Drugs Crime & Violence in America

Many of the Mexican border towns are advocating the legalization of drugs because they are trying to eliminate the violence between sellers in the communities. Gangs and other active drug sellers are fighting over territory and violence is high. The legalization of drugs will hopefully help put a stop to this violence. The taxes on the products should help the local governments and hopefully it will be like the sale of alcohol and cigarettes; there aren’t many related murders over the selling of these products in the community because they are readily available.

The legalization of drugs may not be the answer to our problems. Many people will argue that we need to decriminalize drugs as the users are not harming society, only themselves. The point that these people are missing is that they are harming others. The majority of drug users come from some type of family, and they are hurting their family members either emotionally and quite often physically through abuse. Those who fall into the trap of severe addiction and cannot function with or without being “high” are a drain on the economy. From a functionalist perspective, these wasted lives are some of the missing links to our productive society necessary for success. Tax payers are wasting money on the paroling and incarceration of these users. Those who can’t hold jobs and continue to live off of welfare are also thriving from the pockets of functioning members of society. Legalizing drugs could be one of the worst possible answers and could be detrimental to society.

The whole idea of putting money into the criminal justice field to help crack down on crime is quite similar to the concept of taking aspirin when you have a headache. Aspirin is a salicylate drug used to temporarily relieve minor aches and pains. Unfortunately there are major side effects such as gastrointestinal ulcers, stomach bleeding, and tinnitus. Taking aspirin only attacks the problem, it does not fix it. The proper and effective way of handling frequent headaches would be to find out the cause of your headache and make changes to help improve the outcomes. Dehydration is often a cause of frequent headaches, simply drinking more water could be a solution. This concept can be applied to our government’s solutions to fighting crime. Criminal justice control spends $6 billion a year on 827,440 young African American males alone. The amount of money spent on court systems, police officers, and fighting crime should be used to going to the root of the problems and finding solutions. It is widely known that a lack of resources left for poor inner-city citizens is causing urban decay leading into drug use and crime, so why don’t we start to use that money to develop government aid programs, youth centers, and employment training programs? This money should also be used to give incentives to business owners to come into the cities with tax breaks. The only way to fix our problems is if we address them at the source, we cannot keep trying to cover up the outcome of societal disorganization by throwing our problems into correction facilities and throwing away the key.