U.S. Drug Policy Versus Drug Reality Essay - 1334 Words

If the United States is serious about winning the war on drugs, it will have to face some hard facts about the failure of its drug policy to date. Since Reagan introduced the war on drugs in the early 1980s, the focus of anti-drug legislation has been on incarceration and eradication, not on drug education and treatment. Drug use is viewed as a crimethe same way that burglary and murder are viewed as crimeswithout examining the social and economic causes behind drug use. This categorization of drug use as criminal misrepresents the nature of addiction. Drug addicts do not abuse drugs because they are deviant or even because they consciously desire to cause harm to themselves or to those around them, they abuse drugs because they are†¦show more content†¦Since the war on drugs began, the number of incarcerations on charges of possession or trafficking has shot up from 50,000 in 1980, to 400,000 in 1997. That means that fully 25% of prison inmates are in jail on drug-related c harges. Despite Americas get-tough policies, U.S. school children between the ages of 12 and 15 are nearly twice as likely to have tried marijuana as their Dutch counterparts (13.5% versus 7.2%), though cannabis possession is legal in the Netherlands. Such statistics do not point to the futility of all forms of government action to combat drug use, but they do firmly suggest that a revision of American policies is in order. The currently ineffectual drug policies stem from a few basic misunderstandings about the nature of Americas drug problem. Firstly, politicians are overly fixated on the inevitably futile policy of eradication. Regardless of the number of DEA officers stationed along our southern border, the US will never be able to quell the importation of illicit drugs into this country. The economic incentives to run drugs across the border are just too high. 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