Colombia War On Drugs

For years, the United States and Mexico have been engaged in operations to halt the production of drugs south of the border as well as their shipment to the United States, which is world’s largest drug market.   However, the genesis of the current Drug War is commonly traced back to the 2000s for a couple of reasons.  Just days after taking office in December 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon  kicked off a veritable “war” against the cartels when he sent 6,500 soldiers and police into his home state of Michoacan to  organized crime  in this area. Mexican society is largely homogeneous and socially conservative.

There is a saying in Colombia that God made the land so beautiful it was unfair to the rest of the world, so to be fair, God populated Colombia with a race of evil men. Violence in Colombia has been prevalent since the country’s bloody struggle for independence. Since then, violence has sprouted from a variety of sources, serving multiple interests and agendas. These different waves of violence shook the country and left countless dead. One of the most recent occurrences was the violence that developed during the late twentieth century, and continued into the twenty-first century, in Bogotá and Medellín. During this era, Pablo Escobar and the other cartels terrorized Colombia’s urban centers with their bombing campaigns and assassinations.

Drug abuse is a major problem throughout the world. Drugs can influence the everyday lives of people, whether they be users, dealers, drug-related crime victims, or the friends and family of a person affected. Violent crime, prostitution, government corruption, and more can all have a link to narcotics. Much of the world, including the United States, try to stop these effects of illicit drugs by focusing on stricter laws and enforcement. Yet this this approach may be counterproductive.

Introduction Written and published in 2008 by Paul Gootenberg, History professor and Latin American studies at University of New York at Stony Brook, “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global drug” retraces the pivotal stages of the illicit cocaine trafficking, starting from the boundless coca fields in Latin America to the chemistry laboratories in Europe up until the streets of U.S. cities. The aim of this book review is to provide the reader with a short but detailed insight of what is the main content of the book, by paying particular attention to its structure, objectivity and style. Scope & Organisation Adopting a meticulous chronological approach, Gootenberg describes the infamous and complex untold history of cocaine, analysing and

The use of narcotics like cocaine, claimed many lives and earned widespread coverage by media and news. Following this Nancy Reagan began the “War on Drugs”, a campaign to combat pre-existing drug usage and prevent future

The 2014 National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) Summary discourses evolving expansions associated with the trafficking and use of main illicit drugs abuse. The U.S. seizures of illegal substances in shipment exceeded 1,626 metric tons, demonstrating that DTOs have great succeed in shipping thousand tons of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, and MDMA into the United States each year. (DEA 2014) There are exceptional smuggling and shipping methods related with each drug type, but drug seizure statistics and federal, state, and local law enforcement reporting shows that smuggling overland and transportation by vehicle surpass all other methods of smuggling combined. The 2014 National Drug Control Strategy, in which has had very little

When analyzing the causes of the Mexican Drug War, one must understand the basics of the Mexican culture and its heritage. Mexico has been under the power of the PRI for almost 80 years, under its control Mexican people have endured social discrimination, censorship, and lack of opportunity. Under the corrupt government, the richer became richer and poor became poorer; thus creating a sense of distrust and impotence among the poor population towards its government. Mexico is one of the richest economies in Latin America, but it is also one of the top countries with the highest number of poor population. This gap can be visualized with the term of horizontal inequalities.

Spanish imperial rule defined much of Colombia’s social and economic development. As a colony, Colombia was an exporter of raw materials such as metals to its mother country. Colombia’s modern economy based on coffee and other agricultural exports did not emerge until liberalization began under President Gaviria. However, the economy did not take off the same way as the policies of the Washington consensus due to the uncertainty created by violence and illegal drugs. 1845 was an era of stagnation where economic change was happening at a fast rate.

For example, agencies have been established with the sole intent to manage drug use and distribution and technology has been exclusively developed to detect the presence of drugs. Yet, evidence has indicated that such exhaustive efforts have been relatively unsuccessful. First, it has been assumed that drugs have perpetuated violence in society and based on this rationale, it was believed that by the suppressing the pervasiveness of drugs that incidents of violence would simultaneously diminish. However, reality has failed to align with the expectations that had initially been anticipated. Research findings have suggested that the decriminalization of drugs would result in a less adversarial drug market in which conflicts have tended to arise among dealers as well as between dealers and buyers (Common Sense for Drug Policy, 2007, p. 21).

Some may not be too familiar with the war on drugs and the effects it has had on the society we live in. The war on drugs was started by the Nixon administration in the early seventies. Nixon deemed drug abuse “public enemy number one”. This was the commencement of the war on drugs, this war has lasted to this day and has been a failure. On average 26 million people use opioids.

The main issue when it comes to drugs in the United States is the inefficient policies and sentencing laws that have been created. Also, the injustices within these policies pertaining primarily to race. Once the “war on drugs” was claimed the only way the government and law enforcement saw fit to handling this skyrocketing issue was to incarcerate offenders. Although this solution worked for a while, other alternatives needed to be made. However, these alternatives were not made and this left the drug policies, sentencing laws, and injustices at a standstill.

Chapter two introduces the policy problems related to the War on Drugs, as well as other policies that banned or limited other use of alcohol and drugs. Authors start with the history of the regulations of mood altering substances that began in colonial times, and then it escalated with “The Father of Modern Drug Enforcement”, Dr. Hamilton Wright. President Roosevelt assigned him to be the first Opium Drug Commissioner of the United States. Dr. Wright saw drugs as a big problem, according to the text the drug prohibitions started with his opinions on limiting drug use. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was signed and required the labeling of the ingredients of the products. There were other acts signed after that period, first we had The Harrison

There are many,many kinds of drugs that are subject to drug prohibition laws which are transported and sold illegally throughout not only our country, but throughout a majority of the world. This is called drug trafficking. In the past decade drug trafficking has become a growing problem. Drug trafficking itself is worth about $435 billion per year; cocaine alone is worth $84. Though drug trafficking may be a huge part of some countries’ economies, it is a problem that continues to grow and cause problems for other countries.

Danielle Allen who is a “political theorist” wrote this article to bring perspective on the effects of the “War on Drugs” declared by late President Nixon, on mainly the African-American communities, and minorities. This war was meant to stop drug abuse to improve our communities, instead, it turned into a war on the people of our country.

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.