Did the war on drugs actually increase the amount of drugs on the street? It sure seems that way but how could this be? After researching this topic I am left with many questions. It has been ingrained in most of us from a young age that drugs are dangerous and harmful, so being harmful must be the reason they are illegal, right? If this is the case why are the two deadliest drugs completely legal? That's right, tobacco & alcohol kill more people than H.I.V, suicide, murder, and all other drugs combined. Tobacco alone kills 400,000 people annually. All drugs were legal at one time including opium and cocaine which were once sold at the local drug store, yet America did not have a national drug problem like we do now. Am I saying that we should legalize all drugs? Not exactly, but I am saying maybe they shouldn't have been made illegal to begin with. Prohibition does not work, we should instead focus on addiction. I think by nature humans will always be attracted to the forbidden fruit. Maybe by criminalizing drugs we actually caused them to increase in popularity and demand. This might make sense on paper but I think the problem goes much deeper. What is going on in our society that is causing so many people to want to escape from reality? Personally I think it is a combination of many factors, including breakdown of the family and increased exposure to pressures via movies or Internet. Its not the governments job to monitor our lives. In fact when the government steps in and outlaws a drug it creates a black market, it does not get rid of the drug. Here are some interesting facts I came across in my research. The following studies make troubling correlations between certain classes of people and the criminalization of particular substances.
Human Rights Watch-
"Black youth are arrested for drug crimes at a rate that is ten times higher than white youth even though black teenagers are less likely to use drugs".
"African Americans are thirteen times more likely to go to jail for the same drug-offense as a white counterpart".
Historian Richard Miller
"Hemp was legal and consumed in a variety of forms until it became a way to reduce economic competition from Mexicans".
"When Chinese immigrants began to crowd out jobs for white people in California, opium consumption suddenly became a crime"
"Cocaine, notoriously, was consumed in polite society throughout the century, but was not the subject of police attention until blacks migrated North to escape the Jim Crowified South".
Sources - (Google Images)
http://www.vanderbiltpoliticalreview.com/?p=1083
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_of_drugs
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