Running Head: Drugs
Drugs: More Than Just Black and White
Brooklyn High School
Drugs 2
The war on drugs is the fight to keep illegal drugs off of the streets. The government is fighting the drug dealers and users single-handedly, and are somewhat successful with catching drug lords. The government then fails with drug treatment programs. If the government would just educate the drugies why the drug is bad instead of saying it is with no reason then we might see some progress in the war on drugs. The war on drugs is ineffective and needs to be changed. The drug illegal drug situation in America is not getting any better. According to the John Stossel Reports the Federal government fights the war with 50% of their budget, and there are still drugs on the street (Stossel 2002). Jerry Oliver the Police Chief of Chicago says that a third of the Chicago’s budget is spent fighting the war on drugs. Despite this arrests are up 50%, and supply is still the same on the street (Stossel 2002). The priest in the Broncs sees drugs being sold on the same corner of his church, and believes that drugs suck children into the underground, creates crime, and corrupts cops. His solution to the problem was to see drugs to become legal (Stossel 2002).
Drugs 3
Although the statistics are bad the war on drugs has not been a complete waste of time and money. According to the United States health survey among high school seniors tobacco use is down over the last twenty-six years (U.S Health 2007). It seems that as the government spends more money to make its citizens aware of the dangers of drugs that the drug use goes down, but when it comes to inhalants, drugs not really worried about by the government, the numbers have not changed (U.S Health 2007). Also, America has made an effort to destroy drugs before they even come into the country. They do this by fumigating coca fields in Columbia. Killing a tiny portion of the coca crop (Goodman 2007).
Drugs are an area that dubbed by the government as black and white, but is more or less gray in my eyes. Drugs are something that need to be talked about not pushed to the gutter as an evil thing that should be abolished from the earth. Marijuana is our most valuable cash crop. If the government were to legalize marijuana they would save $7.7 billon in law enforcement, and could bring in $6.2 billion dollars in tax revenue (Venkataraman 2006). Marijuana would yield more money than corn and wheat combined (Venkataraman 2006). The judge in the Stossel report said that the
Drugs 4 problem that comes with selling harder drugs legally is that somebody will want to get rich off of it and commercialize it (Stossel 2002). I believe harder drugs will never be legal just for the fact that somebody will want