last several decades and nothing we have done up to this point has helped to curb this. So what can be done for this growing epidemic that now faces our country?
The U.S. government has spent countless billions trying and trying unsuccessfully to make America “drug-free.” Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, marihuana and other illegal street drugs are much more pure, less expansive, and easier to find than they ever have been before. Nearly half a million people in the United States are currently serving time behind bars on drug charges. That’s more than all of Western Europe has incarcerated in there prisons for all crimes, not just drug charges.
Many of the problems the drug war was created to fix are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called “drug-related” crime is a direct result of the harsh repercussion’s that are enforced when someone is caught perpetrating a drug related offense; because once they are in the prison system they generally become harder criminals who commit worse crimes when there released. Also instead of treating drug offenders for their addiction, they are locked up so once they are back on the streets they are likely to commit another drug crime and the cycle repeats itself. There is also much more rampant spread of HIV and Hep.C because of the lack of tolerance for needle exchanges. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness,... [continues]

Read full essay