PB2A

The scholarly article I chose for PB2A is called “Slowly Learning the Hard Way: U.S. America’s War on Drugs and Implications for Mexico” written by Glen Olives Thompson. As the title is very straightforward, you can determine what the paper is going to discuss: the drug war in America. There is nothing interesting about the title and unlike many other genres of writing, there is no “hook” sentence to draw in readers.

This scholarly article is separated into clearly labeled sections, each giving a preview to what the section will discuss. The first section is called “Abstract.” The purpose of this section is to give brief background information and present the reason for writing the paper. In this article, the abstract gives some brief background information on America’s drug policy. The first line of the paper is “U.S. America's aggressive drug enforcement policy, costing over US$1 trillion and putting millions of people in prison for casual drug use, is an abject failure.” This sentence presents the authors opinion on the drug policy and the side that he will argue throughout the paper. The last sentence of the abstract poses the question of how to reform this “failure” of a drug policy.

Next is the “Introduction” section, where Thompson goes into further detail about the history of drug use and trends relating to prohibition or legalization of certain drugs. He explains that “for U.S. legislators, making certain psychoactive drugs illegal, regulating oth­ers, and leaving others still unregulated, requires a difficult balancing act, and an easy one to get wrong.” He argues that if alcohol, which is the third highest preventable cause of death in the United States, can be regulated, that other drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, and opiates should be regulated in a similar manner.

From there, he goes on to talk about how history shows that prohibiting a drug doesn’t stop it from being used in a third section titled “The First War on Drugs: Alcohol Prohibition in the United States.” In his next section, “The Current War on Drugs: History and Consequences,” he describes how drugs such as marijuana were prohibited and how the U.S. government has spent over a trillion dollars in the drug enforcement efforts. The result was that our incarceration rates increased tremendously. Thompson states “When a country has a prison population approaching one percent of its resi­dents, most of whom are incarcerated for non-violent, drug-related crimes, spends bil­lions of dollars a year on drug enforcement and prison related activities, and yet has the highest rate of illegal drug use of any country in the world, some­thing is deeply out of balance.” He goes on to explain that the more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies of drug deliv­ery (like crack cocaine). He states “It's hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her.” In another section, “Piecemeal Political Solutions,” he explains how one could reform the drug policy. “Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to repeal the Compre­hensive Drug Abuse and Control Act and replace it with liberalized drug policy where most drugs would be regulated and controlled like alcohol and tobacco.” By doing this, Thomposn says that bil­lions of dollars could be saved, millions more earned through federal and state tax­es, and many millions more, formerly spent on drug prosecution offenses, could be spent on drug education and rehabilitation. He supports this by telling readers that other states that have done this, have had multiple benefits such as decreased drug use and an increase in tax revenue from drug sales. In the “Conclusion” section he sums up everything from throughout the paper in a brief, straightforward manner.

Overall, the author uses advanced vocabulary and an academic tone, demonstrating his knowledge on the subject and has references throughout the whole article, making readers trust him and believe he is credible.  The format of the paper makes it easy for readers to follow along, or even quickly get to a certain area of information that they are interested in. Also, the article has footnotes, which the author uses to give definitions or other background information. All of these rhetorical devices used helps the author strengthen his argument, that the U.S. drug policy should be reformed. Personally I think there are two specific aspects of the article that are the most important -- the evidence and the argument -- because they work together. Without the the argument, the evidence is just factual information, and without the evidence and background information, the author’s argument is very weak.

Link to article: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=6bc65fdf-8ab0-4be4-914a-27192e4164f7%40sessionmgr120&vid=8&hid=106