Drug Addiction Treatment Center Palm Beach Gardens

If you're worried about someone you know who's taking drugs getting into criminal activity, you have every reason to be. The number of people in prison for drug-related offenses highlights just how many people are actually taking drugs and getting involved in crime - often simply to support their own habit. The prison population is such a heavy financial burden, the laws are starting to loosen up. And, thanks to drug courts, some offenders can now go into a drug addiction treatment center instead of prison.

Lightening up on the laws is definitely called for. A recent article in the magazine Mother Jones chronicled some of the legal changes in the last 20 years and the effect they've had on the prison population.

In 1986, for example, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act made the sentence for selling or possessing crack cocaine 100 times stricter than for powdered cocaine. The prison population doubled over the next ten years.

Two years later, the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act mandated that anyone even loosely connected with the sale or possession of certain quantities of crack would also get a five-year sentence. In other words, if you lived with someone who had five grams of crack on the premises, even if it had nothing to do with you, you could go to prison for five years. In the six years following that law, the number of people in prison for drug offenses quadrupled. And offenders still didn't have the option of a drug addiction treatment center. That didn't start for another ten or twelve years.
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