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Drug Trafficking In The United States Essay

1055 Words5 Pages

Drug Trafficking in the United States Illegal drugs, specifically the trafficking of, in the United States have become a concern and issue to reach a global scale. While he United States has been aware of, and enacted legislation against illegal drugs since the late 1800’s, the ‘War on Drugs’ as we know it today really started in 1971. President Nixon believed illegal drugs to be an unmatched global threat, and the U.S. government, aside from attempting to eliminate illegal drug operations within its boundaries, has put into effect aggressive foreign policy against illegal drug activities (Destefano, 2007). This essay will briefly discuss the current problem of drug trafficking in the United States and how the government tries to solve the …show more content…

In 2002, there were 1,209, 938 mentions of drug use by emergency room patients (compared with 899,977 in 1995), and in 2000 alone, over 1.5 million people were admitted to substance abuse treatment programs in the United States. Americans consumed over 259 metric tons of cocaine in 2000 and over 13.3 metric tons of heroin in the same year (ibid, p. 779).
The U.S. government, as a solution to the growing problem of drug trafficking, invests more resources into law enforcement, rehabilitation, and prevention initiatives (Destefano, 2007). The United States acts upon verified intelligence regarding major threats related to drug trafficking from neighboring countries. Trafficking drugs from a neighboring country to the United States is primarily done because it is easy for a cartel to simply satisfy or surpass the demands of the United States’ prohibited drugs (Destefano, 2007). The drug control goals of the U.S. government are articulated in diverse ways by policymakers, but they have in common the goal to mitigate the use, accessibility, and negative impacts of

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