This text was adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee. Preface

7.5 Drug Policy and the War on Illegal Drugs



LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. 
   Explain whether the DARE program is effective.
   
2. 
   Outline the goals and examples of a harm reduction approach to drug use.
   
3. 
   List the problems arising from the current legal war on illegal drugs.
   

For many decades, the United States has used several strategies to try to deal with drugs. These strategies generally fall into four categories: treatment, prevention, harm reduction, and, for certain drugs, criminalization and the use of the criminal justice system, or, as we will call it, the war on illegal drugs. We now turn to these strategies.