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Illegal drugs


Mr.Anonymous

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Illegal drugs -- such as heroin, marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine -- inflict serious damage upon America and its citizens every year. Accidents, crime, domestic violence, illness, lost opportunity, and reduced productivity are the direct consequences of substance abuse. Drug and alcohol use by children often is associated with other forms of unhealthy, unproductive behavior, including delinquency and high-risk sexual activity.

 

Illegal drugs cost our society approximately $110 billion each year.8 The greatest cost of drug abuse is paid in human lives, either lost directly to overdose, or through drug abuse-related diseases such as tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), hepatitis, and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Traffic accidents caused by alcohol- and drug-impaired drivers; street crime committed by addicts to support their addiction; and resources expended to apprehend, sentence, treat, and incarcerate drug abusers are the burdens borne by taxpayers year after year.

 

Drug use erodes human potential. It is associated with a broad array of antisocial behavior that limits children from the outset of their lives. Children who begin to smoke marijuana at an early age are much more likely to not finish school and to engage in acts of theft, violence and vandalism and other high-risk behavior than are children who do not smoke marijuana.9 Studies of adult users of cocaine and heroin have found that youth use of marijuana correlates strongly with later use of cocaine and heroin. Children agedtwelve to seventeen who use marijuana are eighty-five times more likely to use cocaine than children of the same age who have never used those substances.10 But no study, statistic, or survey accurately reflects the suffering and heartbreak that occurs when a loved one sinks into addiction.

 

Drug-related deaths remain near historic highs. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)'s Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) Medical Examiner Report annually examines drug-related deaths -- exclusive of deaths from AIDS, homicide, and where the drug of abuse was unknown --in forty-one major metropolitan areas across the country. DAWN reports drug-related deaths climbed throughout the 1990s, but appear to have leveled off at about 9,300 per year.11 Drug-related deaths declined among those aged eighteen to thirty-four, but were offset by an increase among those aged thirty-five and older, particularly those aged forty-five to fifty-four. This trend may reflect the aging of the drug-abusing population in America, indicating that those who started drug abuse in the 1960s and 1970s are now succumbing to the cumulative health effects of years of abuse.

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