Drugs
America's Holy War
Arthur Benavie
- 180 pagine
- English
- ePUB (disponibile sull'app)
- Disponibile su iOS e Android
Drugs
America's Holy War
Arthur Benavie
Informazioni sul libro
Using the best scientific evidence, Drugs: America's Holy War explores the impact and cost of America's "War on Drugs" – both in tax spending and in human terms. Is it possible that US drug policies are helping to proliferate, not prevent, a multitude of social ills including: homicide, property crime, the spread of AIDS, the contamination of drugs, the erosion of civil liberties, the punishment of thousands of non-violent people, the corruption of public officials, and the spending of billions of tax dollars in an attempt to prevent certain drugs from entering the country?
In this controversial new book, award-winning economist Arthur Benavie analyzes the research findings and argues that an end to the war on drugs, much as we ended alcohol prohibition, would yield enormous international benefits, destroy dangerous and illegal drug cartels, and allow the American government to refocus its attention on public well-being.
Domande frequenti
Informazioni
Part I
Background
Introduction
- • The war has been estimated to have caused about 10,000 homicides a year, most the result of turf warfare between rival drug gangs. Suppliers in this immensely profitable underground market obviously cannot appeal to the legal system to resolve disputes.6
- • Over 100,000 people are in federal, state, and local prisons for simply possessing (not selling) illicit drugs.7 It costs an average of $20,000 to maintain a person behind bars for a year.8
- • More than a third of the AIDS patients in the United States contracted the disease by using dirty needles to inject drugs.9 The federal government refuses to support the supplying of clean needles to illicit drug users, claiming—contrary to its own studies—that drug injection would be encouraged.10
- • African Americans feel the impact of the drug war disproportionately. Of the 265,000 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses in 2002, about 47 percent were black, while blacks constituted about 15 percent of illicit drug users.11 (The majority of traffickers are white.)12
- • Heroin is superior to morphine for alleviating some types of pain and marijuana is an effective anti-nausea drug for those on chemotherapy. Yet, in spite of the recognized therapeutic value of these drugs, physicians in the United States are prohibited from prescribing them.13
- • “We are presently spending $50 billion a year on the war on drugs. I'm talking about police, courts, and jails. For all the money that we're putting into the war on drugs, it is an absolute failure … Should you go to jail for simply doing drugs? I say no … People ask me, ‘What do you tell kids?’… You tell them that by legalizing drugs, we can control them, regulate them, and tax them.” Gary E. Johnson, the Republican former governor of New Mexico21
- • “We are speaking of a plague. … The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal.” William F. Buckley Jr., conservative columnist, and founder of National Review22
- • Our supply reduction strategy is “a colossal failure” and our demand reduction policy is one that “can never produce a victory.” Steven B. Duke, professor of law at Yale University, and lawyer Albert C. Gross23
- • “America's highly punitive version of prohibition is intrusive, divisive, and expensive and leaves the United States with a drug problem that is worse than that of any other wealthy nation.” Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter, behavioral scientists at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center24
- • “Our country's attempts through the criminal justice system to combat drug use and abuse, and all of the crime and misery that accompany them, were not working … Our so-called War on Drugs was our biggest failure.” Judge James P. Gray of the Superior Court in Orange County, California25
- • “About $500 worth of heroin or cocaine in a source country will bring in as much as $100,000 on the streets of an American city. All the cops, armies, prisons, and executions in the world cannot impede a market with that kind of tax-free profit margin. It is the illegality that permits the obscene markup, enriching drug traffickers, distributors, dealers, crooked cops, lawyers, judges, politicians, bankers, businessmen. Naturally, these people are against reform of the drug laws.” Joseph D. McNamara, former police chief of Kansas City, Missouri, and San Jose, California. He has a doctorate in public administration from Harvard and is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution26
- • “The day in the fall of 1988 that I was mandated to sentence Luis Quinones, an eighteen-year-old with no prior record, to ten years of real time because he was a bouncer in an apartment where drugs were being sold, I faced our national drug policy and … concluded that our present policy of criminal prohibition was a monumental error.” Robert M. Sweet, a district judge in New York City and former deputy mayor27
- • “Blanket prohibition is a major source of crime: it inflates the price of drugs, inviting new criminals to enter the trade; reduces the number of police officers available to investigate violent crime; fosters adulterated, even poisonous, drugs; and contributes significantly to the transmission of HIV. These are not problems that are merely tangential to the war on drugs. These are problems caused, or made substantially worse, by the war on drugs. That is why I have long advocated that the war on drugs be fought as a public health war.” Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, and U.S. attorney for the district of Maryland28
- • “Deterrence strategies have not been successful in reducing drug use. Enforcement strategies have consumed resources, aggravated health risks associated with drugs, and increased the levels of violence surrounding drug markets. Drug policy has also increased profits for drug dealers and attracted other young people into selling … Severe sentencing laws applied broadly and indiscriminately have undermined, rather than reinforced, the moral authority of the law.” American Society of Criminology29
- • The war is “lost” and “making drug use a crime is useless and even dangerous.” Raymond Kendall, head of the international police force, Interpol30