Drug Prohibition
Under the United States Constitution the federal government is charged with the responsibilities to protect our individual, as well as collective, rights to life and liberty. Often times this charge leads the various branches of the federal government to create, implement, and enforce policy that is designed to protect society from itself. Noble in it's ambition the result although not apparent initially, sometimes does more to hinder the rights of the citizens it is attempting to protect, and/or the cost of doing so becomes a higher price than that of the cost that is being avoided. In this case it is necessary to re-evaluate the situation and explore any alternatives that may offer a more fathomable solution concerning both protection of rights as well as the cost of so doing. In the late 1980's the United States government made such policy and today the results have done little to resolve the problem and have left the country closer to the danger it sought to prevent. The policy is known as the " War on Drugs". Initially the drug prohibition was, however idealistic, a valiant attempt to rid the country of this terrible "enemy". The objec
To begin to evaluate a policy, one must be able to define the parameters of the policy being examined. In contrast today the price of heroin has sky rocketed to a price of fifty dollars per gram compared to a mere twenty cents per gram, the cost of aspirin. The difference between the two types of liberties is significant. In the early 1900's before the prohibition of so called illicit drugs heroin and aspirin both were sold at about the same price. While it is estimated that ten thousand people die from overdose of alcohol annually. The problem occurs in the fact that is fairly impossible to regulate individual contributions (positive or negative) to the nation in any broad legislative sense. Of the seven hundred and fifty thousand people arrested, six hundred thousand of them were charged with minor counts of possession. States that did not comply with the Bush plan would be penalized with a reduction in funding from the federal government. A negative liberty is the type of liberty we most often refer, such as our first amendment rights. The issue of limited prison space gains significance greatly when you consider an estimated sixty-percent of prison population is serving time on drug conviction. Crime has risen exponentially since the 1989 when the "war of drugs" was first introduced. Around 1985 that rate dropped a staggering twenty-two percent among the two classes, but rose exponentially in the poorer class. Since the federal government has very limited police resources, it would have to enlist the combined cooperation of the states to achieve success.
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