Effects Of Cocaine Dependence On Increased Crime Rates And Criminal Activity Essay

is a public health concern and it continues to be a burden on the healthcare system (Ely,

When an individual has a substance abuse problem it affects not only that person but everyone around them. The person who is abusing the drugs is causing physical harm to their bodies while causing emotional harm to family and friends. People using drugs are almost always associated with violent crime, robbery and burglary and other forms of crime. The social effect of drug abuse will be a higher crime rate, declining health, and depression for friends and family. It is evident that the need of a closer analysis of drug use in our society can no longer be ignored.

Heroin, Cocaine, Methamphetamine, all cling to their victims. “Almost 70% of all offenders on probation reported using drugs sometime in their lifetimes. About 35% were abusing drugs at the time of their offense” (NIDA). Drug use is the fastest growing problem in the United States. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2013, there were just over 2.8 million new users of illicit drugs, about 7,800 of new users per day. Only seventeen percent of offenders get treatment for their drug use. Criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, and other criminal justice professionals try to determine how to stop this problem. We wonder why crime happens, who commits it, how to stop it, and more recently, what to do with the offenders after

This will also increase health costs as well as making the health of the public worse.

The short term effects are high blood pressure, increase in body temperature and heart rate, and dilated pupils. Some cocaine users report feelings of restlessness, anxiety, panic, and paranoia. Long term effects are memory loss, Damage to portions of the brain that regulate critical functions such as learning, sleep and emotion, liver and lung diseases, and infections from sharing a needle. You can also experience depression or even a heart attack. Also if a pregnant female is addicted to to a drug it can pass it down to its baby so your baby will be fighting for its life in the hospital just because the mom decided to try that type of drug. When cops put a stop to this there will be no kids that have health problems when it's not their fault it's their parents for trying the

One of the more dangerous aspects of cocaine abuse in the United States, is that its risk is often downplayed. All too often, people view cocaine as a harmless party drug, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Cocaine is an extremely addictive stimulant that creates a sense of euphoria and increased energy in people who use it. A cocaine high tends to be short-lived so it is often used in a binge pattern, meaning it’s used repeatedly and in increasingly larger doses over a short period of time. Cocaine raises the risk of serious heart problems and even of sudden death in people who use it because of its range of cardiovascular effects, which include sharp increases in heart rate and narrowing (constriction) of blood

Over the years, I think there has been misconception that drug use is the common cause for crime, as we are lead to believe that drug are bad and that they turned people into crazy criminals. While it might be true to some extents, I think the relationship between drug use and crime is rather complex and dynamic. As a community, we tend to blame drugs for every problem in our society, but the reality is that there are other important factors that we need to take into account, including unemployment, socio economic inequality and poor mental health before we could say that drug use really caused crime. As pointed out in The Sociology of American Drug Use, research provides ‘’no conclusive evidence about any single relationship between drug use

dependence. Cocaine can be taken with other drugs. Drugs like Heroin, and Marijuana can create

One of the most common beliefs today is that the drug-crime link is viewed as causal. More notably, it is presumed that drug use is one of the key motives of crime. However, criminological proof to support this belief is not as resilient as many have might imagined. Rather, the best obtainable investigation has commonly decided that the relationship is exceedingly complex and challenges attempts to sort out directionality.

One of the editorial decisions that led to the original 1975-1985 ISR time series data for the prevalence of cocaine use being presented in Newsweek is that Newsweek relied on larger and more dramatic numbers regarding lifetime cocaine use, even though the change from 1984 to 1985 of lifetime prevalence was not statistically significant. Another editorial decision was the choice to only include the recent changes in lifetime cocaine use in their graphic account, while still discussing data from seven years earlier for a more dramatic effect. The authors explained that Newsweek said that lifetime prevalence had doubled over the past ten years, while the increase in 1976 to 1979 was actually much worse than the changes from 1980 to 1985. Newsweek

At its absolute worst, addiction comes with some rather severe unintended consequences. It's difficult to explain the risks to young adults who are wrapped up in their cycle of addiction to the point they start doing things they wouldn't otherwise do. One of the most serious external repercussions that comes from young adult drug use is criminal activity, whether intended or not.

The effect of cocaine use has been a tremendous concern not just to the group of the individuals influenced, additionally to the general population security by and large. With this being said, the association between cocaine use and crime is surely understood. Cocaine use is involved in different sorts of drug related offenses which could be delegated offenses identified with a way of life that incorporates relationship with different guilty parties or with illegal markets

A lot of people link drug abuse with crime, at times even with violent crime. This association comes from psychopharmacological association that imply that people may engage in criminal acts after taking some kind of substance known to undermine their judgment as well as self-control result in paranoid thoughts and distortion of inhibitions (Sewell, Poling and Sofuoglu, 189). Though all substances that affect the central nervous system might result in this kind of relationships, scientific information indicates that some type of drugs have a more strong effect than others. Such drugs are alcohol, cocaine, phencyclidine and amphetamines (McCauley, Ruggiero, Resnick and Kilpatrick, 136). Inversely, cannabis and heroin are less associated with desire to commit

In a study that was done back in 1970 by Sutherland and Cressey, they pointed out that in the U.S. alone, “felons are overrepresented in the addict population, [and] crime rates are increased considerably by drug addiction” (1970, p. 164). Despite having proposed several hypotheses attempting to explain the correlation between drug abuse and crime, they could not reach a conclusion. A decade later, the knowledge about the drug/crime relationship had steadily increased due to numerous studies of the incarcerated or addicted population. However, the information didn’t reveal any viewpoints that made sense aside from heroin. This view was