Drug Abuse and Drug Poliicy Their effects on urban america
Drug consumption pre-dates civilization. Since humans have lived in cities, these cities have been centers of drug use. As science has progressed and life spans prolonged, the adverse effects of drug use on physical and mental health has become more apparent. Governments around the world have attempted to eradicate drug use, and yet in modern times these problems of abuse still exist. ... Is it truly efficient to expend resources in the attempt to eradicate drug use? ... Does drug policy encourage an extremely violent, albeit highly profitable underground economy? Does incarceration of drug users have a prevention effect on violent crime before it happens, or merely diminish the stock of capital and labor available for economic growth? ... There is no doubt that drug abuse enacts a serious cost to society. Many of today’s crimes are drug related. Drug abuse has a serious drain on health care resources. Loss of worker productivity and motivation can be attributed to abuse problems. The Institute for Health Policy estimated in 1993 that drug abuse costs our nation more than sixty seven billion dollars per year and an additional ninety-nine billion per year due to alcohol abuse. These expenditures where associated with crime, illness, premature death, and the treatment of drug addicts. ... Drug related crimes are the most worrisome. In 1999 29,306 defendants where charged with a drug offense in Federal courts. ... (Bureau of Justice Statistics) Drug abuse among those who are criminally active is very high. ... Economic-compulsive motives refer to the need to obtain money to finance drug habits. Pyschopharmalogical motives refer to violent behavior directly correlated with drug abuse or by withdrawal systems. ... Systemic motives are associated with the inherently violent nature of the drug trade itself: turf wars, rivalries, trafficking patterns and routes, etc. Approximitely fifty-four percent of adult offenders reported using some type of illicit drug in the month before their arrest, with thirty-eight percent reporting the use of an illicit drug other than marijuana in the month before their arrest. Frequency of drug use was also closely related to the supervision these adult offenders received after arrest. Of offenders who where incarcerated after arrest, thirty seven percent where using an illicit drug daily, with seventeen percent using crack cocaine daily and ten percent using heroine daily. After incarceration daily illicit drug abuse was reduced to eight percent( although that still means eight percent of those incarcerated are using drugs daily! ... To compare, adult offenders who where arrested but not incarcerated had a similar percentage of drug abusers, but their was no considerable drop in usage a month after the arrest( DUiMA). ... Though evidence points that incarceration greatly reduces drug use, many of these drug/crime problems could be a matter more of poverty. More than six out of ten adult drug traffickers reported their primary reason they first started selling drugs was to purchase goods other than drugs. ... Seventy percent of juveniles incarcerated in Louisiana are there for non-violent crime, a large majority for drug possession (La JJC). ... There is a correlation between drug abuse and predisposition towards arrest and incarceration. ... Perhaps many turn to drug dealing because poor urban environments have little other opportunity for today’s youth.