Aidan de Holmesburg

Addiction In America

America has struggled with the issue of drug addiction over the past century. Now, we must face the facts.

The United States of America has, in the past half century, been afflicted with a cancer. This is not an unfamiliar thing for the members of our society. It cares little for class, race, or gender. I speak of addiction. The attempts made to stave it off have only perpetuated and inflated the issue. The nature of addiction is using our own strength against us. The richness of our country has been the very thing addiction feeds off of. We’ve seen it’s symptoms play out millions of times, broken families, corruption in the government, crime rates, homelessness, misuse of taxpayer dollars, and the rise of Hollywood are all at least in part influenced by addiction. At the beginning of the last century the drug addiction rate was below one percent, however in recent years it is above two percent. Between then and now has been all anti drug legislation in the United States that began in 1914 with the Harrison act. This is no mere coincidence, there is a direct correlation between this and drug addiction rates. The issue has not only breached the minds of our people, who hide their addiction for fear of stigmatization, but it has ingrained itself into our very culture. The situation now seems hopeless, best to leave it alone and hope it goes away right? However that line of thinking is flawed, we can build a better place for ourselves and fix this problem once and for all, we need only an effective strategy and the unified spirit of all America to drive out this cancer and uplift those impacted by it with all the love and forgiveness we can muster.

WAR ON DRUGS FAILS

The war on drugs was largely a failure. Flat out, it didn’t work. The addiction rate for hard drugs is now double what it was before and the illegal drug trade is still a lucrative business. The reason why is not due to resistance or even public opinion, it was due to strategic mismanagement of funds and political scandal. The war on drugs became a political issue around the time of its conception. There are two different sections that the war on drugs can be broken into, supply reduction and demand reduction. Washington officials say supply reduction is key because with no drugs there can’t be a problem. But the fact is that stopping drugs from existing is a fool’s errand and does not remedy any effects of the drug problem. Reducing supply creates a vacuum, which creates even higher demand pushing up prices and even further increasing supply to levels higher than before to even out demand, even with increased measures taken against it. As said by Michael F. Walther “Unfortunately, parity in spending did not translate into a balanced counterdrug strategy—any more than an equal division of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget between the uniformed services would guarantee a balanced national defense strategy.” With that being said the war on drugs was heavily unbalanced in the wrong direction causing money to be wasted and many people to not get the help they need to overcome their own drug problem.

The effects of addiction

Addiction can ravage one’s life to the point of them being unrecognizable as the person they were. The need to always get more of the drug drives people to steal from family members, sell their body for drugs or money to buy drugs, and even commit violent acts for drugs. This is because of addiction. Addiction can be both a psychological condition and a physical one. One very common reason addicts can’t recover fully is because long after the physical need subsides the mental urge to use drugs remains. This means addicts are particularly hard to cure, because they want to continue the self destructive behavior. However this is a curable condition. The only way to stop addiction is to make the addict physically unable to take the drugs. Sometimes it's better to ease them into it because they can experience so much stress that they die (a testament to how damning this condition is to those affected). Many addicts do not survive long living this lifestyle. A study from the 60’s asks the question “What happens to addicts after age 50? This question arises from both the narcotics bureau’s active file and the addiction research center’s master file … include a decreasing number of addicts in the middle and later years” -John C. Ball. This is a very sad reality for addicts. They simply die off due to their self destructive behavior because of overdose or other dangerous behaviors.

“Tie ins” with democracy

The general belief with addiction is that it is an issue of crime in the United States and if people just stopped doing crime things would be better, but that is far from the truth. The government is inefficient in dealing with this problem and their infighting has caused many major setbacks in the process of dealing with this problem. During Jimmy Carter’s administration when he tried to tackle the issue of the drug problem someone dug up dirt on the person he put in charge of that and it caused him to back off from the issue entirely. “Whatever hopes Carter may have had for effecting meaningful changes in drug policy were shattered on July 19, 1978, by a Washington Post headline: “Carter Aide Signed Fake Quaalude Prescription.” The story revealed that Dr. Bourne had written a prescription sedative for a fellow White House aide, using a pseudonym to mask her identity. The incident erupted into a major scandal when the Washington Times reported that Bourne had used cocaine and marijuana at a DC party 7 months earlier. Bourne quickly resigned in disgrace, and Carter retreated from drug-law reform for the rest of his embattled term.”- Michael F. Walther. And before that with the Watergate scandal causing the original plan for the war on drugs (one mainly focused on demand reduction) to be thrown out the window. This issue is deeply intertwined with the politics of American democracy and this keeps any form of real progress from happening in the first place.

Economy of narcotics

Drugs are, like everything else, a product to be bought and sold. They are cheap and plentiful in the areas where they come from and are shipped to places where there is scarcity to be sold at a higher price. Drugs are therefore susceptible to the same laws of supply and demand, too much supply and the price drops, no demand and there is no market for it, and then no reason to produce it because it is no longer profitable. The secret to reducing the drug problem is to get rid of demand because more supply will always pop up where there is still demand. And with drugs, they create their own demand because of the nature of addiction, it’s the perfect product but it destroys lives so it is morally wrong. Drugs therefore have the single biggest illegal market.

Harm of supply reduction

The war on drugs has been mainly focused on supply reduction throughout its lifetime. There were many “hard on crime” politicians that passed laws that allowed for people in possession of drugs to be arrested and jailed. They passed laws that prohibited federal spending on safe injection sites and restricted federal spending on rehabilitation efforts. Sending addicts to jail, sending dealers to jail, all while dehumanizing both of them in the eyes of the public. Shunning these misguided souls from society and forcing them down the path to a death by overdose or worse. Prison does not reform addicts, in fact it allows them easier access to drugs and makes taxpayers pay for them to be locked up in there like caged animals. This means that the addicts never get help and the crime never really stops, people die on the streets, police officers are killed in gunfights with drug dealers, and all the while more and more people fall into this vicious cycle. With inflation and high interest rates in real estate more of these people are being forced into homelessness as well, causing some to fall into the trap that is drug use. Families are torn apart and nobody bats an eye. All of this because the government is unable to figure out how simple supply and demand works. The pure idiocy that it takes to not see the trend and change something is truly insanity. The war on drugs does not simply affect addicts and dealers, but the whole of the American people. It is an endless vacuum that sucks up taxpayer dollars, drains the life from Americans, and leaves only danger and suffering in its wake. That is the harm of supply reduction.

The way forward.

In order to move forward with the crisis that is playing out daily in the cities of America we cannot be held up with red tape and greedy politics. The problem of addiction will only worsen if we do not treat this as a humanitarian problem rather than a criminal one. The people that are affected are much more valuable than the politics surrounding the issue. In order for the ideals of democracy to be fulfilled we must not treat other human beings as anything lesser. Get the people the help they need and we will all benefit from it.

Chapter 2

Sources & Citations

Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control. | The American Presidency Project, 17 June 1971, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-drug-abuse-prevention-and-control.

Walther, Michael F. INSANITY: FOUR DECADES OF U.S. COUNTERDRUG STRATEGY. Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep11872. Accessed 23 Mar. 2023.

Ball, John C. “Two Patterns of Narcotic Drug Addiction in the United States.” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, vol. 56, no. 2, 1965, pp. 203–11. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1140507. Accessed 23 Mar. 2023.

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