题目内容
Bad Investment
Take it from a businessman: The War on Drugs is just money down the drain.
As a Republican, I'm neither soft on crime nor pro-drugs in any sense. I believe a person who harms another person should be punished. But as a successful businessman, I also believe that locking up more and more people who are nonviolent drug offenders, the people whose real problem is that they are addicted to drugs, is simply a waste of money and human resources.
Drugs are a handicap. I don't think anyone should use them. But if a person is using marijuana in his or her own home, doing no harm to anyone other than arguably to himself or herself, should that person be arrested and put in jail？ In my opinion, the answer is no.
Any social policy or endeavor should be evaluated based on its actual effectiveness, just as in business any investment should be evaluated based on its returns. By that standard, the nationwide drug war is a failure. After 20-plus years of zero-tolerance policies and increasingly harsh criminal penalties, we have over half a million people behind bars on drug charges nationwide—more than the total prison population in all of Western Europe. We're spending billions of dollars to keep them locked up. Yet the federal government's own research demonstrates that drugs are cheaper, purer, and more readily available than when this war started. Heroin use is up. Ecstasy use is up. Teenagers say that marijuana is easier to get than alcohol. No matter how you slice it, this is no success story.
In 1981, the federal government spent about ＄1.5 billion on the drug war. Today, we spend almost ＄20 billion a year at the federal level, with the states spending at least that much again. In 1980, the federal government arrested a few hundred thousand people on drug charges; today we arrest 1.6 million people a year for drug offenses. Yet we still have a drug problem. Should we continue until the federal government spends ＄40 billion and arrests 3.2 million people a year for drugs？ What about ＄80 billion and 6.4 million arrests？ The logical conclusion of this is that we'll be spending the entire gross national product on drug-law enforcement and still not be addressing our drug problem. I believe the costs outweigh the benefits.
In New Mexico, the cost to the state of treating drug use as a crime is over ＄43 million per year and this does not even include local and federal expenditures, which nearly triple that number. Over hair of that money goes to corrections costs. Yet despite this outlay, New Mexico has one of the highest rates of drug-related crime and one of the highest heroin-usage rates in the nation. Our results dictate that our money be spent another way. That's why I have called for a reevaluation of my state's current drug strategies, and we have begun to make great progress in this area.
A study by the RAND Corporation shows that every dollar spent on treatment instead of imprisonment saves ＄7 in state costs. Treatment is significantly more effective at reducing drug use than jail and prison. I believe the most cost-effective way to deal with nonviolent drug users would be to stop prosecuting them, and instead to make an effective spectrum of treatment services available to those who request it.
I propose a new bottom line for evaluating our success. Currently, our government measures the success of our drug policies by whether drug use went up or down, or whether seizures went up or down, or how many acres of coca we eradicated in South America. These are absolutely the wrong criteria. Instead of asking how many people smoked marijuana last year, we should ask if drug-related crime went up or down. Instead of asking how many people did heroin last year, we should ask whether heroin overdoses went up or down. We should ask if public nuisances associated with drug use and dealing went up or down. In short, we should be trying to reduce the h
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The Country mouse is cleverer.
Mr. Bono and his former wife Cher were a popular rock-and-roll singing duo in the 1960s and 70s. Sonny and Cher sang the hit songs: The Beat Goes On, I Got You Babe and they hosted a top rated variety show on television.
Sonny Bono entered politics in the 1980s as a Conservative Republican. He served one term as mayor of Palms Spring, California before winning a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1994. Press Secretary Frank Conen says Sonny Bono made his mark on Capitol Hill. Sonny Bono died at 62.
How did Sonny Bono die？
American doctors say that mothers who smoke before their babies are born may slow the growth of their babies' lungs. They say reduced lung growth could cause the babies to have breathing problems and lung illness later in life. Doctors in Boston, Massachusetts studied 1,000 children. The mothers of some of the children smoked, the other mothers did not. Doctors found that the lungs of the children whose mother smoked were 8% less developed than the children whose mothers did not smoke, and that the children whose mothers smoked developed 20% more cold and breathing illness than other children later in life.
Another recent study found that children had a greater chance of developing lung cancer if their mothers smoked. The study also showed that the danger of lung cancer increased only for sons and not for daughters, and that the father's smoking did not affect a child's chance of developing lung cancer.
Mother who smokes before their child is born may______.
Here are come of the biggest developments in medicine that can be expected over the next quarter-century.
1. Diagnosing ailments will be simpler, faster, more accurate and cheaper, using noninvasive scanners, teleconferencing and the Internet. Farther down the track—perhaps 10～15 years—are biochips, which will monitor your DNA and analyze it for genetic anomalies that could bring you fatal diseases or have and adverse reaction to certain drugs. You could then make lifestyle. changes enabling you to avoid exposure to conditions or substances known to trigger the disease.
2. Advances in molecular biology mean that scientists now know more than ever about the genetic causes of disease and how to garget them. Over the next decade or so, enzyme inhibitors and gene therapy will make great inroads against different kinds of cancer, heart disease and even brain diseases such as Alzheimer's. The surgeon of the future may look back on the present ear with the same sense of distaste as his present counterpart views the blood-soaked sawbones of the 19th century. In the coming decades, surgery will be carried out only as a last resort and as minimally as possible. Robots will help perform. long or tricky operations such as organ transplants. Nano-probes may be used to clear the arteries free of dangerous plaque build-ups. Another possibility: microchip implants and transplants into the central nervous system to help treat disease like brain tumors, epilepsy, movement disorders and stroke.
3. Outbreaks of disease that previously were localized have the ability to spread quickly, thanks to modern jet travel; a person incubating a new strain of flu in one continent can take it to another in a matter of hours. In addition, feeding and housing a population of six billion has brought Man into closer and closer proximity to animals and rain forests, exposing humans to viruses that "leap" the species barrier, such as mad-cow disease and hemorrhagic fever.
On the hand, microbiology and epidemiology are so advanced that scientists can now quickly spot a new disease (AIDS was detected only three years after it was fist identified) and find out how it is transmitted. This can help in the development of preventative measures, although finding a cure or a vaccine are different matters, as the elusive search for a "silver bullet" against AIDS has shown. In wealthy western countries, the risk to life may be lifestyle. Obesity and depression, caused by excessive eating, loneliness and alienation, may become the twin biggest causes of death. (518 words)
What can we learn from the third paragraph？
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