Vietnam War On Drugs Essay

Redefining Addiction and Rethinking The War on Drugs
It has been one hundred years since the U.S. joined the war on drugs and drug use has only been increasing. Increasing at an alarming rate. According to the National Institute of Drug Use “[i]n 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans… had used an illicit drug in the past month.” (Nationwide, 2015). Drug use and addiction affect many americans. The approach that America has been taking to fight drug use involves criminalizing addicts and outcasting them from society. In order to reduce drug use and the number of addicts in the U.S, the government must completely change its idea of what addiction is and its policy on dealing with it. The first step in effectively combating addiction is finding discrepancies in society’s idea of what addiction means and why these discrepancies came to be. There are many real

However, there was a human experiment. During the Vietnam war, “twenty percent of all U.S. soldiers were addicted to heroin” (Hari, 2015). Many people in the U.S. were worried that by the end of the war the U.S. would be filled with heroin junkies. When the war ended the soldiers that were addicted to heroin were followed back home and were carefully observed. From these observations, a surprising phenomenon emerged. Only five percent of the troops stayed addicted. Ninety-five percent stopped almost immediately. They did not relapse and they did not go to rehab (Hari, 2015). These statistics were shocking compared to the average ninety percent relapse rates after rehab (Nationwide, 2015).With the evidence presented from the soldiers from the Vietnam war society must stop believing addiction is about drugs but rather the environment addicts take drugs in. transition words,