Drug Abuse In Canada

Over the past 30 years, the use of illicit drugs has become a long-standing problem within the Canadian Society and requires urgency of more effective policies. Although it might seem that this issue has been tackled, however, the policies in place are ineffective causing the dramatic increase in the use of illegal drugs nationwide; as the National Institute on Drugs (NIDA) has confirmed that the prevalence of illicit drug use has increased since the 1970’s (Brownsberger & Heymann, 2009, p. 187). Busemeyer (2009) explains that in order to understand outcomes of the social policies and their relation to each other, it is required to include the over-time approach in examining the variables. This advocates a cause-and-effect relationship

Further, in his platform, he offers a very similar strategy that President George Bush used in September 1989 in order to address the issue of drug overuse. Mr. Harper (2015) offers a national drug control strategy, which is jailing people for drug crime that includes drug overuse, drug trafficking, drug distribution, and drug possession. Promoting his views, Mr. Harper (2015) states that, “We as a government will not use tax payers’ money to fund drug use” (Blair, 2015, p. 1). In comparison, the Canadian Addiction of Mental Health association (2015) states that the Harper government is building a policy that is based on ideology rather than actual facts (Bryden, 2014, p. 1). For example, mandatory jailing and increased policing will cause the prison population to increase when the Canadian jails are already over-populated (Blair, 2015, p.1). This policy will end up creating more problems rather than solving problem, for instance, are the new jails going to be build reduce the over-crowdedness in prisons? Or are they going to be privately funded? Ironically, the very tax money that Harper (2015) does not want to use to fund drug users will be used towards the problems caused by initiating the penal policies against drug use. Hence, many social and health organizations do not support these conservative views on drug over use and demand

In turn, media uses these concerns and creates a divide between the general population and the drug users. Media links the use of drugs with violent behavior, for instance, “Cannabis caused 14-year-old- to kill” (Mail Online, 2005, p. 1) or “Woman murdered was deliberately run down by suspected drug addicts” (Mail Online, 2014, p.1). The community then stigmatizes them into different labels, for example, junkies, potheads, scums, smack heads, and criminals. Thus, drug use in the media is illustrated as the key causal factor in violent behavior and crimes, as if experimenting with drugs turn people into murderers, rapists, or psychopaths. Hence, this causes the political actors like Mr. Harper (2015) to create punitive and zero-tolerance polices to tackle the issue of drug use; without realizing that the criminal behavior and the use of drugs has a weak