The War On Drugs
In 1968, when American soldiers came home from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin, President Richard Nixon initiated the War on Drugs. More than a decade later, President Ronald Reagan launches the South Florida Drug Task force, headed by then Vice-President George Bush, in response to the city of Miami’s demand for help. In 1981, Miami was the financial and import central for cocaine and marijuana, and the residents were fed up. Thanks to the task force, drug arrests went up by 27%, and drug seizures went up by 50%. With that, the need for prosecutors and judges also rose. Despite these increased arrests and seizures, marijuana and cocaine still poured into south Florida. At this stage, the root of the problem, the Colombian Cartels, was not attacked. The DEA soon realized that they needed to crack down on the cartels. In 1982 the DEA went to Colombia to eradicate fields of marijuana and coca plants. These fields were located and burned. The hard part now, was finding the labs used to turn the coca leaves into cocaine. These labs were in very remote locations, to avoid surveillance. The DEA suspected that the cocaine labs were very large, but the Colombians kept eluding them. Finally the DEA was able to track down the chem
There are different opinions on how to stop America’s drug problem. Two of those opinions are education and treatment, and prison. Crack was distributed to the U.S. through the Bahamas. The Bahamas were ideal because of the islands and waterways, and the fact that Florida was only 90 minutes by air. At this point the drug smugglers have the advantage over the DEA. The smugglers were always just a few steps ahead of the law. The DEA tried using helicopters to catch the smugglers’ boats, but by the time the helicopters got close enough to make the grab; they would have to turn back because they were close to running out of gas. The DEA was seen as a dog trying to catch rabbits; the dog would catch one or two, but most of the time the rabbits get away. The health problems brought on by using heroin are usually associated with the use of needles. Hepatitis C and HIV are two of the biggest heath problems that IV heroin users face. Users that snort heroin or smoke it (referred to as “chasing the dragon”) have very few of these problems. There are a few different methods of treatment, but for the sake of simplicity, this paper will cover methadone and narcotic antagonists. However, informal surveys have found that D.A.R.E. is no more effective than any other drug education program. “The D.A.R.E. program’s limited effect on adolescent drug use contrasts with the program’s popularity and prevalence. An important implication is that D.A.R.E. could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug education programs that kids could be receiving.” Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey’s assertion in his Scripps-Howard News Service column that no clinical evidence demonstrates that smoked marijuana is good medicine, is inconsistent with the facts. Whether this is an intentional deception, as part of the federal government’s stated public relations offensive against medical marijuana, or whether it is based on ignorance does not matter. The reality is General McCaffrey’s statements are not consistent with the facts.
Some topics in this essay:
Study NTIES,
Hepatitis HIV,
War Drugs,
Household Survey,
Netherlands Dutch,
Prevention Blindness,
Institute Medicine’s,
Drug Abuse,
Holland Germany,
Black Latino,
illicit drug,
war drugs,
methadone maintenance,
illicit drugs,
drug dealers,
federal bureau,
drug users,
build prisons,
drug abuse,
gateway theory,
commission marihuana drug,
percent current illicit,
current illicit drug,
drug abuse concluded,
marihuana drug abuse,
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Approximate Word count = 4993
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page double spaced)
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