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i ii Two Waters Review Student Essays from Fall 2016 – Spring 2017 Volume 1, Issue 3 Scottsdale Community College English Department Scottsdale Community College improves the quality of life in our communities by providing challenging, supportive, and distinctive learning experiences. We are committed to offering high-quality, collaborative, affordable, and accessible opportunities that enable learners to achieve lifelong educational, professional, and personal goals. iii All student works collected here are copyright © 2017 by their respective authors. Licenses for publication in Two Waters Review by the English Department of Scottsdale Community College are on file at the college. Cover image: “TWR Cover 1.3” by Matthew Bloom is a digital manipulation of an image accessed via Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/en/hands-palm-string-lights-2568126/) that is in the (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en). Maricopa and Scottsdale Community College logos are copyright reserved. Volume 1, Issue 3 September 2017 iv Table of Contents Enduring Injustices 1….Brady Thurman – “Why Fight an Epidemic with a War?” 12….Christopher Popov – “African Americans: the Majority” 25….Natalia Evans – “The Future of Prostitution Law in the United States” 39….Paige Vannarath – “Harmful Modern Day Journalistic Integrity” 48….Lina LiVolsi – “Turkey’s Honor Killings” 57….Ashley Clark – “How Ordinary People Become Perpetrators of Genocide: A Look at the Psychological Factors” Shattering Misconceptions 75….Esther Choe – “The Promise of Bitcoin” 87….Gillian Bryant – “I Am Not Throwing Away My Shot” 97….Lexi Nikolaus – “Passing Bonds: A Possible Solution for Funding Public Schools” A Unique Take 103…. Garrett Maeshiro – “The Cycle of Media Dominance: Chapter 2017” v 1 Brady Thurman English 102 Why Fight an Epidemic with a War? In 1971, citizens and governmental figures, including the President of the United States, saw a huge drug addiction problem on the rise. President Nixon thus declared a “War on Drugs”. Immediately, he increased the governmental anti-drug power, although there was much resistance at first. Then, during the Reagan Era, crack cocaine gained a powerful presence and everyone’s knee- jerk reaction was to prohibit everything. And now, 45 years later, so many costs and resources have been spent to combat the drugs with prohibition that those costs seem to even outweigh the pros of the war. On top of that, the drug war has also unintentionally caused many contradictory consequences, including making drug addiction rates higher than they have ever been and making drugs extremely profitable towards violent, drug-running cartels. Due to the fact that it causes more harm than good, the United States' War on Drugs must come to an end, and new strategies must be sought out, in order to effectively counter today's drug addiction epidemic. The War on Drugs has been a 45-year prohibition strategy to eliminate the presence of drugs around the world. Prohibition is the act of eliminating all production, consumption, manufacturing, transportation, and sale of a particular product. It is the hope that this type of wholesale ban on all narcotics will one day render drugs nonexistent around the world, and therefore there will be no drug addiction and no drug-related crimes. The War on Drugs in America has fought by using governmental legislative policy to create and enforce these prohibition laws against narcotics for years, and it does not seem like this process will come to an end anytime soon. The war has been fought primarily through the government enacting legislation that seems to closely resemble military operations. As Jelani Cobb explains in his New Yorker article, “A Drawdown to the War on Drugs”: 2 The war on drugs has been a multitiered campaign that has enlisted legislation, private-sector initiatives, executive-branch support, and public will. But it actually looks like a war, with military-style armaments, random violence, and significant numbers of people taken prisoner. It has been prosecuted throughout eight Administrations and has had the type of social and cultural impact that few things short of real warfare do. (Cobb) No matter how one may feel about the drug war, there is no argument that the drug policy legislation enacted by the government, especially in America, has had a large cultural impact. People, therefore, develop strong, even largely emotional-based opinions about drug policy, and is why individuals can very easily just take an either all-or-nothing approach to dealing with drugs. But, the fact that drug policy has the same level of effects on society as does war in many cases is precisely why many solutions to the drug epidemic, besides prohibition, for example, must be considered. Despite how heroic an all-out ban on drugs from a government that enacts powerful legislative acts equal to that of military actions, there have been serious negative effects caused by the drug war. In the Wall Street Journal article, “Have We Lost the War on Drugs?”, Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy say that: President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains of the war have been modest at best. (Becker and Murphy) The War on Drugs enacted by the US government has indeed had profound effects since the 1970’s, only they have been unintentional and adverse costs and effects. And to add salt to the wound, drug 3 trafficking has been greatly increased rather than greatly reduced. Yet, the war still continues. This is most likely due to the fact that most people do not know enough about the war to care and the politicians in power who do care are far too emotional when employing anti-drug policies. Either way, the cons of the war are seemingly endless and even have outweighed nearly any possible pros of the war. The war has also cost countries billions of dollars and drug addiction rates are higher than they have ever been. Kofi Annan, the previous UN secretary-general, in his Huffington Post article, “Why I’m Calling an End to the War on Drugs”, says the drug war has failed. Claiming that the drug war has cost at least $100 billion, Annan also states that around 300 million people use illegal drugs worldwide today. He says that its illicit global market of $330 billion makes it one of the largest global commodities today. The fact that the former UN secretary-general who received the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize says that the war has failed simply due to the costs means this fact should not be taken lightly. Also, even though he does claim the same population of the US uses illegal narcotics globally, he doesn’t mention the fact that over 24 million people shoot up unlawfully in America itself, according to the “Nationwide Trends” of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. A large portion of this huge population of drug users have also been arrested since the act is illegal, which has greatly contributed to another problem in American society – the prison overpopulation crisis. Since drug offenses are treated as crimes rather than afflictions, the War on drugs has greatly contributed to the US prison system becoming grossly congested over the years as well. So much so, that according to the BBC News article "World Prison Populations', the current incarceration rate in America is greater than any other countries in the world, at 2 million people, which is about 500,000 more prisoners than that of China in second place. In fact, one in FIVE Americans who were in jail were imprisoned due to non-violent drug offenses in 2016, according to Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy article, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016”. They both claim that “The 4 American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails”. Those are some horrendously ridiculous numbers that take very large sums of American tax dollars to manage as well. One would think the US would do whatever it can to keep those numbers down, but sometimes emotion overtakes logic, especially when it comes to drug policy. On top of that, the war on drugs furthermore fuels the assumption that some have that many or most people of color are in possession of drugs. Especially in the US, police often racially profile poor citizens and minorities, due to the fact that drug trade is often present in more run- down urban areas. Asha Bandele wrote in her New York Times article, “Jay Z: The War on Drugs is an Epic Fail”’, that “...African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States’ population - yet 31 percent of them are arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rates as whites”. Not only does the prohibition strategy of the drug war fuel the possession of drugs for blacks and whites, and this sad assumption of many officers and other citizens, it also has led to the mass incarceration of mostly minorities in the US as well. The drug war not only has greatly contributed to the overflowing of the American prison system, but it greatly works against the country that is prohibiting the drugs in the long run too. In Randy Paige’s "Interview with Milton Friedman on the Drug War", Milton Friedman says in response to Paige’s first question about his opinion on the legalization of narcotics: I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there's a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they're sure of the quality.