Drug Trafficking is the most violent crime In America and over 50,000 people died from the overdose of illegal drugs in 2015. That is a lot more than the American’s who died from Muslim extremist attacks in the past 20 years. Nobody uses drugs to become addicted to and individuals that use drugs are hooked to them and it takes over their life but they don’t want to die. A lot of these people start using these drugs when they see a family member or close friend use them.
Drug Smuggling started back in the 1800’s and drugs that were brought in and sold were opium, marijuana, and cocaine. In California Opioids were promoted by manufacturers in an irresponsible way and then doctors started prescribing it. In California, there were immigrants from China who showed the American people about smoking opium. Opium was traded, sold and distributed across the area. The places to purchase and sell was in Opium dens and the drug began to appear in cities in California and then New York and other areas that were Urban. Soon there were some who started exploring other opiates like Morphine. Morphine was used a lot as a pain killer in the Civil war and it caused a lot of soldiers to become addicted. The Harrison Act of 1914 banned opium if it wasn’t used for a medical reason but use of other illegal drugs continued.
Mafia groups in the 1950’s smuggled and sold illegal drugs as well as gambling and other activities. There were drug cartels that sold drugs for money. The Mafia’s drug exchange was called the “French Connection” and Traffickers in New York would take hold of shipments of Opium from Turkey that came from Paris France. In the 1970’s Pablo Escobar started a group called the Medellin Cartel where there were drug smugglers that supplied drugs in Columbia. The Medellin Cartel made $60 million dollars every day from drug sales.
According to UNDOC there are 200,000 people who die from abusing drugs every year and it takes $250 billion dollars to treat cases of drug misuse. The economy is highly affected from drug smuggling. A lot of countries are poor and the money from drugs doesn’t not do anything to make the economy better. Drug traffickers in criminal groups who have a lot of money can use that money to protect themselves from governments that try to close their drug activity. There are countries who deal with many health problems from the drugs which is costly. The cost of Health care in the United states for treating drug problems is billions of dollars. It is also expensive to track down and prosecute a drug dealer. The police force and crime also affects how the economy works in most countries
Drug Trafficking is a serious hazard to health. Drug addiction can ruin lives of families and it leads to people being without a home and can cause death. If drug trafficking continues, then there will be a supply of drugs that are available to anybody who wants to use them. Addiction influences children’s health and the way they are loved by society and the way they end up growing up. Drug trafficking spreads both HIV and hepatitis C. “According to the United Nations on Drugs and Crime, there are about 13.3 percent of drug users that inject in the world that have HIV, and most of them consumed Hepatitis C by the sharing of needles.”(Rehab Center Rankings) Many people have died and it will continue if huge amounts of drugs are continued to get smuggled into different countries.
There are solutions to the drug trafficking problem and how to stop it. Limiting the prescription of opioids can decrease the abuse issues and there. There are many other pain relievers that can be used instead of opioids that can help with severe pain. Adding more law enforcement police officers can reduce drug smuggling. It will also restrict the number of people in the drug trade. If officers are doing different tasks in the day and you add more law enforcement it can give the public the help that they need. Some other helpful resources are educating, giving counseling and services to people that are facing addiction. The only downside with seeking good therapies and services is that cost can be too high. This correlates with how much a person makes with how much he/she will be addicted to illegal substances through drug trafficking. The poor can’t get the insurance and they can’t pay the fees. People could recover if they changed this in the future.
According to a report from the white house President Donald Trump’s budget plan attempts to fight the epidemic of drugs “by providing 175 million dollars for battling drug trafficking and opioid abuse. He will give 500 million dollars to individuals addicted to opioids treatment services and stop them from falling into addiction.” (McHugh, 2017)
http://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2017/09/21/stopping_the_drug_epidemic_110362.html
http://www.history.com/topics/history-of-drug-trafficking
http://www.rehabcenterrankings.com/can-drug-trafficking-be-stopped/
"In The World of Drugs" 
Drug abuse is undoubtedly a serious epidemic that needs to be corrected in the United States. Our country already has been implementing the war on drugs in order to stop the abuse. It’s clear that the methods being practiced have not been working, as they have just been leading to mass incarceration for non harmful drugs such as marijuana. I think focusing our efforts on the trafficking itself instead of just the people who abuse the drugs will prove helpful into fighting this ‘war’. If we halt the trafficking itself then there will be no need to arrest all the people who are abusing it. Although it will be harder to do this, it will be more advantageous. One of the ways we can do this is by making the distribution of drugs a much higher offense and cracking down on low level distributors. They have access to the people higher up on the distribution chain and by negotiating with them we may be able to eventually find the source of the drugs. More often than not it’s the lower level drug distributors that get prosecuted and if we work with them then maybe we can change that. We can also focus on the transportation of drugs; If we can discover the drugs as it’s being transported then it will never reach it’s destination and we can discover who is in charge of that. Often times drugs are transported in trucks so having a more thorough look into the vehicles which cross our border can help. Stopping trafficking at the root of the problem is the solution to the drug crisis in our country.
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Good topic to choose for the first blog, Naveed! With drug trafficking, we have a supply/demand problem. Unless we actively work to reduce the demand, we are not going to dent the supply. This is evident in the fact that regardless of the billions of dollars we spend to stop it, drugs still get through. Increasing law enforcement and doing “more of the same” isn’t getting us anywhere.
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