Public+Policy+-+Drug+Policy


 * Drug Policy**

Our government’s war on drugs has led us to form what is now our current drug policy. A drug policy in other words is a government’s attempt to settle the negative effects of drug addiction in its society. Everyone has their own reasons to why they want to end the war on drugs. There are many different factors in today’s world that give clear reasons that we as a nation need to find a solid way to end the war on drugs. Several different factors include economics, drug war funding, terrorism, environmental consequences, and public health crisis. I’m going to explain what the drug policy has to do with each one of these subjects and how they affect America today. First is economics. Drug trafficking is obviously illegal but of course people are still bringing drugs into the US every day. Even though many people depend on the drug trade to live there life, it still needs to be stopped. The Drug Policy Alliance Network said, “Risk-taking criminal organizations were compelled to traffic in products that provided the most bang for the buck.” This makes the spread of more potent drugs become more available throughout the States. Next is the amount of money spent for funding for the war on drugs, even though most of the money comes from The Byrne Grant Program which provides hundreds of millions of dollars each year for crime prevention, endless cities in America still have to spend a lot of their own money to try and control or stop the war on drugs. Also, terrorism has a lot to do with the war on drugs, "[s]sixty percent of all the drugs that enter the US start or pass through Colombia," said US drug czar Barry McCaffrey. Illegal drugs make up a total of 8% of all international trade while textiles are only 7.5%, and motor vehicles are only 5.3%. This large percent of international drug trade has without a doubt caused violence across the world. According to drugpolicy.org, attempts to limit the supply of illegal drugs while there is demand actually increases the profitability of drug trafficking. The next factor is environmental consequences. One problem that is hurting the environment is the production and manufacturing of some illegal drugs like cocaine, marijuana, and opium poppy, these illegal drugs are taking up several hundreds of thousands of acres that have completely wiped out the native vegetation in areas like the rainforests and erosion-prone cloud forests. Also in order to maintain these illegal drugs one must use several pesticides, fungicides and toxic chemicals, which in the end are being dumped into the rivers. Finally, the public health crisis and the use of syringes for a wide variety of illicit drugs is a cause for major concern. The most common types of diseases when it comes to syringes are HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis B and C. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 57% of AIDS cases among women are linked to injection drug use or sex with partners who inject drugs. The Drug Policy has been around for several centuries. Our present drug policy began at the beginning of this century. From the beginning of the Civil War to the end of the 19th century the use and sale of opium, morphine, cocaine and other psychoactive drugs were legal and common. Around that time, in 1914, congress passed The Harrison Act; this Act restricted the distribution of those narcotics to physicians only. So, in theory this Act required anyone selling drugs to be licensed and to keep all of their sale records. Following The Harrison Act of 1914, The Behrman decision of 1922 further restricted the ability for physicians to prescribe narcotics, which in the end resulted in legal supplies of opiates and other drugs becoming unavailable by the 1920’s. In more current times, President Obama speaks out about the drug policy saying that he believes that the drug policy reform should be treated as a health issue and not criminal justice. When discussing the current drug policy that we follow it is important to know that a meeting is to be held in the next month to set up the policy for the next decade. Many people will say that the Drug Policy we have now doesn’t need to change completely, that we just need to do more of the same things we are doing now. But in truth, something needs to be done. As of now the war on drugs has failed. The United States spends over 40 billion dollars every year on trying to stop the supply of drugs. 1.5 million people that live in the United States are arrested each year for drug offences. “In Mexico more than 800 policeman and soldiers have been killed since 2006. According to the UN’s estimate the drug industry is worth more than $320 billion a year. The only way to fix this is to replace the existing strategy with more effective drug policies. A survey taken by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration stated that 15.9 million Americans ages 12 and older confessed to using an illicit drug. The most common used drug in America is marijuana, about 37% of American citizens reported lifetime use of this illicit drug. In the same survey a test that asked high school students if they have used and illicit drug at least once in their life, 53% of the kids said they had. These drugs don’t come cheap either, In the year 2000 Americans spent an estimated $36 billion on cocaine, $11 billion on marijuana, $10 billion on heroin, $5.4 billion on methamphetamine, and $2.4 billion on other illegal substances (White House Drug Policy). In the end, the war on drugs will never end, but when a new and stronger drug policy is put into action many things are possible to change. From the economic crisis, drug war funding, and the public health crisis, it is clear that if our country needs to find a way to control these outbreaks. If not done so then the problems will only get worse with time.

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