Should Drugs Be Legalized?

As society developed, more and more problems emerge. Many people start to use drugs to kill time but it also causes severe influence on the society since drugs have different side-effect and many people use them to do crimes. Government started to use drug education and imprisonment to educate people that drugs are not good for people and to punish those who use it to do crimes. However, people started to find out that drug education is not helpful and inefficient. Besides, imprisonment also causes criminals to get a place to run their business. It also wastes government’s resources. People then started to suggest that drugs should be legalized and I mostly agree. This essay is going to discuss why drugs should be legalized by examining the
Imprisonment is one of the serious punishment and many people believed that imprisonment is an efficient way to stop this since they believe prisoners will not have any contact with drugs dealers and cannot use drugs anymore. However, they did not consider that imprisonment also has lots of disadvantages and most importantly, it’s waste lots of resources and cannot avoid drug use. Prisons need to be built to hold that much prisoners and government needs to spend money on providing food and other stuff. Imprisonment provide a safe shelter for prisoners to operate crime and deal drugs. Besides, imprisonment fails to deal with drug problem since people still use drugs after they come out from prisons and the reuse rate is high. Also, some people only go to jail for a short period and they join the community immediately, however, they will go back to jail again quickly because they do not change the habit to use drugs. Even if they are locked up for a long time and people think they change, they do not. Studies have shown that after a long time in jail, people cannot join the community and they will start to use drugs very soon to avoid the unaccepted feelings. People have done a survey and found out that 53% of the voters claimed that people have a higher rate to do crimes after they went to jail than before. As a conclusion, imprisonment has failed to
Portugal legalized drugs in the year of 2000 and it found itself become the country with lowest drug usage rate and the number of people get HIV because of using drugs also declined by 17%. A research has been done by Canadian experts shown their drugs usage rate do not increase and at the same time bring advantages like they expected. Same phenomena happened in Czech Republic that they gain more benefit after legalization. Legalization of drugs have the benefits like saving money on the enforcement and reduce the number of violent crime. Also, with the examples from Portugal and some states of America, people find out that they are more likely to get treatment after legalization without the fear of getting caught and this lead to less rate of disease and death rate. Besides, the Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper also agree that “drug war” is not the solution to drug abuse problem since prohibitions only increase illegal drugs market and people can have easy access to drugs. Legalized drugs can save this part of money to government for more public goods and by the estimation of UN in 2015, there are $350 billion spent on drugs in a year. People also claimed that if we legalize some drugs that are not lethal, people’s attention can be attracted to those instead of those