The Growing Threat of Drug Abuse
“WE ARE a drug-dependent society,” “a drug-obsessed society,” say authorities. Millions of people cannot sleep, wake up or feel comfortable anymore without the help of drugs. Great numbers of adults pop pills into their mouths for whatever ails them. Medicine cabinets are stocked with medicines: diet pills, stomach soothers, sleeping tablets, tranquilizers, barbiturates, amphetamines, laxatives and pain-killers. A popular opinion is that there must be “a pill for every woe.”
There were 12,000,000,000 amphetamine and barbiturate tablets and 50,000,000 tranquilizers manufactured in the United States in a single year. The United States Food and Drug Administration says that each year the thousands of millions of pep pills diverted to illegal use and ultimate misuse could “keep everyone in the United States awake and jumping for a week” and the barbiturates could “keep them in a stupor for a week.”
The extent of drug use among young people is substantial. Police officials estimate that between 15 and 50 percent of the teen-agers in any suburban American community may be experimenting with marijuana and other drugs. In some large universities, surveys indicate that 10 to 30 percent of the students have dabbled in drugs at least once. The extent of drug abuse by elementary- and high-school students is not known, but is reported to be significant and on the increase.
In a small American town, fifteen high-school children were arrested for using marijuana. One father, a church deacon, was the supplier. Five New England prep-school boys got thrown out of school for drug use; one of them was the son of a United States congressman. The children of two senators have been arrested on marijuana charges, as have the sons of a California assemblyman and an actor.
School investigations have revealed, among other things, that children as young as thirteen were “shooting” a stimulant called Methedrine beneath their tongues so the needle marks would not show. A survey in one school revealed that 18 percent of the boys and 12 percent of the girls in the seventh grade had at least experimented with marijuana. Washington’s District of Columbia Addiction Center has uncovered marijuana users as young as eight years old.
Where and how do children become involved in drug abuse? Primarily in the schools. Children themselves refer to the schools as the “supermarket centers” for drugs during the school term and the city streets and parks at other times. Here is what some of them have to say.
A seventeen-year-old Connecticut lad said: “I was just entering high school when I was first exposed to drugs. Almost every person in school knows someone who sells drugs, whether or not he uses them. The funniest part of the whole thing is that it’s all done in the open. It’s stored in the students’ lockers. You would be shocked to see the dealers’ lockers stacked full of ‘nickel’ and ‘dime’ bags of ‘pot’ [marijuana].”
Said a teen-ager: “The first time I was invited to indulge in marijuana was in my sophomore year. Many of my friends were trying it, simply out of curiosity. After a while I took it.”
A boy from Detroit, Michigan, writes: “In my biology class last semester there was this kid who said to me, if I ever changed my mind and wanted drugs, he would give them to me cheap.”
An eighteen-year-old youth from New Haven, Connecticut, wrote: “I first started using drugs when I was 16 years old in New York city. While in school, a friend of mine convinced me that harder drugs were the ‘hip’ thing.”
A girl in San Francisco writes: “When I was a sophomore, a green cigarette was placed on my desk. I was shocked when I learned it was marijuana. The boys dared me to smoke it.”
Reports are generally the same whether from New York or San Francisco—the schools are a major spawning center for drug addiction. But what many young people are not fully convinced of is the extent to which various drugs are harmful and dangerous.
Is marijuana dangerous? The answer is, Yes. Many are the persons who suffer adverse effects. A sixteen-year-old Maryland youth said he was quitting marijuana “because I can’t remember things anymore.” Another person “smoked one cigarette and became restless, agitated, dizzy, fearful of his surroundings, afraid of death, and had three short attacks of unconsciousness.” Marijuana impairs judgment and distorts vision, hearing and sense of time and distance practically in every user. And in the majority of cases where stronger drugs were taken, it was admitted that smoking marijuana definitely paved the way. Is that what one might call a safe drug?
Hallucinogens like LSD are known to have caused permanent change of personality, human chromosome damage, unpredictable behavior leading to suicide attempts and psychological dependence. Depressants (barbiturates) can cause delirium, hallucinations, convulsions and coma. Stimulants (amphetamines) can cause permanent change of personality. Heroin destroys willpower, causes extreme restlessness, severe aches and pains and death from overdosage. Sniffing solvents damages the liver and kidneys and quite often leads to death.
What can parents do to protect their children from mind-affecting drugs? What can children do to protect themselves from the drug-enslaving influence sweeping the world? There are some specific things parents and children can and should do now. The following article tells what these are.