What Is The Purpose Of The War On Drugs?
What is its benefit? It doesn’t reduce drug usage or addiction.
However, it causes many harms:
It causes violence. The Mexican drug wars are no different than the alcohol gang violence of the 20’s.
It causes high prison populations. The US has the highest per capita prison population, which is very expensive and disenfranchises a large percentage of our population.
It deters people from seeking help with their addictions.
The only benefit is receiving votes from those that want to legislate against immoral behavior.
Actually it does deter drug use. However, while it deters drug use, usually in recreational users, it also causes the addicts to turn to crime more in order to pay the higher prices for their fix.
I agree about the prison situation, we should begin killing prisoners that have a sentence of 20 years or more. Space available!
Politicians who want to appear to care promote things like “the war on drugs” often without regard for the big picture. They take resources form somewhere else and stick them in a high visibility program that they can tout to the public. There was an instance where they took resources to go after cocaine producers in Mexico. And they broadcast their success with photo ops and news conferences. What they didn’t say at the time, was that they took the funding and manpower away from finding heroin producers in Mexico. The heroin flow to the USA jumped dramatically, and lots of Americans died from heroin overdoses. True story.
On the local level, it doesn’t hurt to educate people to the problems that drugs can cause. Any teaching groups who can educate people
to the fact that drugs are harmful would be a “war on drugs” which should not cause violence.
and that is the main reason the movement to legalize marijuana is gaining so much ground