National Prescription Drug Take Back Day

The War on Drugs is seen by many as an enormous factor of mass incarceration. There were more than 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. in 2014. More than 80% of them were for possession only (Drug Policy Alliance, 2017). 208,000 people are incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons and 97,000 are incarcerated in federal prisons for the same reason. 1 in 5 incarcerated people are drug offenders (Peter Wagner, Bernadette Rabuy, 2017). According to Politifact, “The state and federal prison population remained fairly stable through the early 1970s, until the war on drugs began. Since then, it has increased sharply every year, particularly when Reagan expanded the policy effort in the 1980s, until about 2010…. In 1980, about 41,000 people were incarcerated for drug crimes, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2014, that number was about 488,400 — a 1,000 percent increase.” Even other factors, like

House Bill 7095, relating to Prescription Drugs or more commonly known as the “Pill Mill Bill” was passed by the Florida Legislature on May 6, 2011, and signed by Governor Rick Scott on June 3, 2011. In essence, H.B. 7095 regulates all facets of the prescribing and dispensing of pain killers and controlled substances, from distributors all the way to pharmacists and doctors. One of the main aspects of the bill is its enforcement of s. 456.44 F.S.; which deals with the dispensing of prescription drugs such as pain killers and controlled

The principle reason for the Act is to keep the abuse of controlled medications and attains to this by forcing a complete boycott on the ownership, supply, make, import and fare of controlled medications with the exception of as permitted by regulations or by permit from the Secretary o

The War on Drugs continued well after President Ronald Regan left office. All of his predecessors continued to wage a war on street crime to win votes from the American people, Republicans and Democratic candidates alike began to dismantle social programing and implementing stiffer penalties toward convicted felons. Alexander reveals that by the turn of the twenty-first century 2 million people were cattle into penal systems and millions more were being discriminated against for employment,

ESSENCE OF THE STORY: In the past few years, opioid addiction has become an epidemic in the United States leading to around 64,000 people dying from drug overdose in 2016 alone. As a result the health and human services secretary, Mr. Azar, and the F.D.A. chief, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, has made battling opioid addiction a top priority. The main way the F.D.A. is attempting to battle the epidemic is by allowing pharmaceutical companies to sell new types of medications that aren’t meant to stop addiction but to help suppress the cravings of addiction. The new medication that the F.D.A is approving is supposed to be a part of the program MAT, or medication-assisted-treatment. Mr. Azar as well as Dr. Scott have been pushing for more MAT in hope to help people with addiction live productive lives. Though like most big changes in society, the F.D.A’s decision has drawn criticism. Addiction experts are saying that new medication isn’t the solution but more access to the medication is.

We approximately have 5 percent of the nation’s population, but we have over ¼ of the world’s prisoners. This number is still increasing at an alarming rate. Since the 1980’s the prison population has increased to 2.2 million men and women. In all of the world, we are the leaders in incarceration. Most of the people being arrested and charged are for drug related offenses. This significant increase in prisoners is due to the War on Drugs started by Ronald Regan.

The United states has taken consistent efforts to control the distribution and manufacture of medications and other drugs, with many efforts regulate possession importation and sales of various types of drugs. While there are several historic pieces of legislation that deal with the regulation and control of various substances, there is no other single piece of legislation that is an important and impactful to health care as the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This essay will explore the history of this legislation, its purpose and passage from proposal to law. Some may argue American this is true for American society as a whole, because of the implementation of this law and the addition of the Drug enforcement Agency as the agency that

You have already done a great deal to combat prescription drug abuse in the United States. In particular, I appreciate your push to reauthorize your bipartisan legislation, H.R. 3528, the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting (NASPER) Reauthorization Act. If that bill passes, I know it would help provide more uniform funding and access within our current system. However, given the magnitude if this epidemic, more substantial reform is necessary.

Mass Incarceration of poor, black male, and increasingly female, young people in the Name of a Bogus War on Drugs

Also, the DEA sponsors the National Prescription Drug Take-Back Initiative. In 2014, some 780,000 pounds of controlled medications were collected under this program (http://1.usa.gov/1mRQ8Rn).

According to “The Apocalypse Now : The Lost War on Drugs”, the United States federal government began to become tough on “crime” especially drug offenses in the 1970’s under President Richard Nixon. Nixon stated that “drugs were public enemy #1” and that he was going to be tough on this crime. As a result, state level government began to create policies that were strict on drug offenses causing minimal sentencing for minor drug offenses. Instead of going after the root of the problem which was preventing drugs from entering the country, these laws targeting low income communities with predominantly black and Latino residents. In addition, these merciless laws were the cause of the significant amount of people, specifically men of color, in prison during the 1980’s “war on drugs” in the United States.

The criminal justice system has many flaws that many people believe It is broken. The first step of fixing the system is by acknowledging that the system is broken. According to the documentary Fixing the System, the increase of incarceration is due to nonviolent drug offenses. There are more drug offenses than for homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, immigration, sex offenses, etc., combined. The cost for incarceration has dramatically increased as people kept getting incarceration due to the nonviolent drug offenses. President George W. Bush decided that building more prisons and jails was the best way to teach the lesson of war on drugs. Although incarcerating individuals’ due drugs wasn’t helping get rid of the problem because they

In the 1980’s and 90’s at a time when crime was in decline throughout the United States poor neighborhoods saw the beginning of what would soon become the great tragedy of mass incarceration. The topic of drugs had become a media sensation and political parties battled on which side could be the “toughest” to solve the pestering issue. Images of African Americans hooked on crack aired across televisions, newspapers and tabloids nationwide. Though crime rates were down, government used the media blast to gain funding of over two billion dollars to fund the DEA and local police forces in sweeps that would fill American prisons in numbers unprecedented in world history. Targeting poor and mostly African American neighborhoods, arrests made during this era conjure memories of Jim Crow racism and Convict Leasing leaving many of the convicts or even merely accused marred in an infinite loop of struggle inside and out of the prison system.

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Civil Rights Activist, Thurgood Marshall, once said that the ‘intent is evident in the results’ to mean ‘when we intend to do good, we do, [and] when we intend to do harm, it happens… our intent always comes through’. Former President Bill Clinton said that he didn’t intend to cause an increase in prison expansion, yet, under his administration ‘the incarcerated population rose from 1.3 million to more than 2 million’ (Kilgore 66). In 8 years, the Clinton administration managed to increase ‘federal, state, and local corrections expenditures…[to] $57 billion a year’ (Kilgore 32). His administration also implemented the Omnibus Crime Bill and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 which ‘cut the rights and opportunities for people with felony convictions’ (Kilgore 32) and ended the welfare assistance that once existed. None of these actions actually brought about the safety of U.S. citizens, because at the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, crime rates were decreasing. Yet, despite this downward trend in prison population rates the Clinton administration ‘enacted notoriously harsh narcotics penalties in the … three-strikes legislation in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, and more capital crimes with fewer appeals in the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and the

“Drug-Free Workplace Act is a federal act that mandates that any business receiving a government contract or federal grant must be drug-free to continue to receive the funds”.