Drug Misuse Analysis

Criminal activity and drug misuse always seem to be wrapped up in the same newspaper headings and news reports you see on a regular basis. Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway address the connection drugs misuse and crime have on each other and identify the casual mechanism that connect the two. In the article the author is mainly focusing on a research method that was used to find the connection of drugs and crime using the data from criminals that have experienced these connections first hand. Before this research was done, Goldstein divided the connections between drugs and crime into three different reasonings. The first was “economic-compulsive” crime which was committed to generate funds to support the drug use, “psychopharmacological” when …show more content…
I have always been really interested in drug use and the ways that criminals seem to always be involved in the “street scene”. This was a really interesting and eyeopening compilation of data that helped me discover the true mechanisms that relate drugs and crime to each other in the modern world. I found Goldstein’s investigation to be the most compelling with his simple three part analysis that looked at the economic, the phycological and the systemic explanations that drug misuse and crime were related. Although I quickly found that his theory was missing information and was more open ended than we would have liked it to be.The experiment that Bennett and Holloway did was fair in the means that they had a clean sample and there data was very simple to follow. The different examples that were listed on the last few pages of the text that the criminals were actually saying verbatim was a really prime example of some of the instances that they were finding with their research and was a good way to show this in the article. I thought that the graphs depicted throughout the text were also a great way to show the many mechanism connecting crime and drugs to one another and definitely proved the point that Goldstein’s theory was a good start to the process but was still lacking many of the categories of mechanism connecting drug misuse and crime in modern day society. I did not however like that the experiment was very limited due to lack of participants and the factor that all the participants were manly the same race. It is also brought to my attention that these are all criminals who have been in-prisoned for misuse of drugs and crime but we need to factor in all the people who are not in prion for these acts as well. I think that this should not substitute the findings that Goldstein has but merely supplement these theories. Something that