The Impacts of America’s War on Drugs, Essay Example

The impacts of America’s War on Drugs might be described as a concatenation of disaster and calamity: ruined lives, ruined communities, and ruinous expense for the nation as a whole—though not, of course, for law enforcement and the for-profit correctional corporations. The United States spends tens of billions of dollars every year fighting the effects of the lucrative black market it has done so much to create. A key aspect of this, of course, is America’s burgeoning prison population, which is now straining the capacity of state and federal prisons due to the tremendous numbers of non-violent drug offenders incarcerated.

Of the various issues touched on above, the first is the impact of criminalization on the lives of convicted, non-violent drug offenders. For a crime so pedestrian as possession of a small amount of marijuana, individuals are being locked up and forced to spend significant time behind bars. Convicted nonviolent drug offenders are disproportionately African-American, lending much credence to the allegations that the War on Drugs is being fought with racial profiling and preferential enforcement of drug laws. The legislation against crack cocaine, and accompanying sentencing, has been particularly implicated in institutional racism, in light of the fact that despite being a minority of American crack users, African-Americans account for the vast majority of those sentenced for crack.

Not only does the War on Drugs ruin lives, it also imposes a double cost on society: in addition to depriving society of the productive and free labor of those convicted of non-violent drug “offenses”, the War on Drugs forces the taxpayers to cover the high costs of incarceration. As the readings make clear, spending on prisons continues to mushroom, while spending on education continues to decline. All of this, in the so-called ‘land of the free’. All of this, despite the fact that treatment options designed to help drug addicts overcome their addictions and rejoin civil society are much, much cheaper monetarily, and do not ruin the lives of the addicts—indeed, quite the reverse.

And there is still another, further cost: the heavy cost of lucrative black-market drugs. Prohibition of drugs is to today’s crop of drug-peddlers what it was in the 1920s to Al Capone: an opportunity to make a great deal of money by illegal means. Of necessity, these career criminals operate in a shadowy underworld, a world which of necessity, being beyond and against the law, settles its disputes by violent means. The result has been the calamitous disruption of civil society in lower-income communities, which have become battlegrounds for gangs of heavily-armed, career criminals. This in turn creates a vicious cycle of violence, poverty, and further criminality: the gangs offer young people the chance of lucrative employment and protection, in the very neighborhoods scarred by gang violence. Thus, the lucrative drug money of prohibition is itself a double cost: it encourages violent criminals to pursue profits at the expense of society, enriching themselves and destroying the lives and livelihoods of others.

Thus, prohibition has imposed calamitous costs on all concerned—again, all, that is, except for those involved in the War on Drugs business. Decriminalization offers a far more humane and effective way of addressing the problem of drug addiction, assuming, that is, that this is something that the state ought to concern itself with. What is clear is that the decriminalization approach offers drug addicts a chance to turn their lives around and develop better habits, without penalizing them by forcing them to spend time behind bars. Treatment is far cheaper, both for the individuals and for society, and does far more to redress the impact of drug addiction. By any measure, decriminalization is a far superior approach to prohibition, both morally and in terms of overall financial costs.