Drug Trafficking In The United States And Policies To Combat It
Where to begin with the United States international counterdrug policy. We live in this world where the United States Government has felt like they have been doing a good job for the past 60 years on this subject. I am here to explain to you why it is not. Professor I’ve been listening to your lecture’s week in and week out with you imploring us why this rumbling tumbling government has not fixed anything together in such a long time. Throughout this mess of a situation that I am no expert in is going to explain to you why we’re like this at all. First, I wanted to say that throughout all this time are drug policy has narrowly changed apart from marijuana. Aforementioned it’s been one of the most expensive missions to try to fix and from what it looks like we’re just burning money away. Momentarily with that information what makes you damn think that we’re doing a better job internationally? With the recent opioid outbreak that we’ve caused around the world along with the disaster, we know as Fentanyl. The overdosing has gone out of control with the many deaths we’ve suffered have already exceeded more than 200,000 deaths since the outbreak. As ill explain more in detail about that later ill go into the war on drugs, we’ve been with other countries starting with Mexico.
The war on drugs with Mexico is one of the best examples of our failure in general. As this war, in general, have been going on since 2006 but it’s been around longer than that. I like to add that Mexico is one of the biggest juggernauts in the drug trade with cocaine and methamphetamine as its core business. Cocaine is the one I am primarily going to focus on because it smuggles over 90% of the world’s cocaine into the United States. “U. S drug and immigration control strategies focus primarily on curbing the foreign supply, and secondarily on targeting the sources of demand” (ANDREAS). With this article I’ve read with this class it helps understanding many things that happened wrong with this. Corruption is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of International counter drug policies haven’t worked in favor of the United States. It goes without saying that Mexico has been riddled with corruption for so many years way past the infamous Pablo Escobar era.
Now since Mexico has delegated all the issues pertaining to drug trafficking to the United States. The United States has just been spending money at this point to help at least decrease the number of drug busts as well. Mostly the United States have in my opinion just kept in their own territory trying to keep out Mexicans in general and make drug busts in their own side. Its as if we get more concerned with the facets of pigging back on Mexico and try to solve its own problems as well as solving another issue altogether. Like immigration as with its current Presidential administration tries to make it a reason that drugs are the issue along with crime and or rape. Its mostly just targeting the Mexicans instead of solving its drug trafficking issues they claim they can solve.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Mexico who themselves are trying to solve their own problems in retrospect. Mexico is trying to destroy all the drug cartels that stand in their way. This has been proven by a documentary that we watched also haven’t been working out. This is mainly due to the corruption they deal with daily. It took many people in small towns to rise and rebel against the drug cartels themselves when it occurred to them that Mexico wasn’t helping at all. If the United States really cared to make a difference in the world of drug trafficking, they wouldn’t have stopped to solve a giant issue themselves. Even with the dangers now they should at least have helped Mexico more by stopping the drug cartels in Mexico. As the United States could’ve have helped instead of giving immunity to the leaders that are willing to give some sort of information or taking the glory of capturing a higher up themselves. Our next President should have a clear stance in stopping corruption globally because that’s the bottom line. Especially in supply and even nations of the world. Yes, firstly the president should help stop corruption in the United States. But since drug cartels keep getting money who knows who they’re bribing at every turn. They may have bribed a lot of our leaders today stating that selling fraction of their supplier can make them billionaires today.
Now shifting back to supply and demand is probably the most important part of this section. The supply and demand for illegal drugs have skyrocketed to unfathomable levels and this is from the peoples’ thirst to consume drugs. We encounter so many issues with drug consumption that countries are frantically moving around to work out a plan to stop it. The United States has the right plan, in theory, to stop drugs from moving around. That’s mostly to seize as many illegal drugs in time before someone can get their hands on them. The second is to try and be ahead of the game and to deprive everyone of getting near the drugs. This mostly means to increase the price of drugs as much as possible. Has this plan worked out for the United States at all? Well no, not at all this has only given people more of an addiction and force people to scrap up enough money to buy at least a little bit more.
This plan, in turn, has been shifting behaviors of the addicts even more than it uses too. Its not the United States fault on this one it’s the addicts that can’t get the help they need and or they have refused any kind of help. This only actually helped for the time being but not long term. After Colombia and other countries like Mexico and Chile got involved drugs kind of got on the cheaper side because of the attempt to smuggle them or fly them over, cue the American Made Barry Seal joke. But, yes based on the creative ideas of these countries they always found new ways to smuggle their drugs just to satisfy demand. This core information is what I learned from your power points and lectures.
In the largest scale of operations, you may give the United States a pass in the terms of how fast drug supply and consumption have been at all-time highs. But after such a long time you’d hope they’d come up with a plan that at least benefits a lot of people instead of turning around and making a quick buck out of for-profit prisons. With one of the strongest militaries in the world, the United States could use one of their best’s strengths in action like fear. Fear is probably the best weapon you can have against the suppliers. The United States spends billions annually on military spending and billions more on drug enforcement. It is best to instill fear on to many people like they do on an average day to international companies and hopefully it works out in this situation. I also thought of more severe punishments for relations in drug crimes but that might be too general because anyone possessing drugs can be implicated as a dealer instead of a user. I’d suggest the United States government come together and spend more on the treatment of addicts to aid them get over their addictions and to stop labeling as criminals because then they’ll fall back on their terrible habits. It may cost more than a billion to at least get this started but at least a good amount of people receives consulting, therapeutic, and rehabilitation centers. If I was the next president, I’d make it clear to the American people to help these people fix their mistakes and with goodwill and say, “Your life is not over, mistakes happened and we’re here to fix them. ”.
Essay Question 2
Opioids, one of the most consumed drugs by patients galore. These patients are suffering from horrid painful days that are coming from surgeries like cancer. The Opioid was mostly used to combat this pain and was recognized as such. As always when a drug is being harshly used like this you can most likely get it from prescriptions. As a result of this people started to get too hinged on the idea that this can be used for any kind of pain. Patients sooner or later began begging for the drug that relieved them from sleepless nights and daily pains of everyday life. This has delved into a gigantic problem. Doctors have no real way to see how much pain a patient can be despite, numerous tests to see what’s the amount of pain they’re in. This can lead to an estimate version of doses given.
This can lead to an area where the patients are getting more doses than they should. This can lead to a rather unsafe addiction and that’s why they keep coming back for more. Opioids are on the expensive side of drugs according to you professor it reels them in with the excitement that it brings you and immediately makes you want to buy at any costs. You don’t even need to have a prescription as if you’re a man looking for illegal drugs you can just obviously inquire about the black market. Who is to blame in skyrocketing such a life-changing product in terms of addiction and swirl of pain? Well, the pharmaceutical companies of course! Like any ordinary drug you see on TV, they began advertising throughout promotions and commercials anywhere. Its heavy rotation began to attract consumers to the idea of a way to relieve pain at no matter what costs. Big Pharma had consumers right where they wanted as they ran such a concise campaign that people flocked for the product and begged to get some. Millions of dollars went into such a massive ad campaign for this resulting in so many people viewing the commercial and the work opioid began to take its place in the household.
In the realm were future cases we begin to wonder how the Big Pharma got away with so many laws with the effects of addiction and the legality of the opioid is quite simple. “A study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Associated Press found that from 2006 to 2015, the pharmaceutical industry spent $880 million on campaign contributions and lobbying state legislatures, 220 times as much as the amount spent by groups trying to limit opioid use. ” (Humphreys, Caulkins, and Felbab-Brown). In a sense, you can infer that they predicted a lot of lawsuits, problems with the opioids, and a lot of issues in general with the distribution of the opioid. This essentially creates a hurricane of problems for people around the United States. It is creating such an unbearable environment clouded by the people living with pain and in turn, keep being prescribed opioids to resolve their pain. Not a little number of opioids but an untold number of Opioid prescriptions that made consumption rise in the hundreds of millions. An amount that shocks the world and affects productivity and the health of people in general. It differs from many of the previous crisis mainly because of the amount of money that’s been funneled in opioid.
President Trump to combat this by basically trying to stop and kill the supply by targeting its black-market dealers as well as stopping overdosing in general. This plan is claiming to show results as Trump claims he is making “tremendous progress” but in 2017 more than 70,000 people died because of the overdoses. Trump claimed that it went 4% down from the previous year but how can that be? If the amount of death by overdoses have never been higher. Otherwise, with this information, Trump tries to make bonds with the lower class claiming that his emphasis lays on public health and taking on the cases of addiction that he claims is a disease and not and I repeat not a crime. The only problem with this is with the false claims before made by Trump how can we efficiently measure that the billions poured into controlling the crisis is working?
At this point, we can infer that it’s not working because we just hit a new higher in drug overdose relating deaths. Trump may be getting help international from China and others, but it creates another problem relating to him ignoring human rights violations and other known problems in the world. He ignores this problem by getting financial assistance in helping him solve the urgent problems he has of his own. It’s as if he is declaring war on human rights because he is ignoring a lot of other problems that he can shift his focus on. In my opinion, it is not the way to go. Trump just needs to keep focusing on reducing the prescriptions of opioids to people. This reason alone of excessive prescriptions is what’s killing millions of people. We Americans need to do better in stop giving careless prescriptions and terrible drugs that are making people into savages. We must stop making our addictions into nightmares. We’ve got to come up with ways into researching for an alternative pain relief drug that doesn’t have the same addictiveness and horrid side effects of opioids. Obviously, that’s easier said than done but with the current year coming close to an end and no perfect solution to this crisis. Trump or the future president hopefully invest their time, research, and money to find that relief drugs that not only help people in the United States but around the world as well.
As well we do need to find a solution as well as to fix bribery and corruption relating to these drugs as well. To not let any crimes, go unjust for these people that knowing what they made and the effects that as harsh as endangering one’s life. All in all this is a worldwide problem not just with opioids but illegal drugs, in general, that’s the supply and demand that’s destroying us as well as consumption and addiction. We as people can do better and all we need to do is to stay in the loop and be aware of possible drugs and crises that we go through every day. And to help and not punish the people that are getting addicted but to help them with funding to public health and its research to make them better people. To not treat them as criminals of any sort but to help them become a better and healthier person. Hopefully, we begin to expand on solving this crisis and remember it in the future as just a blemish on one’s history of drugs.
