What Is Omitted in the Controversy Surrounding the Issue of Drugs Lega Essay

What Is Omitted in the Controversy Surrounding the Issue of Drugs Legalization - Essay Example For the United States, the drugs problem today has assumed the shape of the controversy about whether drugs use should be legalized. In this debate emotions often rule, when appeals to the conservative values of the nation are made by the adherents of the continuation of the current "War on Drugs" (Inciardi, 1999, p.128). However, we will see that significant benefits can be obtained from the legalization of drugs and from the shift from the drugs-related prosecutions to harm-reduction policies. Let us explore this issue in detail and try to see why this is the case. One of the strong arguments for legalization of drugs stems from the inadmissibility of the continuation of the current state of affairs, when hundreds of thousands of people are arrested every year and kept behind bars for possession of illegal substances for personal usage, and not for sale (Inciardi, 1999, p.133). At the same time, realistically looking at things we have to confess that even under such a harsh regime there has not occurred a significant reduction in drugs use, and there seems to be no perspective for such reduction at all. Indeed, the real problem with drugs is that for many people they have a unique ability to satisfy one of the fundamental human aspirations that lies in the need to escape from the numerous unpleasant aspects of our reality, even though doing so in a perverse way that may finally only aggravate the problems that we are trying to get rid of. If we understand this then we have to concede that drugs, in one form or another, are to stay with us perhaps forever. In this light, the disputable successes that proponents of the maintenance of the criminal status of drugs use to allude to when they defend their position may be misleading. Indeed, the measures of prosecution and compulsory rehabilitation of drug addicts substitutes one evil for another as they only add to the unhappiness of people who depend on drugs by intensifying in them an atmosphere of psychological tension that may actually contribute to the drug-oriented behavior and addiction.  Ã‚