The Times: Poverty

Drugs costing Scottish society £3.5bn a year
Scotland’s drug addicts spend almost £1.4bn a year feeding their habit while NHS spends almost £2bn a year treating them

Sha Marai is pointing out the important issue in her article about the drug problem in Scotland. Scotland is the drug addiction capital of Europe with addicts collectively spending around 1.4 billion pound in a year feeding their habit. The society of Scotland is spending 3.5 billion pound per year for treatment and among others tackling the nation's drug problem. Not only the amount of money needed for treatment of this problem has increased, also the number of addicts has made an enormous rise. Additionally the government has to handle the consequences of this problem, such as criminal justice costs for instance. This issue shows the scale of the problem both in human terms and in financial terms. Finally I may quote the statement of David Liddell, the director of Scottish Drugs Forum: “These figures underline all too clearly why we must continue to invest in treatment, focus that investment on the most effective range of treatment, care and rehabilitation services — including in areas like housing, family support and employability, and continue to address the underlying issues of poverty, deprivation and other social and health inequalities.” If there will be no immediate intervention of the government and no right treatment, then Scotland's problems will soon dominate its daily life.

The Time- Poverty

Third World population controls won't save climate, study claims

David Bebber responds in his article to the proposition of the environmentalist Sir David Attenborough to restrain population in all nations. According to a study, the contribution of the poor countries to climate change is little and at the same time a dangerous distraction from the main problem of over-consumption in rich nations. The idea is a strict birth control to reduce greenhouse gas emission. It has been proved, that poor countries have low emissions so it is not beneficial to keep spending billions of pounds to the third world countries for contraception. The problem are not the poor countries, they do not need a birth control in compare to the western countries who overproduce nearly all goods and may have to high levels of consumption. A prove for this is China: the one-child rule had resulted a sharp decline in population growth but its CO2 emissions had risen rapidly. The reason for this is the amount of Chinese enjoying Western levels of consumption. An additional study shows that 7% of the worlds population are the rich people, counting half a billion. Those half a billion of people, might only be 7% of the worlds economy, though they produce 50% of the worlds emissions.
This clearly shows that the western countries should not blame things on uneducated countries, they should take care and realize what they problems are and what an grave impact they can have.

Modest Proposal Idea- poverty in Africa

Nowadays civilizations of different countries have to face many different problems. Our daily life is controlled by things we have to do or cannot do so we avoid more problems. We can deal with some of the problems in our country, some we simply have to accept so live with them. The question now is what if another country cannot deal with its problem and it strongly harms the people who are living there, what should one do to help them? An example for this situation is poverty in most of the parts of Africa. The governments are incapable of acting against this issue because of lack of money and no education. A growing country such as Switzerland, where the people live above the poverty line and the government acts in the interest of the citizens, should such a country help the people in Africa? Does it make sense that wealthy countries help the poor countries and people are still dying every minute because of starvation? Should all this money go to these countries and in the end one can see no grave difference in poverty?
My concern is it that it is not of good use to keep spending money to the poor countries where there can be no change seen but if one would invest this money in its own country where things could become better. This issue need to be solved because money is needed everywhere at the moment so it should be invested in something that will actually change afterwards. It is a waste of money to give it to the poor countries where they need by far more than only money to solve the poverty. At this point I propose that all countries in the world should end the spending and leave Africa on its own. Many countries do not need any money from the outside so Africa’s government should start to try this as well. This will most probably not be the case so without any money the people below poverty line will starve to death as they get no help. This can only benefit us because we will keep the money and they will have the chance for a new start sooner or later when all the poor people are dead and no longer a burden to the government. At this point outside countries will probably be willing to invest in Africa again because they will see that their money is of use and actually makes a difference in people’s lives.