The War on Drugs A Global Loss Essays - Law, Foreign Relations

The War on Drugs: A Global Loss The global war on drugs has failed, having no success in accomplishing its goals and infringing on human rights. It has wrought immeasurable damage among foreign nations and even in areas within our own with already unstable infrastructure. The only rate in relation to drug use that the plan had succeeded in lowering were that of survival. None of these facts are intended to permit free access to narcotics without any care, but rather they serve to bring to light the critical flaws with our current system of countermeasures. Laws on narcotics have been being put in place since the late nineteenth century, but the first federal action in the United States was in 1920 with Amendment XVIII to the Constitution, banning the possession and distribution of alcohol. Only thirteen years later it was repealed, after the alcohol trade boomed in the black market and alcoholism worsened. This was not the end of the bans, however, as in 1971, President Richard Nixon mailed a message to congress announcing that drugs were US public enemy number one. This was the beginning of the multimillion you should probably say dollar, to eventual multibillion costing project to contain and prevent drug use. After over forty years there has been little to no progress shown and the prices have only scaled up. The global war on drugs needs to be reformed, there is no good in keeping the methods as they are, as there are no signs of success, it overrules the rights of human beings in the conquest of one day stamping out drug use and leaves societal footprints that have yet to resolve after decades to recover. There is no doubt that this is a necessary change the United States needs to make for the future of both itself and many nations now involved in the drug trade. Extensive use of drugs while under the harsh policing of laws imposed to halt such use has not gone down. The trade and sales of illicit substances have been recorded in participating countries of the United Nations, and in just the ten year span between 1998 and 2008, highly illegal substances such as opiates and cocaine have increased in trade by 34.5% and 27% respectively according to the studies of the UN (War On Drugs: Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, 2011, p. 6). Such a steep increase implies that despite every action taken to restrict trade and possession, use of illegal substances has likely increased worldwide. In the United States, over the course of over a decade from 2002 to 2013, use of illicit drugs has climbed (NIDA, 2015), and while not significantly, but it does show that the numbers are not going down. Without a change in our course, there will be no end to the senseless war and excessive spending going into a project with no success in sight. Ther e have been and still are instances of nations using alternative methods to control drug abuse, Portugal for example has made notable strides against its major prevalence of drug abuse and mortality by overdose by undertaking a drastically different approach than nations such as the United States had. Portugal's country overview from the EMCDDA in 2013 shows that in 2007, six years after their drug policy reform, the adult prevalence of lifetime use of any illicit substance was 12% and with young adults, 17.4%, however, in 2012, the numbers had dropped down to 9.5% and 14.5% respectively (Portugal country overview, 2016). The rapidly lowering numbers are due to their policies focused on therapy and controlling drug trade to be safe and limited, rather than stamp it out completely, which allows for more extreme conditions to form, such as drug cartels and black market substances significantly more dangerous than the easy access, less expensive safe stock that is to be accompanied by therapy to overcome addiction. Without the use of methods that promote recovery rather than punishing possession, there will and have been grave consequences among the private lives of victims of drug abuse. The War on Drugs is not just a burning failure of policies, it goes above and beyond lack of success, and