The U.S. needs to come up with a proactive way of dealing with the trade system. This does not mean banning drugs because we have already done that. What needs to happen is legalization.
Re-banning or continuing to say that the fight is being won by banning drugs in the U.S. is redundant. Think of the country as a teenager. What happens when you tell that teenager not to do something? They walk right toward what you told them not to do.
Ann Fordham of the International Drug Policy Consortium for the United Nations stated, in an article by The Guardian, that there is no longer a consensus on the international policy for dealing with drugs.
“We are starting to see member states break with the consensus about how we should control drugs in the world. Punishment hasn’t worked. All the money spent on crop eradication hasn’t had the impact we would like to see,” Fordham said.
Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program, stated in the same article that human rights are also a factor.
“Heavy reliance on law enforcement for controlling drugs is yielding a poor return on investment and leading to all kinds of terrible human rights abuses,” Malinowska-Sempruch said.
“The withdrawal from the most repressive parts of the drug war has begun – locally, nationally and globally.”
The international drug trade is a monumental task to undertake but the go-to answer will never be more law enforcement or legislation. In order to take a step further in the battle, things need to change.
Legalizing something would take the permission factor and rebellion out of the issue completely and make way for real progress. When you legalize the drugs, you eliminate the need for the black market selling them.
Unfortunately, drugs will never be completely gone but the rate of drug use will greatly diminish once a competitive market is established. Legalization will bring the legal competitors into play, causing price wars and a shift in both supply and demand.
Not to say that capitalism is flawless; this is the reality of the country that we live in.
The drug cartels that are distributing the drugs will be forced to compete with legal dispensaries. The dispensaries would have the ability to provide safer methods of using drugs than the average method on the street would.
The supply of the drugs will increase while the demand will potentially decrease. However, addiction is still a factor when it comes to drugs. Legalization would be a great tool in combatting this as well.
If these black market drugs were legal, drug dens could be opened in conjunction with rehab centers to work on addiction.
Natasha Maguder of CNN wrote an article on an establishment called InSite in Vancouver, British Columbia.
This establishment allows addicts to use drugs in a safe environment with medical staff on standby. The cost of this establishment, according to Maguder, is $3 million in Canadian taxes, but that for every dollar spent, four lives are saved, she added.
Those lives are saved by the medical staff. Something such as a blown vein or a mistakenly used needle will not be as serious as it would be if the person were to be away from medical care. It provides more in-depth medical care for addicts in the future and saves money in the long run, according to Maguder.
The medical staff is there to ensure that the addict does not hurt themselves and, in extreme cases, overdose.
This type of establishment is not necessarily a permanent bandage, nor should it be. It is just another avenue that opens when drugs are legalized and things can be done to combat the drug trade at every possible curve.
Treating this issue as life’s dirty little secret and hoping that laws will do the challenging work for us has not yet been effective and won’t be effective in the future.
We need to legalize drugs, tax them and create places that give addicts the same standard of medical care that regular citizens get.
Until the taboo of drug use ends, people are going to treat this act as if it needs to be done in the shadows where the cartels are waiting.
