Ending The War On Drugs

The War On drugs has cost the United States a lot of money despite being the War being very unsuccessful. Some say the War On drugs is a war on people or a war on minorities. According, to Dirk Chase Eldridge, the author of “Ending The War On Drugs”, the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but consumes 60 percent of its illicit drugs. For decades, The United States has conducted a costly, escalating, and largely futile, war on illegal drugs. The War on Drugs has been paid for using billions of taxpayer dollars for decades. Our hard-won progress in race relations is threatened by the perception of many African Americans that the drug war is a racist plot (1). People tend to ignore the subject War On drugs because they don't …show more content…
The Attorney General announced a less harsh approach to some non-violent drug offenders (4)("The War On Drugs: A Failed Experiment" book Chapter 1,page 1). Imprisonment has little effect on drug abuse, drug law violations have been the main cause of new admissions to prison for multiple decades. More people were put in prison for drug violations than violent crimes in the last 10-20 years. With people being incarcerated for drug offenses, that leaves millions of children in the United States alone to grow up in households where one or more parents are imprisoned. According to www.drugpolicy.org, one in nine black children has an incarcerated parent, compared to Latino one in twenty-eight and one in fifty-seven white children. While, in the United States fifty-nine percent of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug chargers, compared to only two and a half percent incarcerated for violent crimes. I believe the first step is an admission by the administration that our current system doesn’t work. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that in 1993 as many as two and a half million drug-users could have benefited from treatment. Only about 1.4 million users were treated in 1993. Almost half of the nation’s addicts were ignored. The government spent only two and a half billion dollars on treatment programs compared to $7.8 billion on drug law …show more content…
Because of the disproportionate participation of African Americans in the drug trade, they are sometimes singled out based on nothing more than the color of their skin (6)(“Ending the war on drugs” book,page 80). Sixty to eighty percent of drug abusers end up participating in new crimes (usually a drug controlled crime) after being released from prison, which means that imprisonment only leads drug offenders to more violent crimes. roughly, ninety-five percent of drug abusers return to drug abuse after release from prison. Nearly fifty percent of offenders are medically