12 Reasons To Legalized Drugs Essay Research

12 Reasons To Legalized Drugs Essay, Research Paper Twelve Reasons To Legalize DrugsThere are no panaceas in the world but, for social afflictions, legalizing drugs comespossibly as close as any single policy could. Removing legal penalties from the production,sale and use of “controlled substances” would alleviate at least a dozen of our biggestsocial or political problems. With proposals for legalization finally in the public eye, there might be a use for somesort of catalog listing the benefits of legalization. For advocates, it is an inventory offacts and arguments. For opponents, it is a record of the problems they might be helping toperpetuate. The list is intended both as a resource for those wishing to participate in the legalizationdebate and as a starting point

for those wishing to get deeper into it. Are we ready to stop wringing our hands and start solving problems? 1.Legalizing drugs would make our streets and homes safer. As Jeffrey Rogers Hummel notes (”Heroin: The Shocking Story,” April 1988), estimates vary widely for the proportion of violent and property crime related to drugs. Forty percent is a midpoint figure. In an October 1987 survey by Wharton Econometrics for the U.S. Customs Service, the 739 police chiefs responding “blamed drugs for a fifth of the murders and rapes, a quarter car thefts, two-fifths of robberies and assaults and half the nation’s burglaries and thefts.” The theoretical and statistical links between drugs and crime are well established. In a 2 1/2-year study of Detroit crime, Lester P.

Silverman, former associate director of the National Academy of Sciences’ Assembly of Behavior and Social Sciences, found that a 10 percent increase in the price of heroin alone “produced an increase of 3.1 percent total property crimes in poor nonwhite neighborhoods.” Armed robbery jumped 6.4 percent and simple assault by 5.6 percent throughout the city. The reasons are not difficult to understand. When law enforcement restricts the supply of drugs, the price of drugs rises. In 1984, a kilogram of cocaine worth $4000 in Colombia sold at wholesale for $30,000, and at retail in the United States for some $300,000. At the time a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman noted, matter-of-factly, that the wholesale price doubled in six months “due to crackdowns on producers

and smugglers in Columbia and the U.S.” There are no statistics indicating the additional number of people killed or mugged thanks to the DEA’s crackdown on cocaine. For heroin the factory-to-retail price differential is even greater. According to U.S. News & World report, in 1985 a gram of pure heroin in Pakistan cost $5.07, but it sold for $2425 on the street in America–nearly a five-hundredfold jump. The unhappy consequence is that crime also rises, for at least four reasons: Addicts must shell out hundreds of times the cost of goods, so they often must turn to crime to finance their habits. The higher the price goes, the more they need to steal to buy the same amount. At the same time, those who deal or purchase the stuff find themselves carrying extremely valuable

goods, and become attractive targets for assault. Police officers and others suspected of being informants for law enforcement quickly become targets for reprisals. The streets become literally a battleground for “turf” among competing dealers, as control over a particular block or intersection can net thousands of additional drug dollars per day. Conversely, if and when drugs are legalized, their price will collapse and so will the sundry drug-related motivations to commit crime. Consumers will no longer need to steal to support their habits. A packet of cocaine will be as tempting to grab from its owner as a pack of cigarettes is today. And drug dealers will be pushed out of the retail market by known retailers. When was the last time we saw employees of Rite Aid pharmacies