Satire Essay About Drugs

Illicit drugs are drugs that the government consider to be too dangerous for the community, and the use of illegal drugs has been an overarching issue that has inflicted a plethora of costs upon society. The environment is subject to detrimental harm due to unregulated drug production. Furthermore, the money spent on law enforcement leads back to the tax-payer dollar and in addition to lost human productivity, amount to enormous amounts of money essentially wasted. Lastly, the public is at great risk of transmitting and contracting deadly diseases. Although illicit drug use is associated with several other costs to society, the environmental, financial and public health costs are the most significant, and will be discussed in this paper.

Illicit drug use attributes to environmental harm because

The financial costs of illicit drug use can be roughly measured by how much the government spend on law enforcement and the loss of human productivity. Globally the world spends $100 billion annually on law enforcement aimed in an effort to enforce, prevent, treat, and reduce harm caused by illegal drugs. Despite all the money spent on the interdiction of illegal drugs, drug markets continue to rise and expand. Law enforcement provides very poor value for money that should instead be allocated for education, public infrastructure or in the form of lower taxes. Additionally, drug use causes loss in human productivity which is bad for the economy. In 2008 the cost of lost human productivity in Australia was $425m. Although drug users in general tend to be unproductive, the accrue in opportunity cost is significant, and would have been beneficial for a country’s economy. These two economic factors inflicted because of illicit drug use, are amounted to greatly impact society, as they are paying for largely unnecessary law enforcement, and are at loss because of lost human