Ryan Stone . Mrs. Aikey . English 11 Honors, 6Th Hour.

Ryan Stone Mrs. Aikey English 11 Honors, 6th Hour 28 April 2017 The War on Drugs The War on Drugs had hopes of ending drug possession and usage in the 1971 when president Nixon signed the Drug Prevention and Control Act. Through the years, many people have criticized the war for its failures, and others have commended it for its success. Some people want harsher penalties for drug usage and possession, while others want all drugs to become legal. Although the War on Drugs seems to be a solution to a hot button issue, it has many negative effects, including its ineffectiveness, increase in prison population, and high cost. The War on Drugs is hugely and largely ineffective. In 2005, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) seized a†¦show more content†¦The amount of people in prison is usually proportional to the amount of crime being committed. In the case of America however, non-drug related crime has remained constant, or even decreased since 1971 when the war began. There has been an increase of prisoners though, as forty years ago, thirty-eight thousand people were imprisoned for breaking drug-related laws while today, that number is over two million (Swanson). The cause of this influx of prisoners are unjustly harsh drug possession laws, some of which can land people in jail for very long periods of time. One such law is California’s three-strikes law. This law states that any felon that has committed three crimes that required a state level imprisonment shall be sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years in jail, with a maximum of life. This law might be a great idea to keep mu rderers and rapists in jail, but it was found that more twenty-five-to-life sentences were meted out for possession of marijuana than for murder, rape, and kidnapping combined (Patten). Our prisons have become so overpopulated, the U.S. has more people in prison for drug-related crimes than the entire E.U. (European Union) has prisoners. This is despite the fact that the population of the U.S. is forty percent smaller than that of the E.U. (Patten). One solution to keep prison populations low would to be to issue a fine