Why doesn’t it make sense??

“The U.S. has high crime rates but we spend a lot on law enforcement and prison,” Riley said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Should we spend less?

Yes we should spend less.

We’re just a different kind of country. We have higher drug use rates, a higher crime rate, many things that go with a highly free and mobile society.”

What? Having a ‘free and mobile society’ has to have higher crime rates, higher drug use rates?? What would our ‘crime rate’ be if 800,000 arrests went away and millions of man hours of Law Enforcements time went to other activities. A ‘free and mobile society’ requires sensible policy about drugs and there use, starting with the “Classification” of drugs, and continuing with the educaion of what are ‘drugs’. The ‘legal’ prescription drugs are the drug problem. According to Phillip Emafo, International Narcotics Control Board President, ” The very high potency of some of the synthetic narcotic drugs available as prescription drugs presents, in fact, a higher overdose risk than the abuse of illicit drugs.”
The article points out that while the number of young people abusing illicit drugs in the US has gone down the number of Americans abusing prescription drugs nearly doubled from 7.8 million in 1992 to more than 15.1 million in 2003. Those drugs kill people. And all you have to do is go to a Doctor and explain the ‘pain’ you are in because of (insert your story here) and they can prescribe just about anything you want, the insurance company pays for it, you can still keep your job even though it may be addictive.
The FDA is in a complete shambles, no wy they can do what they are supposed to and the difference is you are part of the drug companies not the ‘Drug Cartels’ that are destroying our youth.
The economy of the world seems to be in a hurt, yet the advertising budget for legal drugs “hit a record $4.8 billion in 2006, up from $2.6 billion in 2002.” Health Care isn’t health care, its a legal drug dispensory. We have television ads that give us an ‘atta boy’ for knowing how many prescriptions we take and finding out that little pink pill has a name. According to an article published in the USA Today, Thursday, January 10, 2008, “About 3.1 million people in the USA ages 12 to 25 have used cough and cold medicine to get high, the government reported Wednesday”.
If there are 300million in the US then that is 1% of the population and according to LEAP 1.2% of the population is addicted to these other illicit drugs, that is for all age groups not just the 12 to 25 year olds. We have drug store clerks checking id’s to sell you cold medicine becasue its used to make ‘meth’.
My 27 year old nephew died when I was 54. The autopsy proved it was from an overdose of pain killers, ‘legal’ prescription drugs are killing our young people. We need to ‘Change the Mind Set’, good drugs, bad drugs. It needs to be based on reality.
I guess he is right after all, trying to find a link between drug use and drug enforcement, under the current system doesn’t make any sense……but it should. I think he is missing the point?? VV