Drugs: Good Or Bad

Drugs: Good or Bad

Imagine a world where drugs are legal, walking down the street and seeing people on drugs everywhere. Where almost everyone is going into convenient stores buying crack, marijuana, or even heroin. What kind of world would this be, to see junkies on the side of the road and it is perfectly legal. To see more crime than ever before from people who are trying to steal, kill, and rob just to get a fix.

Believe it or not, but at one point all drugs were legal. People walked around taking acid and smoking marijuana. According to the website addictions.org there was a bill passed in 1970 called The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. This is when the first thought of scheduling drugs came into mind. There are certain types of groups that watch over these schedules. That is the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Federal Drug Administration. The FDA takes care of all the arrests and watches over the drug trafficking (Trafficking drugs is the illegal distribution of drugs) that happens in or around our country. While the other two take care of what to put on the schedules. There are five different schedules starting at five and going up to one, from lowest addiction to highest addiction. The worst type of these schedules is schedule one. This schedule is the one where they put the most addictive and harmful types of drugs. Drugs like heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, and LSD are just a few of them. Now they want to legalize marijuana, this is because doctors say it has medical benefits. But Congress would also like to put a tax on the distribution of this drug. Marijuana could very well be the beginning of the legalization of drugs all together. This is because most of these other schedule one drugs were created for medicinal

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purposes. So they too would serve a medical benefit. If they could pass the bill to legalize schedule one marijuana then what drug would be the next to be legalized? Questions like these arise everyday. I believe legalizing marijuana would wreck society, put many businesses and jobs at risk, and lead to legalization of more harmful drugs.

Let's first take a look at this quote from William J. Bennett, America's first drug czar. "A citizen in a drug-induced haze whether on his backyard deck or on a mattress in a ghetto crack house, is not what the Founding Fathers meant by the 'pursuit of happiness.' ... Helpless wrecks in treatment centers, men chained by their noses to cocaine--these people are slaves," (Balkin, pg.23) this quote hits the nail on the head. Just think that these things are going on in our society today and no drug is legal. Happiness is not found in drugs or money, but in life and living it to the fullest. Society today does not need drugs to be legal, because things like this will happen and no one will be able to do a thing about it. I am not saying that drugs like crack and cocaine are going to be legal. If marijuana is legalized then what is stopping people from making drugs like crack and cocaine legal. Knowing that people will be doing nothing with their lives and tearing at the fabric of society. The fabric of what founded this country, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If marijuana was legalized do people think that crime would go down? American government has increased the number of law enforcement substantially for the fight against drugs. This quote here shows how America has improved its law force for just drugs. " ...the criminal justice system has grown much larger: there are more police officers, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards then ever before. The number of arrest,

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convictions and prisoners has increases exponentially; so has the amount of seized contraband",(Balkin, pg.25) Do people think by legalizing marijuana that crime will go down or even subside a little? Marijuana is not the only drug that people would kill or steal for. A good example would be the Columbian Cartel. They are known for the distribution of cocaine. So the legalization of marijuana would not affect any if at all crime on American streets. Drug organizations would focus on other drugs and still kill innocent people over nothing but drugs. The American people would have to pay for it, in taxes and American lives lost every day to drugs. On top of that marijuana would be legal, so people would have to suffer knowing that others are wasting their lives away on a drug that might only benefit the people who really need it.

Imagine going into a restaurant, or any type of business for that matter, trying to get help from an employee who was high. People would probably never get what they needed. If marijuana became legal then things like this would happen everyday. Let's look at this quote by William J. Bennett, from his address at Harvard University in 1989. "...The last thing we needed was a policy that made widely available a substance that impairs memory, concentration, and attention span..." Going out to eat does not need to be any harder than it already is. Almost everyone has been given the wrong food or the order has taken too long or just is not right. This is when people are almost certain that the employees are not on drugs. Image if people could legally be on drugs to work at a restaurant, it would be absolute chaos. Businesses would lose customers because no one would want to be under that kind of service. Places would have to hire those who did not

4 use marijuana or drugs at all. Then it would come back to legal rights. All in all it would be bad for everyone, the business, the customers,