Is there really a war on drugs??
In our contemporary society, the media constantly bombards us with horror stories about drugs like crack-cocaine. From them, and probably from no other source, we learn that crack is immediately addictive in every case, we learn that it causes corruption, crazed violence, and almost always leads to death. The government tells us that we are busy fighting a war on drugs and so it gives us various iconic models to despise and detest : we learn to stereotype inner-city minorities as being of drug-infested wastelands and we learn to "witchhunt" drug users within our own communities under the belief that they represent moral sin and pure evil. I believe that these titles and ideals are preposterous and based entirely upon unnecessary and even detrimental ideals promoted by the government to achieve purposes other than those they claim. In Craig Renarman's and Harry Levine's article entitled "The Crack Attack : Politics and Media in America's Latest Drug Scare," the authors attempts to expose and to deal with some of the societal problems that have related from the over-exaggeration of crack-cocaine as an "epidemic problem" in our country. Without detracting attention away from the serio
us health risks for those few individuals who do use the drug, Renarman and Levine demonstrate how minimally detrimental the current "epidemic" actually is. Reinarman and Levine discussed how throughout our nation's history, various "drug scares" have been instigated by the need for various economic controls. , 1995) of immediate addiction and consequential criminal violence. Conclusion It is clear from the research, that the "war on drugs" is indeed based upon an exaggeration of facts. According to Rumbarger's economic explanation which was applied in class to prohibition, we can see crack as a problem that may have grown from seeds of a poor macroeconomic environment within large, inner-city ghettos. Early in the article, the authors summarize crack-cocaine's evolutionary history in the U. Conclusively, we should allow drugs like crack-cocaine receive to their due attention as social problems, but let them receive no more than that !. But I have noted that what Dorfman still fails to do is to examine the genuine cost-effectiveness of counter-ads to determine whether or not they are, or would be-- over-exaggerated in this perceived "war against drugs. According to Puritan belief, individuals suffer consequences for their actions. From this study, I have learned much about the evolution of drug laws in our society and developed a new understanding of our government's apparent lack of sincerity in their efforts to "protect" us. As Reinarman and Levine do point out, the government was able early on in this "war against drugs--" to appropriate the results of medical to study to demonstrate an enhanced societal impact of crack. They offer that the ails of society not be blamed by today's youth on the drugs that surround them- but instead on their true causal factors which in many case would continue to exist even if crack-cocaine did not. In doing so, she modestly contradicts Reinarman and Levine's assertion that drug advertising promotes drug use.
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