Are Drugs The Answer Essay Research Paper — страница 2

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End the Drug War , 1998).It would reduce governmental corruption. Drug-related police corruption takes one of two major forms. Police officers can offer drug dealers protection in their districts for a share of the profits. Or they can seize dealer’s merchandise for sale themselves. Seven Philadelphia police officers were indicted on charges of falsifying records of money and drugs confiscated from dealers. During a house search, one man turned over $20,000 he had made from marijuana sales, but the officers gave him a “receipt” for $1,870 (Swisher, 1995). The huge profits from the illegal drug trade are a powerful motive for law enforcement agents to partake in the illegal activity. Legalizing the drug trade completely would eliminate this motive to corruption and help to

clean up the police’s image. This again would put less strain on our court systems and make this type of activity less tempting for law officials.Legalization would save tax money. Efforts to stop the drug traffic alone cost $8 billion in 1992. If we ad the cost of trying to incarcerate users, traffickers, and those who commit crime to pay for their drugs, the tab runs well above $15 billion (End the Drug War, 1998). This is all money that we could be using towards education and welfare reform. The crisis in inmate housing would disappear, saving taxpayers the expense of building more prisons in the future. The savings would be put towards better police protection and quicker judicial service. Or maybe it could be converted into savings for taxpayers or perhaps a portion of the

costs could be put towards the budget deficit. All these things could be possible; however, it takes legalization to make this all possible.It would break down organized crime. The Mafia, organized gangs, and the Cartel stand to lose billions in drug profits from legalization. Members of organized crime, particularly at the top, stand to lose the most from legalizing the drug trade. The underworld became big business in the United States when alcohol was prohibited. Even to this day we talk about how prohibition caused many problems we are still plagued with today. When alcohol was re-legalized, honest manufacturers took over. The risk along with the high profits diminished from illegal bootlegging traders of alcohol. Even if organized crime wanted to keep control over it, the

gangsters could not have targeted every manufacturer and every beer store. The profits from illegal alcohol were very small compared to the amount of money that illegal drugs produce today. Illegal drugs are the Mafia s last great source of illegal income. Legalizing drugs would rid this form of income from organized crime. Smugglers and pushers would have to go out of business. If we are concerned about the influence of organized crime on government, industry, and our own personal safety, the best way to foil this organized crime would be to legalize drugs (Witkin, 1997).Legal drugs would be safer. Legalization is also a consumer protection issue. Because it is illegal, the drug trade today lacks many of the consumer safety features such as instruction sheets, warning labels,

product quality control, manufacturer accountability. Driving it underground makes any product, including drugs, more dangerous than it needs to be (End the Drug War, 1998). Nobody denies that currently illegal drugs can be dangerous. But so can aspirin and other countless over-the-counter drugs and common household items. Practically anything can kill if used in certain ways. Like heroin, salt can kill if enough is consumed. Today’s drug consumer literally doesn’t know what they are buying; the stuff is so valuable that sellers have an incentive to cut or dilute the product with foreign substances that look like the real thing. This can be extremely dangerous because many of these foreign substances can be deadly. Since purity varies greatly on the street, consumers can

never be really sure how much to take to produce the desired effects. Manufacturers offering drugs on the open market would face different incentives than pushers. There would be a powerful incentive to provide a product of uniform quality. After legalization, pharmaceutical companies could safely try to win each other’s customers with better information and more reliable products. Even pure heroin on the open market would be safer than today’s impure drugs that we have now. As long as customers know what they’re getting and what it does, they can adjust their dosages to obtain the intended effect safely (End the Drug War, 1998). So basically, legalizing drugs would promote consumer health and safety. Legalization would help slow the spread of AIDS and other blood born