NHD Process paper

Streets Vs. Society

For NHD this year we chose to do the war on drugs as our topic. We found this topic very interesting and unique because we figure that nobody else would pick this topic. Also, we have both seen the effects that it has on the people involved and the people who have suffered the repercussions of being involved in this war. For example, the boys who sell drugs (who are better known as hustlas), the people who buy it, the fiends who need it and also the dumb people who get caught with it and end up spending months to years of their life in jail. Months and years that they will never get back. Other people who are involved are the people who are against drugs, and want them off the streets. These people include the cops, probation officers, judges, the government, rehab facilities, narcs, and of course concerned parents. At first we were going to focus on the war on drugs in general, but then we figured that it was to broad and we re thought our topic and decided to focus only on Marijuana. For the project we decided to do a board because we figured that it would show our prospective the best.
At the start of this project our opinion was the same, we both thought that the war on drugs is senseless, and unlike many other people we talked to about it our opinions still have not changed. We still believe that the war o n drugs needs to end for many reasons, this war as many people already know is going on around the world and is not just affecting the people that I just named; it is also affecting people just like you and me. Examples of this are loosing friends and family members either to death, the streets or addiction, and the penal system. As a result to this war we are experiencing many effects. Such as racism, racial profiling form cops and also neighbor hood people, more people taking up spaces in jail because it is illegal, people not being able to get a decent job, because they were sent to prison which then results in poverty among the community.
Now we know that many people would disagree with this but truthfully from the data that I found in doing this project I found that the government spends more money on the war on drugs than people do on there drug use. Also the percentage of people incarcerated for marijuana is the highest among young people, which proves that this war is greatly affecting the young people of our community.
For this project we conducted two interviews. The first one was of an anonymous source that smokes weed. And the other was our Art teacher Ms. Klose, who used to work at a drug rehab facility. We figured that we would conduct more that one interview so that we could get both sides of this war. We also conducted a lot of research using the Internet and found that the drugs that are actually legalized in our country are the ones that kill the most people, such as tobacco and Alcohol, but marijuana has never been proven to kill any one.
The conflict of this topic is racism due to drugs, poverty, the crime and murder rate, and also the temptation/peer pressure of illegal drugs. The compromise of this topic is actually hard to explain since there isn’t really a specific compromise because this war is still going on today. And in our opinion locking up 3 generations of people including our neighbors and friends isn’t a compromise at all. Especially when we still have rapists, murderers, petifiles, and robbers on the streets. So after all of this I want you to just ask yourself is the war on drugs all worth it.