Drug Laws Congress

History has shown us an ineffective way to address addiction. Addiction has always been around a long time. However. people just didn’t always talk about addiction. They just ignored the issue and pretended that everything was alright. When the government first tried to deal with this issue they banned alcohol and made other drugs illegal. This action forced people to secretly use the substances. This only made the problem worse. I think that the government kept in the history of this problem in mind when create the current policy. Let’s dive into the history.

Drugs first surfaced in the United States in the 1800s. After the Civil War opium become very popular and was used medicinally. Following opium was cocaine which was also used as a health remedy but near the end of the 19th century opium and cocaine abuse peaked and local governments began to prohibit opium dens and importation. In 1914 the first federal drug policy, the Harrison Narcotics act, is passed and drugs are no longer seen as harmless remedies. The act aggressively regulated the manufacturing of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and morphine. During the 50’s more federal drug policies were passed and drugs began to become more criminalized. The 60’s saw a rise in counter-culture and substances such as marijuana and LSD saw widespread use. The demand for drugs skyrocketed in the 1960s. In 1971 President Nixon declared drug abuse America 's number one enemy and proclaimed that we must wave a all out offensive. After President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, the United States has spent more than a trillion dollars on this failing policy that not only has had no effect on the amount of drugs being used in the United States and has increased the number of people incarcerated on drug charges from just 50,000 to over half a million, but also has helped fuel drug cartels and foment violence and death through overdoses from uncontrolled drug potency and turf wars between street gangs.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's, the federal government began to increasingly tighten drug laws. In 1972, President Richard Nixon formally declared a "War on Drugs", which continues

There is a debate in the American government system on how to handle the use of drug and alcohol. In the 1960s drugs were uprising along with youth rebellion and in 1971 Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” (Citation a brief). This name is not to be confused with the band War on Drugs, but the term is still popularly used to describe the policies that Government officials are making regarding drugs and alcohol. This debate got reheated when Colorado legalized weed for medical and recreational use, followed by several other states. There has slowly been a shift in mindset from, “alcoholics are drug addicts are all criminals and we (the law) should throw them in jail” to “addiction is a disease.” Even the way that addicts/alcoholics are treated has changed to treatment centers with specialist versus throwing them in the hospital to detox and hoping for a change. Policies that are shifting the penalty from incarceration to treatment reflect these changes and help the individual suffering from the disease to get back on their feet. The war on drugs rings on, but changes are being made.

The history of drug use dates back for thousands of years with diverse purposes throughout humanity. According to Levinthal (2012), the drug-taking behavior gained federal awareness in the early 1900s, due to the lack of drug control regulations. Moreover, Levinthal (2012) mentions four major drug control laws which were established, including: (1) The Harrison Narcotic Act 1914, (2) The Marijuana Tax Act 1937, (3) The Boggs Act 1951, and (4) The Controlled Substance Act 1970. The drug control laws formed help regulate importation, manufacture, selling, or distribution of drugs within the United States (Levinthal, 2012).

However, before the specific outcomes of Congressional influence and policy impact can be evaluated it becomes important to first review the general history and current situation of drugs today. Our present drug laws were first enacted at the beginning of the century. At the time, recreational use of narcotics was not a major social issue. The first regulatory legislation was for the purpose of standardizing the manufacturing and purity of pharmaceutical products. Shortly after, the first criminal laws were enacted which addressed opium products and cocaine. Although some states had prohibited the recreational use of marijuana, there was no federal criminal legislation until 1937. By

Drug use has been around for many years and has been an issue that the government has tried to combat and take control over. Before drug use was made illegal, many people could legally purchase them and not be criminalized. The government realized that many of the drugs were addictive and caused a negative impact on society and this is when federal antidrug legislations were imposed. When the government made drugs and alcohol illegal is when the rebellion came and this made the want for the illegal products more enticing.

While laws prohibiting the use of drugs, in one form or another, can be traced back to the 1870s, it was not until 1968, when Richard M. Nixon was elected President, that our current drug war was conceived. In 1970 Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act.(2) With an

Drugs are illegal for a reason, and that reason is to deter use and provide a proportional punishment for those offenses. Drug addiction is a health problem that should be treated by a doctor and handled in a very professional manner, but legalizing all drugs is not the answer to the growing drug problem in the United States. It is necessary to keep policing drug possession in order to effectively keep drug use to as low as it can possibly

Legislative has tried to control the dangerous of drugs since nineteenth century and they have not been able to control the illicit drug. The illicit drug is very powerful that it is very hard to be control. There are many powerful and rich people involved in this and legislative is not able to control the use of illicit drug. According to Musto, “The United States had no practical control over the health professions, no representative national health organizations to aid the government in drafting regulations, and no controls on the labeling, composition, or advertising of compounds that might contain opiates or cocaine. The United States not only proclaimed a free marketplace, it practiced this philosophy with regard to narcotics in a manner unrestrained at every level of preparation and consumption.” Therefore, legislative is not able to control the illicit drug. An example of legislative not able to control this is Mexico. There are many people that transport the drug to Mexico to distribute to their customers. The Mexico president is aware of this, but he does not do anything about it because he gets money out of it. There is a lot of corruption all over the world that it is impossible to control the illicit drug. Now in days sailing drugs is a business where people prefer easy money

Government criminalizing drug possession or use has very little impact and did not work at all in the past years. People kept using drugs because the risk of doing it is part of the reason people start using them but there are many other reasons. If drugs would be legal,

Drug prohibition is rarely viewed negatively by many Americans. The failure of drug prohibition has sparked some debate in the last fifty years, however, the ignorance about illegal substances has led to little discussion on alternatives to prohibition. Legalizing all drugs would be a better alternative than perpetuating the failed war on drugs. The drug war has negatively impacted many lives by demonizing users and corrupting public officials. Criminalizing alcohol did not work in the 1920s and the same thing is true today about illicit drugs. Prohibition has stripped away a fundamental right we should have in a free society, and that is the right to consume whatever you want as an adult. The choice to consume alcohol was stripped from us at one point, however, Congress eventually passed the 21st Amendment making alcohol legal again. Alcohol prohibition has given us the opportunity to see the transformation of a once illegal drug become a legal and regulated substance. The 18th Amendment of the Constitution made alcohol consumption, distribution and production illegal. Prohibition subsequently gave birth to a criminal industry. Prohibition fostered the growth of powerful criminal organizations. It is clear that criminalizing a substance previously legal and letting the criminal market regulate it was a failure. The illegality of alcohol led to a black market where users were persecuted by society, which is exactly what the war on drugs is doing now.

By doing this the governments created the prohibition laws. Based on wikipedia the prohibition of drugs through sumptuary legislation (laws that attempted to regulate consumption) and religious laws (ethical and moral codes taught by religious traditions) is a common means of attempting to prevent the recreational use of certain recreational drugs and other intoxicating substances. Activities that governments looked at as undesirable were put into prohibition. Theses included smoking, drinking, gambling, drugs, and prostitution. These prohibitions led to criminal underworlds battling against police states, in which the public never benefited from. During the prohibition of alcohol in the years of 1920-1933 even though the consumption and the sale of alcohol was illegal it was still being made, but the quality of the liquor was not that good and people ended up with methanol poisoning which led to blindness and even death. There was also a story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohols intended for industrial use killing an estimate of 10,000 people. The global war on drugs endorsed by the United Nations is 55 years old. Early anti narcotic laws emerged in the 19th century to control the trade in opium and later more drugs that people used and abused as a medicine or for recreational use. Count the Cost is a project between a range of

Let’s start off with one of many questions that arise: why not just prohibit the sell and use of drugs everywhere? An excellent example is the 18th amendment which banned manufacture, sell, and transportation of alcohol. It did not, however, prohibit the consumption or private possession of intoxicating liquors. There was a struggle to enforce the Prohibition for the thirteen years it was in effect, and people assumed that banning alcohol would be the solution. It turned out that the Prohibition wasn’t the resolution people hoped it to be. Instead, it failed to actually prevent people of consuming alcohol and also led to untaxed, unregulated, liquor. To make matters worse, organized crime, an increased amount of violence, and corruption of politics also occurred, mostly with bootlegging. Al Capone, a Chicago gangster, greatly benefited from the prohibition by annually making sixty million dollars per year, untaxed. The average skilled

Drugs prohibition caused more harm than the drug itself. There are many pieces of evidence to bear directly to the effect of prohibition in countries like Colombia or Mexico, where is the drug prohibition enforcement mean an increase in violence and corruption. Indeed, drug prohibition does not reduce drug consumption, and if there are any benefits of prohibition laws then the cost outweighs the benefits.