Drugs and Prison Inmates

5 Pages 1372 Words

Drugs are, without a doubt, one of the most widespread problems in this country. About eighty percent of all prison inmates have been incarcerated because of drug related charges. It seems that the more the nation "cracks down" on drugs the more they proliferate throughout our society. But why do we choose to continue implementing ideas that have already been shown to be incapable of solving the problem? Why do we keep increasing prison sentences, inflating punitive measures, and torturing sick people; people who are already tortured from within? Why are drugs illegal at all?

What right has another to determine what a person morally can and cannot do to their own body? How can one impose paternalistic laws upon personal choices that affect no one save those who make them? Drugs can sometimes be horrible things that result in terrible pain and human suffering, but how can one logically justify our saying that anyone cannot take them; that they do not have the right to take them? Furthermore what right have we to punish a drug addict for acting in a manner that affects no one but themselves? Drug laws have one end alone: to protect us, not from others, but from ourselves; from our own ignorance, our own stupididty, and our inability to make the right decisions. How can one justify the application of what must honestly be perceived as torture upon people who are already in pain? To believe that we should punish drug addicts is to believe that we should brutalize people for being in pain.

The "war on drugs", more often seeming a war on the people than on drugs, requires more money, time, and effort than any other criminal activity, and the more of these we waste the more drugs we see. Prisons are overflowing with people who made personal decisions about their own lives; and suffered as a result even before they were carelessly flung into a life of socially-sponsored torture. How can anyone, though, really say that what these people di...