War On Drugs Essay, Research Paper

War On Drugs

This is supposed to be a free country. I don’t see that it would harm you or anybody else if someone smokes a few joints a week in moderation. What is the harm done to you? Is this enough to take fathers and mothers away from children? I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the draw but to say that drug users might abuse the stuff and cause problems for their family or neighbors is not very far from saying that because you have a knife in your kitchen draw that you might choose to use it to cause trouble for you family or neighbors. Please tell me, by what reason should marijuana be illegal and please speak from first hand experience if you can.

Isn’t twenty years of doing the same thing long enough? Isn’t it time to step back, gather accurate information and objectively consider alternatives? Wasn’t there an objective once?

Distinguish between soft and hard drugs like Holland did and reduce actual drug crime by 75%, actual crime, not just prohibition violations. Treat addiction as a health problem, instead of a crime-just like alcohol is treated-and you reduce HIV infection and decrease the costs to society.

I am a very opened minded person and have listened to a lot of opinions and read a lot of articles on this subject. It seems that anything we find that stimulates us or alters our state of mind in some way is a stamped as a drug. How can we take something like cocaine, which is so addictive some people have to go to a hospital to get off it and many people have died from overdoses, and put it in the same catagorize as marijuana, a part of a plant which nobody has ever overdosed from.

From my perspective, the government has no reason to make marijuana illegal, except that it acts as a stitch. I will get to that in a minute. If it were legal, I really doubt we would have as much drug dealing and drug deal related deaths and crimes. It could be treated like alcohol, same rules, maybe more, but we could have an age limit and everything.

(Its (marijuana) defiantly much safer than alcohol I don’t know anybody in the right mind who could argue with that. Alcohol is one of the biggest killers in the world, who do you ever here on the news dying of marijuana use? Sure it may cause long cancer, but you can eat it too. Sure somebody might be too high to drive but make rules against it. Its too bad we couldn’t replace alcohol with marijuana. I would much rather see people in my family as well as my parents smoke pot than drink alcohol. I could go on and on with this forever. You probably are getting the impression that I am a pot head but believe me I am not. This subject just irritates me how we can serve alcohol which makes people violent and go home and beat their wives in front of their kids but the government can’t sell a part of a plant that makes people at ease. I feel I’m getting off subject so I’m gonna get back to my point.

But, if it were legal, a lot of marijuana dealers who base most or all of their business on marijuana would turn to other drugs such as crack to base their business upon. That is what I mean by the stitch. Because we all know how crack changed the inner cities of America. Crack definitely increase the number of street gangs, deaths, and crimes of all kinds in this country and we all know crack is made from cocaine.

So what I am saying, is that instead of trying to shoot at all drugs at once, only go after cocaine. Forget marijuana, make it legal, the government sure made a profit from cigarettes and alcohol. Make a profit from marijuana. Use the profits to fight the war on cocaine and heroin. Because you know when the cocaine supply is weakening, so is the crack. Most of the crack sold on our streets is made inside our country by dealers who buy the cocaine that comes from outside the country. But when the cocaine supply is dying down, heroin is going to take over so that’s why we have to fight that too.

It’s the hardcore drugs that ruin our society, not marijuana. Sure there are many other drugs that are addictive, and we need to separate hardcore life destroying drugs from the recreational not so addictive drugs. We need to take things one step at a time. If you’re a thief you can’t steel everything in the store at once, you gotta take what you want most and work on getting that. (I know that’s a terrible example but I think it’s a good one to get my point across). There are many drugs that are used for many reasons. We need to sort through the good (at least not so bad), bad, and ugly and make zero tolerance for the bad and ugly, and really reconsider the good (referring to marijuana).

I think reconsidering some laws and opening our minds and putting our brains to work a little harder on this whole issue will get us the results a lot quicker and cheaper than what we are doing about the problem right now.