Question

Examine the various drugs on the world market and propose a plan to address this social problem.

Answer 1

The commission consisted of nineteen members, including a former UN Secretary General, a former US Secretary of State, a former US Federal Reserve governor, and former Brazilian, Colombian, Greek, Mexican, and Swiss presidents or prime ministers. The report of the commission called for a dramatic overhaul of current drug policy: "The global war on drugs has collapsed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world... Fundamental changes are urgently needed in national and global drug control policies"

The best approach our society could take would be to broaden the solutions to prevention, recovery and harm reduction discussed earlier; because drugs are always with us, our society should do what it can to reduce the many harms that drugs cause. In this way, prevention of drug education and drug treatment programs should be improved, sterile needles should be made available to drug addicts who inject their drugs, and drug courts should be used for more drug offenders.

Providing legally prescribed opiates for heroin addicts and/or alternatives, including methadone. Several other nations have proven effective in this provision. Encouraging primary health care practitioners and other health care providers to screen for substance abuse more carefully. Basing drug sentences less on the amount of illegal drugs sold and more on the level of violence that some drug vendors are engaging in.

If arrest and imprisonment are to continue, these measures should be reserved for sellers of large quantities of illegal drugs, not those who use the drugs or those who sell only small quantities of them. When drug dealers of low level are imprisoned, they are simply replaced by new dealers on the street. Providing alternative sentencing to low-level dealers would reduce the number of imprisoned dealers by several hundred thousand annually over time without making illegal drugs more available.