Addiction

There’s no way to completely eliminate addiction, and it will always be here. In the United States, roughly 10% of our population is addicted to something. I think those numbers can go down, but again you’re never going to get rid of addiction, and you’re never going to get rid of supply and demand for drugs. So I got to thinking about it and immediately asked some friends and family a very blanket statement, that was, “All drugs should be legal; agree or disagree and why.” I also asked, “If a man doesn’t have sovereignty over his own body and consciousness, then what does he have?” With that said, I got a lot of responses and I want to share them to you, the reader, in this essay. One argument was, “If you make all drugs legal, then you make them readily available and consumption will logically increase.” This is to some extent of true and not true, because if you look at Portugal and the Netherlands drugs policy for example, it contradicts this statement. So effective in 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs; heroin, meth, crack, marijuana, etc. This does not mean that they are legal and as far as I know there is not a single country or nation that has completely legalized a drug, not even marijuana. With that said, Portugal shifted the emphasis from incarceration and punishment to treatment. Portugal diverted a lot of their funds to this and if you were caught with less than ten days of supply for whatever drug you possessed, you did not have to serve jail time. This didn’t mean you weren’t disciplined, but that administrative disciplinary action was taken for that sort of law-breaking because you were still technically breaking the law. Their administrative action was focused on treatment and prevention, rather than incarceration and punishment, and again, statistics are somewhat skewed and you are always going to be dealing with a sample size and when you are talking about drugs, it’s very hard to gage it because it is such a taboo subject and not many...