President Richard Nixon The United State - 1720 Words

On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon, addressed the United States of America and its congress, detailing his plans to stem drug abuse in the United State. He declared it â€Å"America’s public enemy number one†, saying that â€Å"In New York City more people between the ages of 15 and 35 years of age die as a result of narcotics than from any other single cause†. Less than a year prior to his speech, congress had passed into legislation a bill that called for a comprehensive reform of the country’s current drug laws. Still, Nixon felt that the nation needed more as the current drug policies were not enough to eliminate drug abuse. He went on to propose many ideas for what he called â€Å"a full-scale attack on the problem of drug abuse in†¦show more content†¦Strict prohibition needs to end, and we need to adopt a more lax policy like decriminalization or legalization. These have been both shown to help in fixing the aforementioned problems that the United States currently faces because of the war on drugs. The war on drugs has cost our government a vast amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere. In fiscal year 2013 alone, the United States government spent $25.6 billion in an effort to prevent drug use and its consequences. This was $415.3 million (1.6%) increase from the previous year. [1] This indicates that our government has no intentions of backing off of their drug stance any time soon. Overall, the national drug control budget costs the government more than the state, commerce, and interior departments combined. In addition, large number of drug-related trials clog our nation’s criminal justice courts, and often times the result of these cases is imprisonment for the accused. Since the start of the war on drugs, the country’s incarcerated population has increased sevenfold, and over one percent of the population now resides in a prison. [3] There are currently more people behind bars for drug charges today than there were people behind bars for any reas on in 1980. [2] Keeping all of these prisoners incarcerated costs