Free Custom «Relationship between Drugs, Crimes, and Psychosocial Problems» Essay Paper

Statistics demonstrate that drugs do cause crime. In 2011, 19% of U.S. State prisoners and 21% of Federal prisoners acknowledge that they committed their offense to gain money for drugs. (US BJS, 2011). In a 2010 research of 10 U.S. states, 43 % of the persons in detention tested positive for marijuana. Among repeated offenders the majority is criminals-drug-abusers (Katel, 2010). People, under the drugs influence are more susceptible to do things they normally would not do, like committing crimes. Drugs reduce the sense of prohibition and restrictions due to their euphoric and hallucinogenic properties and as a consequence provoke unsocial behavior that results in actions that can be dangerous for individual or people around.

There are a lot of researches that studies the connection between drugs misuse, crimes and psychosocial problems that related to these unfavorable social phenomena. Some researchers have psychopharmacological explanations; others have the economic and drug-lifestyle interpretations. The psychopharmacological interpretation considers the chemical effect of the drug on the human organism and impact that drugs have on human behavior and nervous system. For instance, the psychopharmacological model explains that drugs directly cause violence, that under drug influence a person became irritable, irrational, loses sense of restrictions and gains the sense of permissiveness which often lead to socially unacceptable behavior including crimes (Goldstein, 2009). Brochu, Parker, Auerhahn and McCoun in their researches asserts that drugs influence on special areas of the nervous system such as limbic system and frontal lobe that responsible for impulsiveness and aggressiveness (Bennett and Holloway, 2009). Other researchers see that connection in the economic explanation. Drug users simply commit crimes to raise money for drugs, and these reasons are the most common among thefts, burglaries, fraud and shoplifting. There are researches that focus on the relationship between drugs, lyfestyles and violence. They explains that drug abusers are surrounded by violence and crimes so they are also likely to be violent. Many researches provide conflicting explanations to these topic and many of them provides enough sufficient evidence to prove their theory about causal link. However, there are a lot of inconsistencies and questions. Some drug users are criminals but some are not. Some criminals are drug users but not all of them. There is should be more deep and comprehensive researches that will study this question from point of view of united influence lifestyle, psychological, genetic predisposition and drugs.