War on Drugs

War on Drugs

It is no secret to most people that drugs are a big issue in our country. Whether it is the pharmaceutical companies trying to sell a cure for anything you can think of to the sale and distribution of illegal substances. Even though I feel that it is a crime how much the big pharmaceutical companies are making off of their products, the drug trade is definitely a more pertinent topic to discuss. It is my opinion that while the drug problem in our country needs to be taken care of, the approach to it that has been taken by government is not as affective as one would hope.

Drug control has been a very large issue for most of our country's history and has grown even larger as of late. This is due to the rise of drug trafficking and its association with other areas of crime that law enforcement has to deal with. The first actual laws making certain drugs illegal were put into place just before the beginning of the 20th century and the failed attempts at alcohol prohibition occurred not to long after this. So, if our country has had laws against certain drugs for a good part of our countries history, shouldn't we have a plan put into motion that has produced results by now? You would think so, but this has not been the case in most of my findings.

Knowing that we have had over 100 years of fighting against the sale of drugs and on occasion alcohol you would think that all of this practice would have caused us to find a successful mode to combat the sale of illegal drugs. This is a debatable topic, because some people believe the way we are fighting this war presently is way to harsh or just not working and we should find a new way. While on the other side of this argument there are those who feel that the aggressive approach that we employ will eventually win the fight. To add to people's negative views of our police officers, it is also a fact that crooked cops are still around and may have larger numbers than before.

The nation's war on drugs can be traced all the way back to November of 1880, when the U.S. and China completed an agreement which prohibited the shipment of opium between the two countries. By February 1887, the 49th Congress enacted legislation making it a misdemeanor for anyone found guilty of violating this ban on American soil. This would later evolve into the Food and Drug Act in1906. In actuality, all this act did was make sure that labels on food items were truthful in their ingredients so that illicit drugs weren't place in foods. During this same time many states started banning alcohol and other drugs. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act was put into place to regulate the sale of opium, heroin, and cocaine around the ...