What's the Harm?

Paper Summary:

This paper explores the historical legal status of cocaine in the United States. Attention is given to the reasons that cocaine is currently illegal, the statistics supplied by the government to support the current legal status and the implications to the judicial system as a whole, especially with regard to racial discrimination.

From the Paper:

"There is a wide array of substances that our society (and our government) have deemed too dangerous for public consumption, and as such, these substances have been made illegal. In a variety of circumstances, substances as disparate as opium, hashish, mescaline, and cocaine have been declared unfit for an upstanding member of society. At the same time, some psychoactive drugs including many painkillers and muscle relaxants are not outlawed altogether, but require a physician's proscription. Caffeine, tobacco (nicotine), and alcohol persist as the only entirely legal psychoactive substances in twenty-first century America, although for the latter two there exist minimum legal ages for consumption. In the remainder of this section, we will compare the legal status of cocaine to that of opiates, alcohol, and tobacco in an attempt to distill out the logic behind the relative legal status of each."

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