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Submitted by freefortermpapers on 06/24/2008 03:00 PM
- Category: Medical
- Words: 2142
- Pages: 9
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- Popularity Rank: 2075
Aids
Ved Patel BIOL 178: Virus
The Stigma
The impact of stigma can be as detrimental as the virus itself. The solitude and lack of support it imposes are deeply wounding to those who suffer it. It should also hurt every one of us, for it is an affront to our common humanity.
-Secretary-General Kofi Annan on World Aids Day, 1 December 2002
The human immunodefiency virus is a sly parasite that weakens, then destroys societies across the globe. There are many ways that HIV travels and infects our bodies. One of the primary pathways of the virus is through blood contact. Intravenous drug users are one of the main carriers and spreaders of HIV. Illegal drugs have haunted many governments because of their adverse effects on the individual and society as a whole. Families are torn apart, economies dwindle, and efficiency plummets on the individual level and the national/global levels.2 These are only a few of the consequences that haunt the struggling war against the HIV pandemic.
In 1968, when American soldiers came back from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin, President Richard Nixon initiated the War on Drugs. America's War on Drugs has taken the no tolerance approach. Anyone in possession of an illegal drug is treated as a criminal. The target of this approach was to put drug traffickers in prison. But, under our current set of laws, most users are categorized as dealers because of the amount they possess or the way the drugs are packaged. That means that a majority of the criminalized under the drug laws are mere users, and thus the target is simply the users and not the source of the ravaging problem. The drug users are placed into the court system and perhaps into prisons. According to statistics from 1998, "of the 1,559,100 arrests for drug law violationsÂ…78.8% (1,228,571) were for possession of a controlled substanceÂ…only 21.2% (330,529) was for sale or manufacture of a drug." In California, and in...
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