War on Drugs in The USA: Laws and Issues

Introduction

Many countries around the World have been dealing with the concerning rise of drug use and trafficking throughout the years for a very long time. Unfortunately, in the United States, the laws that are being enforced are not effective nor does it line up with their objective to prevent drug abuse. Because they are focusing more on the laws to control drug usage within the country, they have mostly ignored what causes their citizens to not only use drugs but eventually abuse it. This results in a repeated offence and back-log of cases in their judicial system as the problem is not being cut off at its source, taking into consideration that drug users are not getting the required help that they need, instead they are being tossed into prison.

In this paper, the United States drug laws are going to be analysed, along with the consequences that they bring to the United States. These consequences include loss of economic revenue through the loss of workers and money being flooded into the drug market, which is not being regulated by the government, and the loss of labour forces as drug abusers become a liability to the government system by using government resources monetary wise without contributing to the economy. Moreover, some comparisons to the Canadian judicial system are going to be made, in order to bring insight on the differences and similarities to the laws in the United States.

United States Laws and Amendments

Under the federal Controlled Substances Act, also known as the CSA, the Continuing Criminal Enterprise is present. In there, it states that the possession of any substance present in any of the Schedules, the offender can spend up to 20 years in prison (Yeh, 2013). Even for the smallest amount of drug that is being in the possession of someone, they are still considered to be up to spend an enormous amount of time in prison, all in order to try and minimize the problem. For example, the documentary called ‘The House I live in’ by Jarecki and Shopsin (2012) claims that a 28-year-old man in Oklahoma is spending life in prison for the simple possession of 50 grams of an illegal substance.

The drug laws in the United States are considered to be so harsh that even the non-violent crimes are up to be sentenced for years in prison. According to Jarecki and Shopsin (2012) the mandatory minimum sentence of drug felonies depends a lot on the amount of drugs that were involved but ranges in between five to ten years the convict has to spend incarcerated. Whereas in Canada, according to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. (2018) the mandatory minimum sentence varies a lot and are based on the aggravating factors as well as the amount of drugs involved, but different from the United States, it ranges in between six months to three years.

In addition, the Fourth Amendment of the United States conditions that with very few exceptions, police officers are not to search people, as well as their homes, without a warrant. But even with that, in the year of 2010 the United States made almost a million dollars on arrests of illegal possession of drugs and they rarely involved the use of the required warrant to be able to proceed with these actions, and in addition, many of these were minor arrests.

Government Spending and Statistics

Now, with all of these strict laws and people being incarcerated for crimes that the punishment could fairly be by paying a fair fine and perhaps do hours of community and service work, the United States is having a lot of money put into keeping up with prisons and the costs of it, due to the fact that these laws are so strict that there is an enormous amount of prisoners that the country has to take care of. In 1999, for example, a few states of the United States were spending more money on prisons than in schools. Prisons, supplies, employees, judges and many other things are to be considered when it comes to where the government is spending money on. It is estimated that the United States has been spending every year, since 1998, $30 billion on justice-related on expenses for their drug wars. In addition, $15 billion is the alleged budget of the Federal Drug Control. Keeping in mind that this is just for drug prevention, we still have to put together the cost for the other serious crime related expenses that also require much more investigation, time and money. Even with all of this money being invested, the problem of drug abuse and trafficking has yet to be resolved in the United States, and there is a very long way to go. According to McNamara (2011) the Federal Bureau of Investigation claims that the arrests for drug abuse were around 1,702,527 out of the 12,005,515 in the United States, it being 12% of all arrests in the country only related to drugs, making it be the largest of any other crime.

Release Experiences: Work Issues

As if the time spent in jail was not already difficult enough for prisoners to deal with, they also struggle to get back to their lives when they are released and trying to re-entry the community. According to Visher et al. (2008), researchers have found that the chances of prisoners reoffending can be reduced if an ex-convict is able to find and maintain a job once they are released from prison. Unfortunately, there are many places that have restrictions when it comes to hiring convicts (Visher et al., 2008). For the most part, the former prisoners have some sort of health problem, and at least 40 percent of them do not even have a high school diploma. In addition, a third of these prisoners do not have the mental condition to be able to find a job.

Unfortunately, not all jails in the United States offer any kind of help to the prisoners when it comes to helping them improve their educational level to be able to find a job once they are released from prison. Because of that they waste all of the time they are convicted when they could be doing and learning things that could be beneficial to them.

Conclusion

Taking everything into account, the United States still has a very long way to go in order to combat the problem with drug use and trafficking. There is a lot more that goes on behind this issue as to what brings someone to enter the World of using and trafficking and they are not being taken into consideration, so nothing is being done in order to work with said problem, but a lot is being done to just punish people involved with it instead in this long-lasting war to combat drugs. Until the United States takes its time to do more research into influences and on ways to help the ex-convicts after they leave prison, not much is going to change and there will be little to no change in the prevention which the war on drugs is seeking.