The curse of our age. The reason why millions of lives have been and are being ruined. I don´t understand why people take them and why they are seen to be “cool”. I´ve recently visited places like Cracolandia in downtown São Paulo and the Tenderloin/Soma district in San Francisco where junkies are literally dying in front of your eyes. These people have lost their self-respect and human dignity – all for a blast of crack that gives them a sensation that lasts a few seconds. While they are the human face of suffering, there is an enormous economic cost.
The Investopaedia site says that Americans buy $150 billion worth of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and meth annually and that the federal government requested $35.1 billion for the National Drug Control Budget for this year. It also highlighted a 2014 report by the London School of Economics called “Ending the Drug Wars.” It said the global strategy of drug prohibition had “produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage,” including “mass incarceration in the U.S., highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilization in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, and an acute global shortage of pain medication,” among other “systematic human right abuses around the world.”
I don´t see anything has changed since then. I´ve never taken drugs even when I was a student. I certainly don´t approve of them but it´s obvious that the current campaigns to combat them have failed. I wonder if it´s time to legalize them or bring their use under control. After all lots of legal drugs are also harmful and addictive.
Nominated by Mr Polly




