Drug and Alcohol Abuse Essay Example For Students

Drug and Alcohol Abuse Essay In the book Understanding Drug Use, An Adults Guide to Drugs and the Young, by Peter Marin and Allan Cohen, you find that education in our youth today is vital. In a few short years, drug taking by younger people has become a fact of life in America, and for hundreds of thousands of families this fact poses a profound problem with wrenching social, legal, and psychological implications. Faced with an upsetting and unfamiliar experience when they discover that their children are experimenting with drugs or alcohol, parents search frantically for solutions-often coming up with the wrong ones, thereby intensifying an already sensitive situation. This book seems to have been written with the parent or mentor in mind. It focuses on realistic approaches to dealing with substance abuse, and attempts to help parents and others understand why some people put themselves in these types of situations. I believe another way to limit the manufacture of drugs is to make a college education easier to achieve, therefore making honest, lucrative careers more obtainable. The state of Missouri should lower the cost of tuition in its colleges and universities and raise the amount of state money in the areas of financial aid, grants and scholarships. While this measure will contribute to a loss of state money, I believe that it will also save money by keeping potential drug manufacturers out of the jail cells and in the classrooms. I believe that it is also important to prevent people, especially children and teenagers, from using drugs and alcohol. Many children and teenagers throughout Missouri experiment with drugs every day. Programs that are already in place for children, such as the Mo Says No and Take Hugs, Not Drugs campaigns are great, but I believe that these programs should continue to the junior high and high school levels because most drug use begins here, not in elementary. For junior high students, schools should hold voluntary drug testing (with the parents consent) every month and those who test negative could receive a pizza party, a dance or something of that nature. This will reward drug-free junior high students and will encourage other students, who might have tried drugs, to do likewise. For high school students, we should provide more scholarships like the Bar S scholarship. This scholarship is for students from all levels of school up until the senior year in high school who pledge to be drug free. Once in college, these students get drug-tested every semester and the scholarship is renewed every semester they are drug-free. This is by far the best solution I have seen to keep our youth off of drugs and there should be more scholarships like it. For those who are arrested for abusing drugs and/ or alcohol, there should be mandatory rehabilitation if the party involved is convicted. A jail term, fine and/ or community service should be mandated as well, but without rehabilitation, the person convicted will be more likely to continue abusing drugs and/ or alcohol. Drug and/ or alcohol addicts need to feel love and peer support despite their faults in order to make any progress on the road to rehabilitation. Often times, a jail sentence, fine and/ or community service alone causes only resentment and defiance among addicts. These individuals need to be around people who care for them and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous provides these individuals with the support that they need. In order to fully understand drug and alcohol addiction, we must first comprehend the phases of addiction itself. According to a handout given to addicts at the Lester E. Cox Medical Center the first stage of addiction is called the pleasure stage. This stage includes peer pressure, curiosity, attraction, release of inhibitions and relaxation. American Poet Analysis Essay This is the stage in which usage is relatively harmless. It is in this stage that, ideally, addiction can be stopped in the easiest way possible; before it begins. The second stage of addiction is what is called the problem stage. This is the stage in which defiance, unplanned use, preoccupation, and rapid intake takes place. When .