War on Drugs

A World Wide Epidemic

4/29/2014 C.J.1010

War on Drugs
The war on drugs, since its official inception in 1971, has been a very interesting and quite controversial topic. Its reach stretches from a localized perspective all the way to every corner of the globe. Indeed, it is one of the most discussed issues we, as a global community, face. I, myself, have witnessed the ill effects of drugs here in happy valley Utah County. If drugs can make it here and have such a firm grasp and take such strong root, they can make it anywhere. I have also witnessed the problem in a more sinister form when I lived in Tulcan, Ecuador. Tulcan sits mere minutes from the Colombian border. The locals told me that La Guerrilla, or FARC as many of us know them, infest the Ecuador/Colombia border. For many of them, fear was a way of life. They would recount stories to me when FARC would come across the border and round up the people and take them to the village center. Sometimes they would discuss freedom, or at least their version of freedom, and sometimes they would kill. They inflicted so much fear that when they crossed the border the Ecuadorian police would flee. Although I never feared for my life, many of the locals told me that if I were to be seen by FARC odds were such that I wouldnt survive. This hit close to home when many nights, as I walked the streets of Tulcan, machine gun shots could be heard firing off in the distance on the Colombian side of the river. Now, FARC claims to be political in nature but much of what they do, and how they are funded, involves a heavy reliance on drug distribution. So much fear and crime and violence stem from the evil roots of drugs. This is but one of the many instances of drug related problems in the world. It can easily be seen that drug use/abuse has a great impact on not only the user but on so many people around them. I was blessed to leave Tulcan and get far away from the troubles they

experience but, unfortunately, they have to stay and deal with such large issues. This is true for so many others also. Often times drugs are closely associated with crime. Many times crime affects innocent people. This can be seen through the drug-crime relationship discussed in the textbook. The textbook mentions that Paul Goldstein, an Epidemiologist, has come up with three models that demonstrate the ties between drugs and crime. The first of the three models is called the psychopharmacological model. This suggests that people act criminally or violently as a direct result of the ingested drugs. People commit crimes and inflict violence because the drugs put them in an altered state of mind and therefore they act or react in a negative manner. The second model is called the economically impulsive model. This suggests that crimes are committed by drug abusers to acquire the funds in order to purchase the drugs. The third model is called the systemic model. This theorizes that violence is the by-product of interpersonal relationships such as the one between drug users and dealers when the dealer is assaulted for selling bad drugs. The relationship between drugs is apparent and is growing more and more rapidly. The textbook relates a statistic taken from federal data which states that people seeking treatment for abuse of painkillers increased 400 percent from 1998 to 2008. A Maine law enforcement official has said, regarding the aforementioned statistic, that this has led to home invasions, robberies, assaults, homicides, thefts all kinds of crime. According to a publication of the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University entitled The Police and Drugs also emphasizes the relationship between drugs and crime. In this publication it is said that criminal activity is known to vary directly with levels of heroin consumption. Many of those arrested for robberies and burglaries use cocaine during the commission of their crimes or steal to support drug habits. It is also noteworthy what is said at

the beginning of this publication, Many urban communities are now besieged by illegal drugs. Fears of gang violence and muggings keep frightened residents at home. Even at home, citizens feel insecure, for drug-related break-ins and burglaries threaten. Open dealing on the street stirs the communitys fears for its children. It has been well established that drugs are a problem for a large portion of not only our community but for the world as a whole and that drugs share an extremely close relationship with violence and other crime. Now, the question begs what can be done? How can we combat such a large issue? Will we ever have a large amount of success? It seems as though there is only mild or impermanent success for the war on drugs. There have been many different government plans and operations put in action against drugs. One such program deals with what was discussed earlier, that is FARC. Plan Colombia was set up by the United States to provide hundreds of millions of dollars per year of military aid, training, and equipment to Colombia to fight the left-wing guerillas (Wikipedia). Operation intercept was another such program that aimed to reduce the amount of cannabis entering in from the Mexican border. All of the programs initiated by the U.S. government have had varying degrees of success but more often than not, they end up being terminated due to loss of life and resources. Looking at a more local spectrum, Utah is slightly lower on the scale of percentage of people using illicit drugs with 6.24%, the national average is 8.02%. A slightly more grim statistic is that drug-induced deaths. Utah has a rate of 20.6 drug-induced deaths per 100,000 people. The national average is 12.7 per 100,000. In addition to this, Salt Lake City has one of the highest prescription drug abuse rates in the entire nation (whitehouse.gov). These are quite alarming statistics coming out of our very own backyard. The good news is that, in my research for this paper, I have found that Utah is taking this problem seriously and implementing

programs to help subdue this dangerous problem of ours. According to the whitehouse.gov website, Utah takes part in, what is called, a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP). This program tracks prescriptions made by authorized practitioners and provides early warning signs of drug epidemics, detects drug diversion, and insurance fraud. I believe that this type of program will go a long way in helping us deter part of the drug problems faced here. Another program of the sort that I find to be interesting is the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program (HIDTA). In Utah, this program is set up in Davis, Salt Lake, Summit, Utah, Washington, and Weber counties. It states at whitehouse.gov that HIDTA controls an extensive part of interstate highways that link major drug sources in Mexico and Canada to major U.S. domestic drug markets. HIDTA is also developing a commercial vehicle criminal interdiction training course for Utah State Patrol. It is interesting to note that Utah has one of the biggest problems with Mexican cartels using our public land to grow cannabis. This is no doubt a huge concern that we have some of the most dangerous people in the world growing their illegal crops where many of us enjoy our recreational activities. Some of the cartels involved in the takeover of Utah ground include La Familia, they have been noted as being extremely violent and brutal. The bright side to this is that there has been a noticeable decrease in seized plants which indicates a large decrease of operation. In 2012 there were 13,000 plants seized by law enforcement. The year before there was over five times that amount seized (deseretnews.com). It is relieving to see that some of our anti-drug campaigns have actually shown some success. We can all agree that drugs are a problem and that there is desperate need for solutions. It is easy as an outsider to look in and offer up seemingly sure fire remedies to this situation and believe they would work without a hitch. However, when one delves a little deeper into the situation, one will notice that there are significant trade-offs with these solutions. For instance,

when the theory of cyclic creation of permanent underclass is considered, it is quite apparent that not all purposed remedies are so cut and dry. This theory states that penalties given to youth for drug crimes almost always involve permanent or semi-permanent removal from education, revoke voting rights, and make future employment much more difficult to obtain due to their criminal record (Wikipedia). It seems that doing the right thing and punishing people for crimes is, very much, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the criminal is experiencing the just consequences of their actions for their choice to take part in drug related crimes, however, on the other hand, they are being deprived of occupational and educational opportunities thus creating a permanent lower class. Society would largely benefit from eradicating what is known as the lower class and striving to elevate every citizen and their situation. It seems that there is no particular right answer when it comes to how we should deal with issues of drug control. Almost every anti-drug campaign or program into which I have looked seems to be terminated because the opportunity costs are just too high and often times, it seems to have the opposite effect as was intended. What, perhaps, seems to be a fail-proof system or idea to clean up our streets often becomes a complicated labyrinth of cause and effect. I suppose that the drug problem will never go away, it is far too valuable to some. Even if we are successful in decreasing the availability of drugs, all that does is drive the prices higher and higher which gives incentive to producers, smugglers, and dealers to increase production and take the added risk because now the reward is so high. That being said, a temporary fix is much better than no fix at all. I do believe that success can be had in this area even if the complete eradication of drugs is impossible. To think that we can rid ourselves of drugs and drug related crime is nave optimism, however, we can make great strides in combating this problem head on.

It is comforting to know that there are never-ending attempts to come up with different ways to continually seek the downfall of the drug empire.

Works Cited
Moore, Mark H., and Mark A.R. Kleiman. "The Police and Drugs." National Criminal Justice Reference Service. N.p., Sept. 1989. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. "Utah Drug Control Update." The White House. The White House, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2014. "War on Drugs." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.