As I try to find what would be the best option to end the war on drugs and also find a way to solve the drug problem, I came up with a theory:
The United States cannot win the war on drugs, it is impossible; however, they can end it. As you can see on the chart in http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225891527617397.html, only 2.3% of people have tried cocaine, 0.1% tried heroin and 0.5% tried methamphetamines; this means that less than 3% of the population has tried drugs yet thousands of people are killed due to the war on drugs. I had an initial idea and that was to legalize all drugs, no exceptions. However I found out that on 1994 in Colombia the use of cocaine for personal was legalized and ten years later the number of people who used cocaine went up 40%; so that is not a good sign.
My idea is to use Amsterdam’s example, which is keeping all drugs illegal, but not enforcing it as much as the United States. As you can read, in Amsterdam they have café shops where marijuana is legally sold, that way people have the freedom to smoke it or eat it in brownies. Technically speaking all drugs will still be illegal, with the exception of Marijuana, which can only be sold in small quantities.
Obviously this solution won’t make everyone happy, but hopefully it will decrease the amount of people that die because of the war on drugs, and sadly the number of hard-drug users will not change much, which is less than 1% of the population. The major side effect is that marijuana use will increase, but hopefully it will be more controlled.
I agree that allowing hard drugs, suck as heroin or cocaine, to be legalized would be a bad decision. Marijuana has not been shown to cause huge problems as other drugs including alcohol and tobacco. However I think that the reason Marijuana is still illegal has to do more with the people in congress. Most of the members in congress have been presented with the idea that marijuana is bad all of their lives and it is hard to change the way they think. We have seen more steps towards the legalization of marijuana and this is largely due to the fact that a new generation of congressmen/women have taken power.
ReplyDeleteRecreational marijuana use is okay if kept under controlled just like you mentioned with coffee shops. But i can never see this happening with more potent drugs such as cocaine because unlike marijuana, an addiction to cocaine is more life threatening than a prescription of marijuana. And besides, just because marijuana would be deemed legal inside coffee shops, that doesn't mean that everybody can get their hands on marijuana more easily. It simply means that for the people that are granted the membership to the coffee shops, they would be the ones that have the easy access to the drug. But in terms of legalizing marijuana altogether, i agree that it's going to take a lot of persuasion to erase the negative connotation that the American public is so used to seeing in drugs. But as sg9233, this issue is easily swayed by generation opinions and newer generations tend to be more relaxed and open minded to the actual benefits of legalization than the older generations who deem the drug with nothing but trouble.
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