Contra
Our group’s argument is that the war on drug should have been a major issues during the 2012 presidential elections because it affected our society in various ways. The Federal government spends more than 26.2 Billion dollars a year on the war on drugs. There 12,408,899 made arrests in 2011, and out of those arrests, 1,531,251 arrests were drug related. To be continue…
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/charts/
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v33n5/cprv33n5-5.html
http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock
http://www.leap.cc/for-the-media/the-war-on-drugs-at-a-glance/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-carlsen/drug-war_b_1833519.html
http://november.org/graphs/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/06/28/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-minorities-and-the-poor/
http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics.shtml
With the war on drugs being so expensive, it does not make sense that this isn’t a major concern for the president and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In my attempt to garner sources for my research, I’ve found that the most glaring statistics are: the cost in governmental spending on the war on drugs, incarceration rates for drug offenders, and the cost that is incurred housing a prisoner for a year.
These are all very costly areas in our society, so costly that we’d expect it to be a major issue of debate along with healthcare and foreign affairs. However it was scarcely mentioned throughout the campaigning season, and not mentioned at all during the debates. It isn’t a matter of ethics at this point, it’s more of a finacial crisis. the cost of rehabilitation is very comparable to the cost of impriosning someone for a year (~$60,000), and the way our judicial system is set up these prisoners end up in a perpetual cycle of returning to jail on probation violations.
Clearly the money garnered from the prison system is not benefiting our country. The United States has the highest prisoner population per capita, in the world; majority of these prisoners for non violent drug offenses. For my area of the project, I’m going to highlight the extreme rising increase in incarceration rates since Reagan’s deceleration on the war on drugs.
Beyond the fiscal costs, there are very glaring societal impacts the war on drugs has. Here in New York the NYPDS “stop and frisk” program, is directly implemented in specific areas of the city, to curb weapons and drugs in the community. Although that’s the justification, the statistics show that the program is used to target certain ethnicities. ccrjustice.org/stopandfrisk
“We can’t have a war on drugs, without waging war on the people.”
@Guang:
This — “Our group’s argument is that the war on drug should have been a major issues during the 2012 presidential election” — is not a historical argument. You can’t argue why something that didn’t happen should have happened. You CAN however make an argument as to why something that you think should have been an issue in the election was not.
@Cary:
This is a compelling argument that the War on Drugs is an ethical and financial disaster. But what you have offered is not a historical argument. It does not explain how we got into the situation we’re in.
Can anyone in your group answer this question: why was the War on Drugs absent from the 2012 presidential election?
As Guang stated above in the original post, the United States National Drug Control has requested an increase of their annual budget to $26.2 billion, an increase of $322.6 million or 1.2 percent over the annual budget of 2010. With an increase in the annual budget, our group is wondering why the war on drugs is not discussed in political campaigns, as the $26.2 billion is a huge portion of the American tax dollars.
The website that Guang posted up (Whitehouse.gov) states that they plan to use the money from the budget in prevention, among other things. I feel like if such a large amount of the American tax dollars is being used on drug control, over ten percent of the persons arrested in 2011 should not be because of drug related crimes.
This ties in with the ideas that Carey posted above as well. He cited that the average inmate costs the US government approximately $60,000 a year, and this money can be better used on other aspects of the drug war. A recent question that came up that we may consider dabbling into is: “If the presidential candidates for the 2012 election publicized their views on the war of drug, could the current drug control program be reformed into a program that would actually be beneficial, instead of wasting American tax dollars?”
This goes along with the idea that prevention is the key. I am shocked to see that out of the $26.2b spent on drug control, only $1.7b is being spent on prevention. This could be a major problem in our current drug control policies, where they are not combating the problem from the source, but they are punishing people for it.
Why was the War on Drugs absent from the 2012 presidential election?
Well to leave something out of debates and campaigning has to be a strategic move by both parties. Could it be that the war on drugs attacks many people , inclduing United States citizens, and this could stir up fear and uncertainty for our country; more specifically the candidates?
But you can’t calculate fear, so I think highlighting the cost of the war and its effect on people it’s touched could be a good stage showing all the reasons why the issue should have been a major issue. Maybe I’m progressing with my research in the wrong direction?
If that is the question, though, then doesn’t the explanation lie at least as much within the realm of presidential politics as it does within the realm of the War on Drugs? I mean, they didn’t talk about this issue because neither candidate would benefit from doing so. What does that tell us about our society and its stance on the War on Drugs?
We’re going to talk more about this in class… come with ideas. What do your want your site to accomplish?
A similar direction we could take is to look at other government programs spending, link the spending with how often it was mentioned through textual mining the transcripts of the debates; then draw a comparison to the war on drugs. We might not be able to calculate why something was left out, but we could compare spending of other programs and the number of times it was mentioned in the debates.
Cary, I’m just reiterating what the professors suggested that we do for our final project. Luke and Thom gave us permission to kind of steer away from the presidential election aspect (but not completely) and said that since we were steering towards advocating change for the war on drugs, we were allowed to put a great emphasis on that while still relating it back to the presidential election.
We were discussing the disconnect between the state and federal level of the war on drugs, mainly their stance on marijuana as a legal drug. I think we can place a greater emphasis on it when we’re researching and putting our project together.
I cannot remember word for word on what Thom said about our historical question, but they are right that we do not have a viable historical question as it currently stands; something about not being able to support a negative. Instead, we should focus on why hasn’t the war on drugs been a major aspect of the current election. Luke mentioned that there were evidence which states that the presidential candidates did not want to touch on the subject because it was very controversial and they did not want to sway away voters if they actually took a solid stance.
I’m pretty sure that I’m missing a great deal, but I’m sure that Guang can fill you in.
Luke and Thom: Guang found out today that Contra is left with just Guang, Cary, and I.
Remember the potential structure we discussed, a design that potentially uses the tools of crowd sourcing and curating social media to advocate for a position. We discussed this project — http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/ — as a possible model. The history will allow you to frame and contextualize the project, in the way that other public historians who are engaged in advocacy present their projects.
But you guys are behind, and need to do a lot to catch up.
For your reference: http://nymag.com/news/features/war-on-drugs-2012-12/