The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice

Drugs are mostly found in Impoverished cities. Her View is Bad. A. TARGETING SERVICES TO "THE POOR" INEVITABLY INVOLVES STEREOTYPING MARGINAL GROUPS AND BLAMING THEM FOR THEIR OWN POVERTY Nicholson '05 The first condition that must be met regards the characteristics of the target group. If a specifically targeted policy is to succeed, the target group must be readily identifiable to both the mass public and to political elites and must hold a marginal position in society. This condition may seem redundant in light of our focus on deviants; but even among negatively perceived groups, some are more marginal than others. Groups that are subject to "value laden" stereotypes, those that lend themselves to clear cut assumptions about right or wrong, are more likely to provide decision makers with policy rationales. Mucciarioni (1995) argues that value-based stereotypes can be the most important factor in determining the allocation of state resources. Furthermore, sociologists suggest that stereotyping is a subtle and dynamic process, producing a hierarchical ordering even among groups generally perceived positively or negatively. B. Blaming has two implications: First it Masks the Need for Structural Reforms Meaning that the Aff Advocacy will Inevitably Fail PURPOSE OF PROVIDING SOCIAL SERVICES TO THE POOR IS TO ALLEVIATE THE MOST OFFENSIVE CONDITIONS OF POVERTY TO DEFLECT THE MOVE FOR BROADER ECONOMIC REFORM Larry Cata Backer '93 Third, acceptance of the status quo in the United States requires the acceptance of the existence, value and immutability of income inequality, and of the notion that a person has the right to the substantially undisturbed enjoyment of the fruits of his or her labor. n63 These are also ancient concepts. n64 As a consequence, some people will always have less than others -- perhaps substantially less. And, among those with substantially less, there likely always will be people whose income will be insufficient to purchase life's necessities. We style these people "poor," whether we measure the insufficiency of their income by reference to some absolute determinant (for instance, a "poverty line") or as a percentage of some calculable median or medium standard of living below which the quality of life is deemed inadequate. n65 The poor, therefore, make up a necessary element of a stable social and economic order. n66 Who are those at the bottom of the scale of income inequality? For those who accept the static vision, the people at the bottom of the economic and social ladder are life's losers, social and economic deviants who could not or would not conform their behavior to our generally prescribed socio-economic norms. They are those who found it unnecessary to seek, obtain and hold a job or to properly arrange their personal affairs to avoid the burdens of pregnancy, drug addition and the like. It follows inevitably under such a view, that the poor are deemed primarily responsible for their own miserable condition; indigence is produced not by the social or economic system, but by the deviance of the poor. n67 The necessary punishment for deviance is poverty. This is another sense in which the static vision accepts as fundamental the notion that poverty is substantially ineradicable. Stasis assumes that every generation will have its share of losers. Extreme income inequality is the most visible evidence of this difference between winners and losers. As such, poverty is necessarily status based. The incentive, then, is to favor passivity. A passive orientation permits alleviation of the conditions deemed offensive, without a care for the reform of society or its economic basis, as the practical expression of the acceptance of stasis. Alleviation of deprivation requires a system of poor relief to do little more than to provide such material things as will increase the standard of living of the recipients to a level deemed acceptable by the donor, be it an individual, entity, or the state. In this guise, the notion of the need for aid as a relational concept is ancient in Western culture. n68 But even this status-based notion, in a world of substantial resources, is meant to be open-handed. n69 It requires nothing of the recipient other than that the person be in need. And BLAMING THE POOR IS LIKE BLAMING THE CORPSE FOR THE MURDER Stanley '09 As we have seen, one view of the poor is that they are to blame for their economic deprivation. From this perspective the system is good, but flawed people fail. This emphasis ignores the social organization that oppresses them. Michael Parenti has criticized those who ignore the system as victim blamers. "Focusing on the poor and ignoring the system of power, privilege, and profit which makes them poor, is a little like blaming the corpse for the murder." POVERTY PERSISTS BECAUSE OF A LACK OF POWER NOT A LACK OF MONEY – CAN'T EFFECTIVELY ADDRESS IT WITHOUT ADDRESSING POWER IMBALANCE Royce '09 A structural perspective implies a unique conception of the poverty problem. Poor people lack money, of course, but they also lack power, and this is the more fundamental issue. Poverty persists in large part because the ability to call the shots -- to make economic and political policy, to allocate costs and rewards, and to control the flow of information and ideas -- has become increasingly concentrated at the upper end of the class system, leaving poorer Americans all the more marginalized and vulnerable. Under normal circumstances, today's poor do not have the resources or leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions, to influence political leaders and government policy, to alter the cultural discourse and imagery, or to eradicate barriers to mobility caused by discrimination, segregation, and social exclusion. Poverty is not just a matter of income; it is also a matter of power. And no theory of poverty and inequality can be taken seriously if it fails to bring power fully into the picture. Second, it perpetuates debilitating stigmatization. Stigma constructs the poor as less than human, victimizing even natives. Tropman, 98 If my visitors are astonished at the supermarket, they are struck dumb by the pet-food aisle. As one guest said, "How can you have a whole aisle of dog and cat food, and have such hostile attitudes toward the poor. You treat aniï¿½mals better than people."1 America's thinking about the poor revealing and becomes an indirect observation on teh central core values of Art"It becomes what Barbara Tuchman (1978) called "A Distant Mirror." "Hate" may be too strong a word. But then again, it may not. It has a lot of synonyms: abhor, aversion, disgust, antipathy, rancor, malevolence, to name a few. And none of these words seem terribly out of place when applied to the poor. If "hate the poor" is a bit of hyperbole, it cetainly points in the right direction. Better to err in the direction of the problem than to cover it up. If we do not hate the poor, we certainly act as if we do. How does hate work? Stigma, of course, is the first answer. What are the intellectual constructs that allow for the poor. Dehumanization is the root cause of nuclear war and genocide – reducing some people to objects is the first step to justifying atrocities. Berube '97 Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization. C. Alternative NEED ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON POVERTY AND DRUGS Royce '09 We need to change how we think about poverty in the United States. We need to shift the focus from the characteristics of the poor to the