The Coca and the Cocaine War :: essays research papers fc

THE COCA AND THE COCAINE contendThe current War on Drugs involves skirmishes in an atomic number 18na with two fronts The consumer and the manufacturer. The successes and failures of the strife are not clearly identified without first looking at how the employment can be ultimately won. When it comes to cocaine, the occupation of punishing the unit instead of the individual is hard to define. Many countries use the raw ingredient, the coca plant, as part of a social and cultural structure. The only focal point to win the War on Drugs is to focus war efforts on competitiveness the manufacturer of the finished cocaine product.The War on Cocaine has been arduous to fight a battle on two fronts. The first impersonal of the the Statesn government is to deter the consumer from using illegal products. The genesis of penalization against drug users is sited in the 1914 Harrison Act, in which addicts and others that possessed drugs were punished for buying or possessing cocaine or heroin without a prescription (Bertram, 26). This act began a thin that still today allows law enforcement to arrest the user along with the provider. The supplier (drug trafficker) is the key in this type of police action, because most of the time the user will be unaware of the exact origin of the substance or have any knowledge as to where it was purchased or fabricate. The chief(prenominal) problem with this type of arrest is that 70 to 75 pct of the narcotic arrests per socio-economic class are for possession and only 25 to 30 percent are for actual drug trafficking offenses. Although the user should not be overlooked, a greater emphasis ought to be focused on the supplier in influence to reach the actual manufacturer of the illegal substances. The other front of the battle of the War on Drugs comes from locating and shutting down the manufacturers of cocaine. Cocaine is manufactured from the coca plant, the drugs main ingredient. When the government imposes sanctions on una kindred nations for growing the coca plant, careful considerations must be made. Just like any other market, there may be underlying muckle for growing the plant that are perfectly innocent to the illegal cocaine market.The key influence of the coca market comes from the Andean countries of South America Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. These countries are responsible for almost exclusively cultivating the coca plant, but Colombia is the main processing nation of the plant into cocaine, at nearly 70 percent (Stares, 2).