Argumentative Essay: Australia's War On Drugs

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Did you know that in one weekend Australians swallow over 100,000 ecstasy pills? And that up to 14.6 per cent of Australia’s population, over 14 years old, use cannabis? With statistics like this it isn’t hard to see that Australian drug laws are not effective. In fact, they are so ineffective that, Australians were recently named by the UN as the world’s biggest illicit drug users. Over the past forty years the Australian government has constantly been “at war” with illicit drugs such as ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana. But unfortunately no one is winning – people are still falling victim to addiction and the government is still wasting money prosecuting and incarcerating victims of such a serious mental illness... Australia’s “war on drugs” is failing so badly that Senator Bob Carr, along with other prominent Australians, has suggested the decriminalisation of low-level drug use. Think about drug addiction for…show more content…
By having such harsh drug laws in place, rather than deterring drug use the government is actually deterring those from seeking help when they most need it. Take the case of Anna Wood for example; just a regular fifteen year old girl at a party with a group of friends that made the mistake of taking ecstasy. She began throwing up, convulsing and drifting in and out of consciousness. Her friends had two options, take her home with the hope she got better or take her to hospital so she could get the help she needed. Take a guess which one they chose, home of course. These teenaged girls were so scared of the trouble they might get into that they didn’t make an effort to help their friend and possibly save her life. I know what you’re thinking though; if Anna had followed the law and not taken drugs then she wouldn’t have died. But reality is, teenagers experiment, they make mistakes but they are not

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