These two drugs bleed the world more than any other for very different reasons.It is a slow painful death robbing individuals of choice and diverting billions of dollars to drug suppliers. There are plenty of drugs available in every neighborhood. They are all around us, ranging in addictiveness, deadliness, and availability. The two most damaging to society and the individual are readily available despite decades of the best efforts by the U.S. and every other nation around the world. A 16 year old can get heroin or crack easier than alcohol or cigarettes because dealers don’t I.D and often deliver (Drug Crazy, Mike Grey ) Heroin and most opiates derive from the poppy plant Papaver somniferum. Which displays a beautiful flower when in full bloom. Opium is the sticky tarry substance produced within these plants seed pod. (dorsman 1998) for 6,000 years the opium poppy has been cultivated for use in various medicinal preparations. (dorsman 1998) Heroin was first synthesized from morphine in 1898 by the bayer company in Germany. It got it’s name from the german heroisch which means powerful. This semisynthetic enters the brain quicker than morphine because chemically it’s more soluble in fat. Once in the brain it turns back into morphine. (dorsman1998) Heroin arrives in our homes from all around the world. From one point turkey was a major some of white powder heroin into the U.S. through the infamous “French connection and when this ended other countries took up the torch to fill this void. the golden triangle: Loas, Mynamar, and Thailand now fed the U.S heroin along with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Along with Central Asia, nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Purity of heroin increase...
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...s the placental barrier into the fetus causing what is known as fetal alcohol syndrome. (fields) When a woman drinks alcohol during pregnancy she risks giving birth to a child who will pay the price in mental and physical deficiencies for his or her entire life (kids health.org) Ethanol is the most widely used psychoactive drug known to humanity (fields) Alcohol is devastating to the body, the community and the world economically.
Works Cited
Robert J. MaCcoun and Peter Reuter (2001) Drug War Heresies Learning from other Vices, Times, And Places ; press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge, United Kingdom
Jerry Dorsman (1998) How to Quit Drugs for Good A Complete Self-Help Guide ; Three Rivers Press. New york, New York
Feilds R. (2013) Drugs in Perspective. New York, NY Mcgraw-Hill
Kidshealth.org
Amsden. Rollingstone Magazine
The documentary states that over 27,000 deaths a year are due to overdose from heroin and other opioids. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in 2015 prescription pain relievers account for 20,101 overdose deaths, and 12,990 overdose deaths are related to heroin (Rudd et al., 2010-2015). The documentary’s investigation gives the history of how the heroin epidemic started, with a great focus on the hospice movement. We are presented with the idea that once someone is addicted to painkillers, the difficulty in obtaining the drug over a long period of time becomes too expensive and too difficult. This often leads people to use heroin. This idea is true as a 2014 survey found that 94% of respondents who were being treated for opioid addiction said they chose to use heroin because prescription opioids were “more expensive and harder to obtain (Cicero et al., 2014).” Four in five heroin users actually started out using prescription painkillers (Johns, 2013). This correlation between heroin and prescription painkiller use supports the idea presented in the documentary that “prescription opiates are heroin prep school.”
Where did this drug come from and what makes it different from any other drug that is on the market? Heroin's origins go back long before Christ was a bleep on the radar. It goes back to 1200 B.C. Or the Bronze Age. At that time how ever heroin would be known as its chemically altered state of the poppy seeds. Even at that time however the ancient peoples of that time knew that if the poppy seeds juice were collected and dried. the extract that was left behind could make a effective painkiller. This would later be named opium. There were small incidents of it appearing in Europe, for instance it was used by the gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. But as a whole it would take more then a millennium for opium to travel from the Middle East to the Europe. This only occurred do to crusades. In just a few hundred after that is went from a rarely used painkiller to a liquid that was said to cure all aliments and would even lead to the most humiliating defeat China Empire. In the 1803 opium became dwarfed by its new brother morphine which is named in honor of the Greek god Morpheus who is the god of dreams. Morphine is an extract of opium and is ruffly 10 times the strength of its counter part. After Morphine creation it was put to used almost at once to assist battle field victims. This was a mistake however, because this refined does of opium is also 10 times more addicting then it was in its original form. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers would retur...
The dependence on hard core drugs in the United States is on a continuous climb. Heroin is the leading reason for this. Considered by many to be the hardest of hard drugs, thus making heroin a very popular choice among drug addicts. Heroin is a narcotic produced from the opium of the poppy plant and poses a serious risk to society. Since it could be injected, snorted or smoked heroin also causes health complications and the possibility of death. Sadly, none of that matters to an addict because they only want their next fix. A century ago the doctors who developed heroin were only hoping for a way to help patients, they were unaware their new found medicine would lead to decades of addiction, abuse, health problems and even death for many.
FITZPATRICK, Michael (2001). “The Lessons of the Drugs War”, Spiked,. Online at: , consulted on March 30th, 2004.
War on drugs is the biggest political hoax in the history of the United States. In “Chasing the Scream”, Johann Hari elegantly outlined the arguments, which illustrate that the drugs use originates mostly from social causes. Hari briefly explained how the war on drugs came to be and how it is perpetuated in the contemporary society. Therefore, to illustrate that addiction to drugs is closely tied to social causes Johann Hari presented multiple examples. For the purpose of the following essay, I will focus on Chino Hardin’s life experiences and how the war on drugs came to be and the repercussions it had on the users.
As this paper had explored, US drug prohibition, from its inception, followed by the “war on drugs”, have failed. The repressive strategies found within the drug wars not only are not able to handle the inherently complex nature of the international drug trade, but it, as history has shown, has exasperated the problem. At the national level, the “war on drugs” effects was just as ineffective and detrimental to society with heavy mandatory minimum prison sentences and the world's highest imprisonment rate. In this regards, the drug war was a failure; however, in some other respect, it is a success. It is a success in that drug laws disproportionately affected minorities, especially the black community; moreover, it exclusively targets the lower rungs of society. As this paper has examined, the “war on drugs” is a proxy genocide of the lower class.
The intake of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy can cause many different birth defects. Drugs and alcohol can easily reach the baby while inside the mother. When a pregnant woman consumes a drug or some alcohol it enters into her bloodstream, then makes its way to the placenta. When it reaches the placenta it travels through the umbilical cord to the baby’s body (Schniderman pg. 27). Once it reaches the bay it can cause a lot of different problems. Drinking alcohol can cause the baby to be born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. If too much alcohol gets into the baby’s bloodstream the baby will most likely have FAS. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can affect an infant after it is born or even later on in life. Kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can be impulsive at times, and they tend to not learn from their own mistakes and behavior unlike other children (Stewart pg. 47). Having a child with FAS could be very hard. They have difficulties trying to learn certain things. Learning from mistakes make life so much easier, and having a child who cannot do that could be very stressful. Many people put the...
. “The illegal drug market in the United States is one of the most profitable in the world. As such, it attracts the most ruthless, sophisticated, and aggressive drug traffickers.” Throughout the years drug trafficking has been a major issue in America. These issues have impacted our economy, security, which promote new laws and policies throughout the U.S. and among our boarders. Drug Trafficking has created conflict with other countries such as Mexico. “…criminal groups operating from neighboring Mexico smuggle cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, amphetamine, and marijuana into the United States. These criminal groups have smuggled heroin and marijuana across the Southwest Border and distributed them throughout the United States since the 1970s.” (Policy Almanac).
The war on drugs, which started in the United States, has become widespread in many countries around the world, and increasingly so in Canada (Odeh, 2013). It has been shown that the war on drugs is an inefficient way to minimize or even control drug use and possession (Odeh, 2013). This begs the question then as to why the war on drugs is still being waged with increasing force. The United States, which started the war on drugs, now has the highest prison population per capita in the world, with 730 of every 100,000 people imprisoned (Odeh, 2013). Furthermore, more than half of these people in prison are serving sentences for drug crimes (Odeh, 2013). Despite the fact that it costs taxpayers a lot of money, with no results; drug use and the amount of drugs in the US hasn’t decreased, the war on drugs has not stopped. While some Americans, even very conservative ones (CBC, 2011) have come to the conclus...
Concerned authorities have focused essentially on criminalization and punishment, to find remedies to the ever-increasing prevalent drug problem. In the name of drug reducing policies, authorities endorse more corrective and expensive drug control methods and officials approve stricter new drug war policies, violating numerous human rights. Regardless of or perhaps because of these efforts, UN agencies estimate the annual revenue generated by the illegal drug industry at $US400 billion, or the equivalent of roughly eight per cent of total international trade (Riley 1998). This trade has increased organized/unorganized crime, corrupted authorities and police officials, raised violence, disrupted economic markets, increased risk of diseases an...
Morphine, codeine and heroin are all derived from the same plant, the opium poppy. The opium drugs have been used for medicinal and recreational use for centuries. In the 1700s opium was mixed into an alcohol solution to help with pain relief as they are a strong depressant. This mixture would be used for helping soldiers with wounds or for the numbing of pain during surgery. Opium was in very high demand and the British Empire controlled the opium fields in India. Britain traded the opium to China for exchange for tea leaves that could only be grown in China. Because of the highly addictive nature of opiuates the people of China got addicted. To combat the addiction the emperor started to burn the boats that sent the opium which started the
In this essay I will define drug abuse and show the economic impact of the sales of illicit drugs. I will introduce an argument for legalization and the impact to the economy. Next I will discuss some of the economic cost from lack of productivity, health care cost and other cost associated with Drug abuse.
The drug war continues to be an ongoing issue in the US – and, to some extent, around the world. The contentious policy, since its inception, has been meticulously documented by historians and filmmakers alike. This paper will explore the failure of “War on Drugs” in the US by engaging with textual scholarly secondary sources to which will be supplemented by a relevant documentary, The House We Live In by Jarecki. It is the war on drugs, and not the drugs themselves, that are harming the nation. As this paper will show, the drug war is a failure on several accounts. Drug prohibition, and the later variation, “war on drugs”, attempt to internationally suppress the inherently complex global drug trade through simplistic means only exasperated the situation. Furthermore, at a national level, the “war on drugs” helped with the criminalization of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens and legitimization of public policies that are insidious in disproportionate consequences to both race, and, ultimately, class; however, it is precisely these factors, as Jarecki argues in his film, that make the drug war successful in other respects.
MacCoun, Robert J., and Peter Reuter. Drug war heresies: learning from other vices, times, and places. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 19,24,48-49. Print.
Walters, John P. "No surrender: the drug war saves lives." National Review 27 Sept. 2004: 41. Student Edition. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.