The United States Should Adopt a Public Health Approach Instead of Incarcerating Drug Users

Subject: Healthcare Research
Pages: 2
Words: 449
Reading time:
2 min

The federal government of the United States has spent most of its drug control dollars on interdiction and law enforcement with substantially smaller amounts of funds directed to prevention and treatment. Scientific knowledge would be used as the foundation for developing drug policy. This knowledge base would be multidisciplinary, depending on such diverse disciplines as neuroscience, behavioral science, and epidemiology. Much of the reason for the present criminal justice advance to drug control arises from the well-documented relationship between drugs and violent crime.

The obvious underlying principle behind drug control policies stressing law enforcement and criminal justice interventions is that drugs cause crime, and that declaring a ‘war on drugs will put a stop to drug-related crime. In view of the connection of drug policy to drug and crime violence, however, it is of utmost importance to make a distinction between violence caused by definite drug use or substance abuse and violence that is a result of the high chances concerned with the selling of the illicit drug.

Of late, the Department of Justice carried out a complete search of all of the existing evidence on the relationship between drugs and violence and issued a report of the finding. In summary, some agreement seems to have emerged that the world government’s emphasis on the criminal justice approach to controlling illegal drugs not only has failed to resolve the problems of violent crime but has worsened them.

There is no doubt that some type of drug use may end in unwanted, intolerable, and anti-social behavior. However, it appears that the intense causes of violent crimes, which frequently find classification under the heading of ‘drug related’ are caused by different factors not linked to real pharmacological effects of controlled substances upon individual behavior.

Drugs increase the various manner of violent and aggressive action by the use of the central sensory and control apparatus consisting of a network of nerve cells. This negative act, however, can make one or more partial changes to the network of nerve cells in a very complex method and at various degrees that eventually aim at the mechanisms of the part of the central nervous system that includes all the higher nervous centers within the skull.

In conclusion, experimental studies proved that the excessive use of drugs (especially alcohol, and marijuana) mostly results in committing of violence and crime or being involved in an unlawful act. However, the excessive use of drugs can be linked to violence and crime and at the same time causes damage to the proper functioning of the network of the entire nervous system.