Prohibition On Drugs Causes Crime example essay topic

pro pot: On anti pot's number one: The prohibition on drugs causes crime. Ostrowski, political analyst of the Cato Institute (from James' 'Thinking About Drug Legalization'), states that drug laws greatly increase the price of illegal drugs, often forcing users to steal to get the money to obtain them. Although difficult to estimate, the black market prices of heroin and cocaine appear to be many times greater than their pharmaceutical prices. For example, a hospital-dispensed dose of morphine (a drug from which heroin is relatively easily derived) costs only pennies; legal cocaine costs about a dollar per ounce. It is frequently estimated that a good percentage of all property crime in the United States is committed by drug users so that they can maintain their habits. That amounts to about four million crimes per year and billions of dollars in stolen property.

Supporters of prohibition have traditionally used drug-related crime as a simplistic argument for enforcement: Stop drug use to stop drug-related crime. They have even exaggerated the amount of such crime in the hopes of demonstrating a need for larger budgets. But in recent years, the more astute prohibitionists have noticed that drug-related crime is in fact drug law-related. The fact is, while some researchers have questioned the causal connection between illegal drugs and street crime, many studies over a long period have confirmed what every inner-city dweller already knows: drug users steal to get the money to buy expensive illegal drugs. These studies were reviewed in an article entitled 'Narcotics and Crime: An Analysis of Existing Evidence for a Causal Relationship. ' The authors conclude that heroin addiction can be shown to dramatically increase property crime levels.

A high proportion of addicts' pre-addiction criminality consists of minor and drug offenses, while post-addiction criminality is characterized much more by property crime. Moreover, prohibition also stimulates crime by criminalizing users of illegal drugs, creating disrespect for the law; encouraging young people to become criminals by creating an extremely lucrative black market in drugs, destroying the economic viability of low-income neighborhoods, leaving young people fewer alternatives to working in the black market, and removing the settling of drug-related disputes from the legal process, creating a context of violence for the buying and selling of drugs. Every property crime committed by a drug user is potentially a violent crime. Many victims are beaten, severely injured, and murdered each year.

Last year in Brooklyn, Eli Wald, the father of a baby girl, was murdered for taking money to buy crack. Another New York City crack user murdered five people in an eight-day period to get the money to buy drugs. The user survived the crack, but his victims did not. So in actuality, the act of prohibiting drugs is to blame for so called 'drug-related violence.

' On his number two: Legal drugs like morphine, alcohol, and a pack of smokes are more detrimental to the user and those around the user than one joint smoked a week. Plus, if pot were to be legalized, it would be regulated, and DUIs could be given to those who drive while high. Also, on his attempt at dissing my author, legalize it. com, legalize it. com is the brainchild of NORML creators. It has information compiled from all over the United States and even if you don't buy it, the other card still stands.

Also, legalization will not increase drug use. Ostrowski says that long-term trends in legal drug use suggest that there would be no substantial increase in drug use under decriminalization. As a society, we are gradually moving away from the harmful use of alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol consumption and deaths caused by alcohol have also been gradually declining as people switch from hard liquor to less potent formulations. Finally, use of marijuana has declined, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

As our society grows increasingly health- and fitness-conscious, heavy drug use loses its appeal. Many people are trading in the tavern for the health club and choosing vitamins instead of martinis. The value of health and moderation clearly has less influence on the illegal drug scene, where hardcore drug users form subcultures that reinforce heavy, reckless drug use. For most of human history, even under conditions of ready access to the most potent of drugs, people and societies have regulated their drug use without requiring massive education, legal, and interdiction campaigns. Before drug prohibition, in both America and England, narcotics use peaked and then declined long before national prohibition was adopted.

Today, in spite of the availability of alcohol, problem drinkers are considered to compose only a small percentage of the population. In spite of the fact that marijuana can be purchased on virtually any street corner in some cities, only a small percentage of the population has done so in the last month, according to NIDA. Prohibition is at best a comfort. Perhaps the most telling indicator of the ineffectiveness of U.S. drug laws is their failure to reduce the overall use of illegal drugs. On a per capita basis, the use of narcotics was no more prevalent before prohibition than it is today.

Seventy years of intensive law enforcement efforts have failed to measurably reduce drug use. The failure of drug control should not be surprising. During Prohibition, alcohol consumers merely switched from beer and wine to hard liquor, often of dubious quality, resulting in a drastic increase in deaths from alcohol poisoning. Whether Prohibition actually reduced total consumption is disputed, but it is known that the repeal of Prohibition did not lead to an explosive increase in drinking.

More recently, in those states that have decriminalized marijuana, no substantial increase in use has occurred. When the Netherlands decriminalized marijuana, use actually declined. So in conclusion, drug use will not increase after legalization, and crime will go down, because all 'drug-related' crimes are actually drug-PROHIBITION-related crimes..