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Washington, DC -- The U.S. policy of outlawing recreational drugs and actively going after those who use them is failing to protect users, with deaths and illness due to overdoses increasing, a report published on Monday finds. Despite declines in drug use, visits to hospital emergency rooms related to cocaine and heroin use have increased sharply, Ernest Drucker of the Montefiore Medical Centre in New York said. "The cure has only worsened the disease," Drucker wrote in a report in the journal Public Health Reports. Drucker analysed 25 years worth of government studies and said the "war on drugs" was responsible for growing social ills that were once blamed on the drugs themselves. "Drugs can certainly cause harm, but our selective application of punitive drug prohibition laws is at least as dangerous," he said. Criminalizing drugs forced users to turn to crime, he said. Backs and other minorities were the biggest victims. He said while blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to use illegal drugs than whites are, blacks are 3.5 times as likely to die of drug-related overdoses as whites and visit the emergency room more than seven times as often. African-Americans were four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug offences, he wrote, calling the unequal treatment destabilising and dangerous to society. A report issued earlier on Monday found that children of parents who abuse drugs and alcohol are not getting enough help from welfare services. The study by the Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found the number of abused or neglected children has more than doubled, from 1.4 million in 1986 to more than three million in 1997. Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 and The Berne Convention on Literary and Artistic Works, Article 10, news clippings are made available without profit for research and educational purposes. |
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