Drug war woes
By
Rachel Goldberg |
IDS
POSTED AT
08:11 PM ON Nov. 17, 2009
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We tend to forget as a country that our longest and most costly war has been the war on drugs. Many people believe that this is a long-failing battle, and I tend to agree.
This year, drug arrests are expected to exceed 1.8 million people, and law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations than any other crime in the past two years.
In May, the head of the National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, said that he wanted to eliminate the idea of a “war on drugs” and instead focus on treatment as opposed to incarceration in order to reduce the drug problem.
This is an important step in the right direction, and I truly hope that Kerlikowske makes effective changes towards this aim.
The war on drugs, besides failing to significantly reduce illicit drug use, also exploits issues such as racism. According to drugpolicy.org, African Americans comprise about 13 percent of total drug users, yet they are 38 percent of the arrests for drug offenses and 59 percent of the convicted offenders. Instead of alleviating drug problems, our government is unjustly creating further racial rifts. Sadly, it is impossible to talk about the war on drugs without talking about racism. Our drug war repeatedly ignores class and race in its policies, and therefore cannot alleviate many of the underlying factors that contribute to rampant drug abuse.
With talks of nationwide decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, it is absolutely insane that responsible adults are sentenced to serve jail time for using a drug that has been mislabeled as a Schedule I drug, meaning that it has no medicinal use. This is an obvious flaw in the system, and responsible citizens utilizing the drug for medicinal purposes should not be imprisoned due to the mislabeling of the substance.
With Obama’s election, a Web site called the Citizen’s Briefing Book allowed U.S. citizens to voice their opinions on the most important issues in America. The top ideas were to be given to Obama at the inauguration, and the most popular idea was “Ending Marijuana Prohibition.”
One main reason for the war on drugs is that we need to be protected against certain substances because they are dangerous to our health and are quite simply bad for us. However, with the legality of alcohol and tobacco, this argument stands on shaky ground.
I agree with Kerlikowske that a total change in focus must be taken in order for an effective drug policy to be enacted. By imprisoning mass amounts of drug abusers, the war on drugs becomes a war on the people instead of one for the people. Treatment should be a much higher focus, as opposed to racist arrests that do nothing to truly eliminate the real drug problems in many impoverished areas.
At the very least, the heart of the issue should be drugs and not war.