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Michelle DiMonte
Professor Pinto
ENGW 1101. 32: College Writing Workshop
October 30, 2014
Drug use has become an increasing problem in our country. “In 2004, 17% of state
prisoners and 18% of federal inmates said they committed their current offense to obtain money
for drugs. These percentages represent a slight increase for federal prisoners (16% in 1997) and a
slight decrease for state prisoners (19% in 1997).” (Bureau of Justice Statistics). But the answer
to this problem is not to crack down on drugs and keep them illegal; the solution lies within the
approach adopted by countries like Portugal. Keeping drugs illegal leads to a dangerous demand
for these drugs in the black market. People will go to extreme measures to get these drugs, which
often involve crime. Stossel believes that legalizing drugs would delete the substantially high
number of unnecessary incarcerations due to drugs and drug related crimes (Stossel 214). He
believes that keeping drugs illegal is the problem and that by legalizing drugs; we can start to
correct a great deal of issues. I agree with his standpoint on the topic. Drug possession and sale
should be legalized because the crime rates would drop, the black market would disappear, and
addiction to drugs would plummet.
Making things illegal doesn’t cause people to stop using them. During the Prohibition,
the sale and consumption of alcohol was banned. Many people believed that alcohol caused
people to do bad things. So the U.S. government made it illegal to drink or possess or sell
alcohol. This law didn’t stop people from doing those things. In fact, it made people commit
more crime than just to obtain the alcohol. There were hundreds of speakeasies and moonshine
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made gangsters rich. Contrary to what the government had anticipated, crime rates skyrocketed.
According to American economist and O. P. Alford III Assistant Professor of Economics at
Auburn University Mark Thornton:
Before Prohibition and the Harrison Narcotics Act (1914), there had been 4,000 federal
convicts, fewer than 3,000 of whom were housed in federal prisons. By 1932 the number
of federal convicts had increased 561 percent, to 26,589, and the federal prison
population had increased 366 percent. Much of the increase was due to violations of the
Volstead Act and other Prohibition laws. The number of people convicted of Prohibition
violations increased 1,000 percent between 1925 and 1930, and fully half of all prisoners
received in 1930 had been convicted of such violations. Two-thirds of all prisoners
