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Essays about drug decriminalization
Legalization of drugs in america
Argument on decriminalization of drugs
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Essays about drug decriminalization
Legalization of drugs in america
Argument on decriminalization of drugs
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Randy E. Bartnett claims that “drug laws cause more harm to addicts and society than drugs themselves.” According to Bartnett, “Drug prohibition makes drugs so expensive, the addicts trying to crime in order to obtain money to buy them. Furthermore, drug prohibition is unfair in that it punishes users for committing a “crime” that has no victim.” Some people might agree with the idea that legalizing drugs would benefit addicts because then they would not be able to obtain drugs so easily.
If drugs were legal in the Untied States and people were educated on their affects, the drug world would eventually eradicate
In a span of seventeen years, from 1980 to 1997, the number of the incarcerated individuals imprisoned due to non-violent drug offenses increased from forty thousand to five hundred thousand (Drugpolicy.org, n.d.). At the start of the decade only 2% of Americans viewed drugs in America as a major issue, but after only nine years, that number grew to an astonishing 64%. The media and politicians contributed to this meteoric rise in such a short time. Television networks and news programs began to cover the negative side effects of drugs that were ignored during the two previous free living decades.
Because more goods are being sold, the economy will benefit from more drugs being sold and becoming widely accessible. Despite the fact that they are currently illegal, drugs are still sold, but because they are legal, their exports do not benefit the American economy. In order to participate in the billion dollar drug trading industry, we would therefore need to legalize drugs in order to support the American
The supply of drugs would dry up quickly, however, if there were not an incessant, powerful demand for them in this country. America has an estimated $80 billion a year habit in illegal drugs, and the legal attacks on one kind of drugs (heroin in the 1950s, psychedelic substances and marijuana in the 1960s), only made consumers to turn to other substances (cocaine and its refined crystal "crack" in the 1970s and 1980s). The demand for illegal drugs is so great that removal of the source of supply in, say, Latin America, would only cause production to begin somewhere else. This is precisely what happened with opium and heroin, when production moved from Turkey to Southeast Asia and then to Mexico between 1950 and 1975, and with marijuana, which came largely from Mexico until the 1960s, but which is now produced domestically on a large scale. The lesson is obvious: "The problem really lies not with the drug-producing countries but with consuming countries like the U.S., which provide an avid market for their output."
The main issue when it comes to drugs in the United States is the inefficient policies and sentencing laws that have been created. Also, the injustices within these policies pertaining primarily to race. Once the “war on drugs” was claimed the only way the government and law enforcement saw fit to handling this skyrocketing issue was to incarcerate offenders. Although this solution worked for a while, other alternatives needed to be made. However, these alternatives were not made and this left the drug policies, sentencing laws, and injustices at a standstill.
For example, agencies have been established with the sole intent to manage drug use and distribution and technology has been exclusively developed to detect the presence of drugs. Yet, evidence has indicated that such exhaustive efforts have been relatively unsuccessful. First, it has been assumed that drugs have perpetuated violence in society and based on this rationale, it was believed that by the suppressing the pervasiveness of drugs that incidents of violence would simultaneously diminish. However, reality has failed to align with the expectations that had initially been anticipated. Research findings have suggested that the decriminalization of drugs would result in a less adversarial drug market in which conflicts have tended to arise among dealers as well as between dealers and buyers (Common Sense for Drug Policy, 2007, p. 21).
Decriminalization in America Imagine a country where all drugs are legal. Most people imagine a place with addicts lining the streets, needles and baggies full of unknown substances littering the floor, and thousands of deaths due to overdosing. This is because of the stigma around drug use that has risen from the war on drugs, which has turned the use of drugs from being seen as a health issue into being treated as a crime. Instead of trying to help the people who are abusing these substances as an escape from their normal lives, the government decided to blame drugs for causing people to abuse them. But in reality drugs can’t force someone to try one, each and every addict started off as just a normal person experimenting, and sending
Legalizing a drug that’s been illegal for decades seems intimidating and nerving but if we instead focus on all the good that comes from legalization, we just may be taking a step towards the right
While there are many reasons to be for the legalization of drugs, many people forget that the reason they’re illegal is to discourage drug
However, there are many that argue that the decriminalization of possession of drugs would redirect focus of the law enforcement system of any country to put more effort into arresting dealers and big time criminals, instead of arresting minor criminals for mere possession, and thus be more effective. It also has more focus on the drug user instead of drug lords which is a more humane approach as compared to the others. Decriminalisation then includes diversion programmes instead of incarceration. Decriminalisation also removes the stigma attached to a criminal conviction for the use of
Two other theories are discussed in chapter 12 regarding drugs and crime: drug enslavement theory and general deviance syndrome theory. The book states that according to drug enslavement theory, “Drug users are forced into a life of crime because they cannot afford to pay for their drug habits unless they use crime to get money for their next fix” (Thio, 2013, pg. 311). The book states that according to general deviance syndrome theory, “The high correlation between drug use and crime does not mean that drug use causes crime because most drug users with a criminal record have committed crime before using drugs” (Thio, 2013, pg. 311). Both theories suggest that using drugs and committing crimes are related. Therefore, if marijuana use is legalized, the assumption can be made that there would essentially be some kind of decline in crime in regard to marijuana charges.
Millions of people around the world are consumers of marijuana. The demand for legalizing marijuana has grown throughout the years. Users of marijuana pledge for it to be legalized to avoid the prison life. For now, marijuana is an illegal drug in almost all countries. With the demand of it increasing, the legalization of marijuana has grown to be a very controversial topic recently.
Possession and use of cannabis is a common offence, so making it lawful, society stops people making this crime and removes them from this crime
Prohibition on certain drugs may prevent a certain number of people from taking drugs, but in the process, it is causing huge damage to society as a whole. For instance, prohibition actually makes drugs stronger. It was the same during alcohol prohibition, which led to an increased consumption of strong liquor over beer. Just think of how many criminal organizations that exist which depend on the sale of illegal drugs. If the government made all illegal drugs legal for recreational use for adults all those criminal organizations wouldn’t exist because they wouldn’t be making any money.