The Drug War
Hello and welcome readers! Today I'll be talking about the drug war. I discussed this with my good friend Ken here, so feel free to listen to this for our conversation, or click here to see his writing on it.
This week we're talking about the war on drugs. Like so many other things the federal government does, it's a large waste of taxpayer dollars, and should be ended.
You might assume that this seems a bit excessive, but I think this is correct. The war on drugs has done nothing but lead to excess policing, and wasting money. Policies like stop and frisk in NYC have lead to targeting of minorities on top of everything else.
Personally, I think most drugs should be legal, outside of ones that truly only have negative impacts, like heroin and cocaine. Legalizing the other drugs will reduce crime rates, and allow people to get more help to escape addiction. In New York, if you report an overdose, you can't be arrested for having illegal drugs, yet most people still don't report overdoses due to the thought they might be arrested. This leads to excess deaths from overdoses.
As of 2004, 25% of both state and federal inmates were in for drug related offenses. If we were to legalize most drugs, that would remove most of those people from jail, not including large dealers and traffickers. In 2015, Vera.org found that the average cost per inmate across the US was $33k per year. While I don't have the exact number of people imprisoned for drug related crimes, we can see that this would be a huge savings on the taxpayer. This doesn't even include the cost of police out on the streets looking for drug users.
As most people know, while drug laws aren't specifically aimed at minorities, they are enforced much harder on them. If you were to remove the illegality of most common drugs, that would lead to a lot less minority people being arrested. This also would have the chance to lower the amount of people who join gangs to run drugs, as the market would be much smaller for them. Overall this would have a profoundly positive impact on the minority communities.
As always, I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to talking to you next week.
I hope you have a great day, and God Bless,
Tim B
Weekly WIN co-host
1 Corinthians 15:58