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border. "Securing Borders and Saving Lives" along with Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas, were very essential sources for this research paper, providing
there is also people bombarded by legal drug advertisement that are supposed to be the answer to their problem or pain, but really a lot of money and manipulation,
new form of organized crime. Heavily armed with sophisticated weapons, (gangs) are involved in drug trafficking, witness intimidation, extortion, and bloody territorial
the government agency to come up with a plan to eliminate maquiladora factories as a vehicle for drug smugglers. This spawned the Business Anti-Smuggling Coalition,
Submitted by chillywill8e on April 18, 2005
Category: Social Issues
Words: 2614 | Pages: 11
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The use and abuse of non-prescription drugs has been a problem in America since colonial times. Historically, the reaction to this problem has been the enforcement of prohibition laws and providing total abstinence education. This has resulted in big business in America; according to the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy, the federal government spent $19.2 billion dollars in 2003 on the war on drugs (1). Unfortunately, the abstinence based education and prohibition laws that are incorporated in the war on drugs have been wholly ineffective in slowing the demand for illicit drugs, and have had the opposite effects of driving up demand, street value, and drug-related crimes. The U.S. war on drugs bases its success on a decrease, and eventual eradication of the prevalence of drug use, a goal that has yet to be met. Detroit chief of police Jerry Oliver, in a 2002 interview with ABC news, said "Clearly, we're losing the war on drugs in this country [and] it's insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over again" (qtd. in Stossel). As the war on drugs continues to fail and cost this country billions of dollars, it has become clear that a new approach to the problem is needed. By changing the focus from trying to decrease the overall use of drugs to focusing on decreasing the negative side effects (both personal and societal) of drug use, our country will finally be able to make significant steps forward in our drug problem. This approach is known as harm reduction.
Harm reduction is a multi-faceted philosophy that includes various strategies to help lessen the negative impact of drug abuse on our society. These negative impacts include death, disease, suffering and crime. One of the basic assumptions which harm reduction is based on is "there has never been, is not now, and never will be a drug-free society" (Drug Policy Alliance). Some of the approaches endorsed by harm reduction are science-based, rather than scare tactic...
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