Why Drugs Should be Made Legal
During the 1920's, laws prohibiting alcohol sales and consumption did very little to stop people form getting their hands on a bottle of rum. Instead, the streets became the battlegrounds for organized criminals. Innocent people were being killed and public officials corrupted. Prohibition was a mistake and hopefully we are wise enough as a society not to try to repeat the same mistake. However, we are making the same mistake by trying to fight the war on drugs. Today, drug laws are doing very little to stop people from consuming illegal drugs. Like Prohibition, the war on drugs has been a failure. It is time to re-legalize drugs. By doing so, we would be able to regulate it, increase revenue for the government, and reduce crime.
Regulation is the control of a product. The government should regulate who can use drugs, how one can get it, and who produces it. Drugs should be regulated in the same way as alcohol. There should be an age restriction of 21 on all drugs that are deemed illegal today. Like alcohol, drugs should be made available for purchase at liquor stores. And as for who would produce these legal drugs? As it stands today, individuals produce drugs. Whether it is the cartels in South America or your neighbor in his garage, quality control cannot be imposed upon them. This is very similar to the days of Prohibition. As the production of alcohol moved away from the corporation and into the hands of the individual, the product became more lethal. Alcohol killed thousands of people during the twenties because it was made improperly. Like wise drugs, like heroin, are doing the same today. If we moved the production of drugs out of the individual's hands and into the profes...
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...drugs would drop the prices of those drugs drastically. A user would no longer have to steal to support his habit. As for the dealer side of crime, that would completely be eliminated because the profits would be minimal. This could only happen if all drugs were legalized and put into an environment where all adults could afford them and obtain them. As long as there is a restriction on the distribution of these drugs there will be a black market.
In review, we understand that the drug war is not working. It is failing most miserably. We must take a look of the benefits of legalization and weigh the results. We can not continue on a path, which has proven itself to not work. We must try something new what ever it is. One thing for certain is should we legalize drugs we could regulate them, increase revenue for the government, and reduce crime dramatically.
Drug use has been an ongoing problem in our country for decades. The use of drugs has been the topic of many political controversies throughout many years. There has been arguments that are for legalizing drugs and the benefits associated with legalization. Also, there are some who are opposed to legalizing drugs and fear that it will create more problems than solve them. Conservatives and liberals often have different opinions for controversial topics such as “the war on drugs,” but it is necessary to analyze both sides in order to gain a full understanding of their beliefs and to decide in a change in policy is in order.
So long as people continue to use illicit drugs, the drug trade and all the problems that go with it will continue. This fact has led to an enormous debate as to whether legalizing drug use will reduce the problem. Many think that, if drugs were legalized, this would take the profit out of the sales, and reduce the drug cartels’ ability to generate the revenues necessary to conduct their operations. Legalization of drugs also would enable the U.S. government to tax the sale of drugs, and to use those revenues for programs designed to help stop people from using them. That debate, however, is the subject of another civics presentation.
I base my support of the decriminalization of all drugs on a principle of human rights, but the horror and frustration with which I voice this support is based on practicality. The most tangible effect of the unfortunately labeled "Drug War" in the United States is a prison population larger than Russia's and China's, and an inestimable death toll that rivals the number of American casualties from any given war, disease or catastrophe.
Over the years, drug abuse has been a rising problem in almost every country in the world. Day by day more people are involved in this endless cycle of drug craving, money shortage, and drug related crimes. Congressmen and politicians of United States, seeing this unstoppable crime wave which is about to spread throughout the country, begin to address various kinds of possible solutions to end this crisis in the most efficient and effective way. As discussed in Alan M. Dershowitz's "The Case for Medicalizing Heroin" and Charles B. Rangel's "Legalize Drugs? Not on Your Life," the most popular proposition set forward by growing number of leaders now is to legalize the use of drugs; but will it help solving the problem or make it even worse? I agree with Rangel that in order to end drugs abuse completely, we have to find the root of the problem and use any forces necessary and retain the determination to keep on fighting because it will not be an easy battle.
Tooley Michael, “ Our Current Drug Legalization: Grounds for Reconsideration,” Newsletter of the Center for Values and Social Policy, vol8, no. 1, Spring 1994. Rpt.in Current Issues and Enduring Questions. Ed. Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1996. 385-89.
A 2012 poll showed that 58% of Americans are in favor of decriminalization of drugs like Marijuana, as opposed to 12% back in 1969. [1] Many Americans feel that the war on drugs has failed, and that our police officers and other federal institutions could be making better use of their time, effort, and fiscal resources. The cost of this war on drugs has become so great. Not only does the war cost billions to enforce, but countless lives are lost as the cartels become more violent in their pursuit of power.
Drugs will even become safer for those who are willing to use them. Government regulations on drug quality will make the drugs more pure, and potent, taking the harmful additives that some drug makers put in. Like cigarettes, warnings would probably be posted on drug packages stating “The use of crack may be harmful to your health.” As well as on windows of the stores that sells the drugs. An age limit to buy drugs would probably be 21. Clean, sterile needles would also be provided to heroin users and stop the spread of diseases such as AIDS from contaminated and dirty needles.
Many feel today we are loosing the war on drugs. People consider legalization unnecessary. They feel that it will increase the amount of drug use throughout the world. They state that in many cases, drug users who have quit quit because of trouble with the law. Legalization would eliminate the legal forces that discourage the users from using or selling drugs. They also say that by making drugs legal, the people who have never tried drugs for fear of getting caught by the law will have no reason to be afraid anymore and will become users (Potter 1998).
Just say no? This is not exactly the philosophy that the vast majority of the United States population tends to follow. Drugs have become a routine aspect of everyday life in the United States. Neither a gigantic metropolis nor a minute town have gone without feeling the everlasting effects of drugs. Drug use has always posed a major dilemma for America to overcome. The banning of illegal drugs takes many back to the days of the Prohibition problems involving the banishment of alcohol. Prohibition obviously did not work in the 1920’s, and some modern day people feel that making drugs legal would solve the constantly rising drug problem. In his article Facing up to Drugs: Is Legalization the Solution?, Pete Hamill presents both sides of the argument very thoroughly. Using tremendous techniques in both writing and in major points, the author persuades the reader to give a great deal of consideration to the author’s belief that legalization is the answer to America’s drug problem.
Recreational drug use has been controversial for years. Government has deemed the use of certain drugs to be dangerous, addictive, costly, and fatal. Governmental agencies have passed laws to make drugs illegal and then have focused a great deal of attention and money trying to prohibit the use of these drugs, and many people support these sanctions because they view the illegality of drugs to be the main protection against the destruction of our society (Trebach, n.d.). Restricting behavior doesn’t generally stop people from engaging in that behavior; prohibition tends to result in people finding more creative ways to obtain and use drugs. However, just knowing that trying to control people’s behavior by criminalizing drug use does not work still leaves us looking for a solution, so what other options exist? This paper will discuss the pros and cons about one option: decriminalizing drugs.
Drug use is part of human nature, but the unimaginable wealth involved leads to the corruption of the police, judges, and elected officials. There is no reason to have the government regulating what goes into an individual’s body. An extreme case of what we’re letting the government do is letting them take away our own self, an individual’s ownership over his own body. I think it’s in everyone’s interest to legalize all drugs, since this war is going nowhere, letting the government get more powerful than it was ever meant to have been, and it’s putting numbers over our names.
Prohibition did not work with alcohol and it is not working with drugs. We as a country need to come up with better solution legalization and regulating all drugs would be beneficial all around. Money spent on battling the war on drugs could be used in far more beneficial ways.
The war on drugs has been heavily criticized over the years due to its incompetence in reducing drug use. This is probably due to the fact that we have never fought the “war on drugs as we have fought other adversaries”, as Charles B. Rangel writes in “Why Drug Legalization Should Be Opposed”(288). However, in “Should Drugs Be Legalized?”, William J. Bennett contends that “every civilized society has found it necessary to exert some form of control over mind-altering substances”, which justifies the importance of the war on drugs (292). In “We’re Losing the Drug War Because Prohibition Never Works”, Hodding Carter III says that “hard drugs are estimated to kill 4,000 people a year directly and several tens of thousands indirectly” (290). Gary E. Johnson states in “The Case for Drug Legalization” that “2,000 to 3,000 people died in 1998 from abusing cocaine and heroine” (285). I deem drug legalization unnecessary because drug use is already decreasing. Furthermore, legalizing drugs will also result in the actions of imposing harm onto others.
The legalization of drugs has been an enormous issue in politics for an extremely long time. Many people believe that the legalization of drugs will allow the government to gain more control and therefore reducing crime on the streets. Another issue in this matter is that the government will be able to profit money off the drugs and be able to control prices and what age you will have to be to be able to buy the drug.
Legalizing recreational drugs does not mean making drugs accesible to all people. The drugs that are legal today, alcohol and tobacco (nicotene) aren’t available to just everyone; they are regulated. Only certain people are allowed to buy them. Since the drug trade is unregulated, drugs are sold anywhere they can be (e.g. schools), allowing children to have access to them. If these drugs were illegal, than that trade would stagnate, and children wouldn’t have such easy access to them. It makes sense… do you ever see people in schools selling beer or cigarrettes? Also, the usual cause of drug overdose is the fact that a person cannot know the potency of the drug he/she is taking. There are no standards because the trade of drugs is illegal in the first place. If they were legal, there would be a standard of quality for all drugs, regulated by the FDA.