Blog: War on Drugs

As of 2010, over two and a half million people are incarcerated in the United States, leading the world in number of prisoners per 100,000 people. This number has quadrupled since 1980 under the so-called “war on drugs,” while violent crime has decreased. In the urban core, poverty is rampant and the public education system is terrible.

Without a proper education, it’s difficult to get a decent job that pays more than minimum wage, and in order to make a living many people turn to crime such as drug dealing

One of these drugs is crack cocaine, a rock version of powder cocaine that can be smoked but is essentially the same drug. Crack is mostly found in poor neighborhoods in the inner city, while powder cocaine is found in more affluent areas. In the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, harsh sentences were enacted for drugs such as crack cocaine, while the powder cocaine laws remained the same. Although the laws have been somewhat altered in the Obama administration they still remain unfair.

Many people in the inner city start selling drugs in hopes of making it out of the terrible situation they were born into. They get arrested for trying to pursue a better life. There are few options. College is out of the picture because of money restraints and very few people around you have gone to college. You could get a minimum wage job and be someone society approves of, but still be poor. You could get on welfare and still be poor. Or you could be a criminal, make a decent living, but eventually ending up dead or in prison.

After prison, drug offenders have few options because of their criminal records and usually end up committing more crimes which leaves them either dead or back in prison.

If all drugs were legalized and regulated like alcohol, there would be less violent crime. There are no alcohol dealers or cartels because alcohol is legal. When something is made illegal, there will be criminals looking to make a profit from it. Illegal drugs are harmful, but so are alcohol and cigarettes. And just because something is legal doesn’t mean more people will use it. If heroin was legalized how many people would start doing it? Probably not very many.

Prohibition has never worked and it never will. It costs 50-60,000 to keep someone in prison for a year; money that could be used to fix the flawed public education system that failed a great number of those prisoners. Why build more prisons when we have the resources to prevent people from leading a life of crime to begin with? Prison just seems like a cover up for societal problems that the government doesn’t want to address such as poverty and ignorance.