Drama - Drugs in Society

Drama - Drugs in Society

THE EFFECTS of ILLEGAL DRUG USE and TRAFFICKING on SOCIETY

Drug use and trafficking are both extremely harmful to society, but most of those harms are either direct or indirect consequences of their illegal status. If illicit narcotics were simply controlled, regulated and taxed by the government in the same manner as tobacco products and alcohol, the problem of illegal drug trafficking would be approximately as extensive as the problem of interstate cigarette smuggling and unlicensed liquor distillation and sales, which is to say inconsequential (Brecher 1991).

Primarily as a result of their illegal status, penal institutions are unnecessarily crowded with individuals whose only moral "vice" is preferring marijuana to alcohol, organized crime maintains a lucrative drug trafficking business, and law enforcement resources are needlessly wasted battling something that, more often than not, is exclusively a private matter.

The Logical Basis of Penal Law: The most important fundamental purpose of establishing societal rules that are enforced through the State's police power to define certain types of conduct as punishable criminal matters is to provide protection to its citizens from being harmed by other citizens. Without law enforcement, the weak and intellectually unsophisticated would be at the mercy of the strong and intellectually gifted. That is a very necessary function of modern government (Coleman, Butcher & Carson 1994).

Penal law and the threat of arrest and incarceration is often the only way of ensuring that businesses do not take advantage of customers, that landlords do not terrorize tenants for higher rent at will, and probably the only reason that there are not many more drunk drivers on the road every day. Critics of criminalizing recreational drug use are not opposed to penalizing any conduct associated with drug use that presents danger to others, or any illegal circumvention of legislative requirements to comply with licensing and distribution of recreational drugs any more than they object to the same types of government regulation of liquors and food sales. They object to the illogical application of penal concepts to private drug use because it is absolutely no different from governmental regulation of private liquor consumption, smoking cigarettes at home, or eating more doughnuts than nutritionists recommend.

Unjustifiable Modern Criminal Laws:

Because recreational drugs are illegal and socially unacceptable, the majority of drug users most people come into contact with are those from the segment of the population likely to be relatively disconnected from society; respectable individuals who choose to use drugs in private usually do it secretly (Coleman, et al. 1994) so as not to damage their reputations and credibility. For just one of many examples, renowned astronomer and author Carl Sagan never publicly divulged his own marijuana use until his 1999 biography was published posthumously. He actually credited his use of pot as helping his thought processes and considered himself intellectually inspired by it (Davidson 1999). His previous writings on the subject appeared much earlier, but under a fictitious pseudonym. In his words:

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds" (Davidson 1999). Even some former federal law enforcement agents have changed their minds about recreational drug use, maintaining that the government's anti-drug laws cause more societal harm than whatever harm they are intended to prevent. According to former U.S.

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) special agent Barry Cooper: "When I was raiding houses and destroying families, my conscience was telling me it was wrong, but my need for power, fame and peer acceptance overshadowed my good conscience... I noticed the people I had been arresting were nice people. They had a balanced checkbook, their kids made straight a's, and I was like, 'This drug is not making people crazy.' "(Farwell 2008)