Illegal Drug Use
Introduction
Illegal drug use and involvement into a drug-seeking behavior are serious community problems existing across the population masses one or another way involved into the illegal business. Consumption of drugs, apart from the known health risk factors, is also argued to have other impacts defined in criminal justice terminology, thus basically affecting the development of illegal networks of drug distribution. As a result, this creates a social issue as well, since drug distribution lacks monitoring and thus creates risks for unprotected and young population categories being put at risk by the fact of poorly controlled individual behavior. In this paper, illegal drug use will be explored as a multiple faceted issue, a problem which apart from health risks evolves in a socio-economic context. Five publications exploring the place of illegal drug abuse in a criminal justice system will be investigated, following the objective to find some contrasting and similar elements discussed under the scope of academic research. The idea is to demonstrate that illegal drug use is a serious issue that should be addressed with a stronger set of efforts in both social systems and criminal justice areas, since its prevention is a mutual responsibility for a larger group of enforcers rather than law system representatives.
Problem Overview
Drug abuse in criminal justice facilities. Incarceration of individuals under different forms of criminal justice supervision has been observed as a growing trend in the United States throughout the recent decades. Among adults, 7.1 million people were under one or another form of criminal supervision in 2009, which was admitted by Chandler, Fletcher & Volkow (2009) as a direct outcome of tougher laws and penalties for drug offenders, with one-half of sentenced prisoners meeting criteria for drug abuse diagnosis, including some of them sentenced for other than drug-related crimes. Another issue associated with continuous growth of drug-related crimes is the addictive nature of drug consumption. Chandler et al. (2009), however, argued that addiction research and treatment of addiction are largely disconnected, since almost 80-85% of prisoners who could benefit from drug treatment do not receive it. Other than that, unsafe drug consumption is typically followed by an increased risk of contracting HIV and other diseases like hepatitis C, further highlighting treatment needs of the discussed population. It is argued that treatment of drug abusers itself could bring better results by using therapeutic alternatives to incarceration and jail-based treatment as methods that help offenders to transit back into the community (Chandler et al., 2009).
Other suggestions outlined in the same paper by Chandler et al. (2009) discuss that treatment of drug-involved offenders is cost-effective, since the monthly price of methadone treatment which has shown effectiveness in reducing drug use and criminal activity following release is three times less expensive than a monthly cost of incarceration in the United States. Integration of volunteering organizations such as Narcotics Anonymous could have reduced these costs even more, revealing additional areas for economic investment in fighting illegal drug distribution.Evidently, the …
