“Drugs are tools of a social war. Discuss.”
Whenever we think about war we typically imagine armed troops, fierce fighting and dead bodies on the battlefields. However, there are wars which are not open: you cannot hear the guns and the losses are not reported in the media, but their effect is even more devastating. Nowadays thousands of people around us die because of drugs abuse. It is terrifying to realize that most of the people addicted are young and healthy, in their most productive age. Can we talk about the drugs as the tools of the contemporary social war? What are consequences of it? These are the questions we will try to cover in the given research.
It is undeniable that drugs ruin people’s health radically. Mostly they affect the brain. According to the research of National Institute of Drugs Abuse (NIDA) even Marijuana use can cause long-term or permanent adverse changes in the brain. Particularly, it makes changes in neural connectivity involved in memory, learning, impulse control. The same NIDA research on heroine abuse reveal multiple health problems of users, starting from deterioration of behavior regulation abilities to withdrawal symptoms and profound physical dependence. Thus, with inevitable brain changes, addicted people completely lose their personalities and become very easily manipulated. They have only one goal – finding drugs, so they fall under full control of drug dealers. This is how drugs corporations win this war for social power without a single shot.
Another devastating effect of drugs is that they ruin people’s welfare and normal way of life. All the aspirations and commitments stay in the past at the moment addiction starts. Addicted people have no other wishes than a new dose so they waste all their money for it. Naturally, drugs corporations take advantage of it, making fortunes on depriving people of their dreams. At the same time, in many of cases addicted people end up as bottom dwellers – I believe you have seen them on the streets.
As sad as it sounds, health and well-being is even a favorable price for drugs abuse, because most addicted people pay with their lives. Just give it a thought: according to Wikipedia data the whole Afghanistan War, which started in 2001 and is still on, brought 2,229 US deaths, while 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary states that for only 2013 year drugs abuse caused 46,471 US deaths! These numbers are shocking, but they speak for themselves.
Summing up this discussion we should admit that this social drug war is around us. This is war against people’ health, personality, lives, against humanity itself. Are there any ways to win this invisible fight? In our hectic and busy life sometimes it’s easier to pretend that nothing happens, however, silence is a bad policy here… Only talking about this war, perhaps even shouting, so that everyone hears, may drag all its awful consequences to light and prevent new victims. Let us remember that forewarned is forearmed and let us forearm our children for this war for the sake of our future.
Works cited:
“Commonly abused drugs charts”. National Institute on Drug Abuse. N.p., Mar. 2016. Web. 12 March 2016.
“United States military casualties of war”. Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 25 February 2016. Web.12 March 2016.
“2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary”. United States Drug Enforcement Administration. U.S. Department of Justice, n.d. Web. 12 March 2016.