War on drugs: a lost battle ?

Résumé du document

In 1968, when American soldiers came home from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin, President Richard Nixon initiated the War on Drugs. More than a decade later, President Ronald Reagan launches the South Florida Drug Task force in response to the city of Miami's demand for help. In 1981, Miami was the financial and import central for cocaine and marijuana, and the residents were fed up.

Extraits

[...] Young, ruled: "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known . [T]he provisions of the [Controlled Substances] Act permit and require the transfer of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance." The Institute of Medicine's 1999 report on medical marijuana summarized the medical value of marijuana saying: "The accumulated data suggest a variety of indications, particularly for pain relief, antiemesis, and appetite stimulation. [...]

[...] The Dutch discovered that making the purchase of small amounts of marijuana freely available to anyone over 16 cuts the drug dealer out; as a result, there is virtually no crime associated with the use of marijuana. Treatment for addiction to hard drugs is widely available there; 75 percent of the heroin addicts in Amsterdam are on methadone maintenance, living relatively normal, crime-free lives. All this still falls short of legalization, and problems still abound, but the experience of the Netherlands clearly points in the right direction. The Dutch see illicit drug use as a health problem, not as a criminal problem. Drug legalization is neither a simple nor singular public policy proposal. [...]

[...] Other types of glaucoma include narrow-angle and secondary. Treatment of narrow-angle glaucoma is primarily surgical. In approximately 90% of the open-angle and secondary glaucoma topical (eyedrop), preparations along with some oral medications can effectively control the disease, but at least 10% of all cases fail to be completely controlled by available prescriptive drugs. In some instances, available glaucoma medications can cause side effects such as headaches, kidney stones, burning of the eyes, blurred vision, cardiac arrhythmias, insomnia, and nervous anxiety. [...]

[...] In 1985, anti-Government Guerillas, mainly composed of the drug dealers, attack the Colombian Supreme Court. The extradition requests were destroyed, and eleven Supreme Court Justices were killed. In total, over 200 people lost their lives. At this point, the drug lords are using terrorism to force the Colombian government to back off the extradition issue. During the 1980s, it appeared that Central America was awash in drugs, and drug money. The violence continues today, through drug related gang violence, to botched drug raids. [...]

[...] It seems that no matter how hard the government tries to fight drugs, it will always lose. Government's solution is spending more money, imprison more people but that does not keep people from using drugs. In this final part of the paper, I will discuss legalization and decriminalization to effectively end the War on Drugs. "Prohibition . goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. [...]