Chapter 12

Chapter 12 centered around the use, misuse, and abuse of mind-altering drugs. It gave a general overview of how alcohol, tobacco and other drugs are used and abused on a community-level setting. For example, many people may use drugs because of coping with personal problems, giving in to peer pressure, more thoroughly enjoying social interactions, curious experimentation, a brazen attempt to escape from reality, and attempts to self-medicate.  A point that I can’t stress enough is that even though the chapter lists a large amount of reasons to take drugs does not mean that people should be more encouraged to take them!

Another topic in this chapter was that of drug dependency; the behaviors that I listed above are all factors that encourage drug dependency. Furthermore, if an individual experiences a drug abuse problem, their health and behavior will suffer greatly.  Drug misuse is the inappropriate use of any drug, while drug abuse refers to the taking of a drug that has not been medically approved for the specific individual with proper knowledge of the health risks.  Finally, drug dependency occurs when the user believes that taking a certain drug is absolutely necessary for everyday life.  Drug dependency is psychological problem that can be properly described as an illness; it needs to be treated as a medical problem in order to be resolved.

Drug abuse in the United States was a constantly rising trend in the 1990s, but proper educated has helped to stem the tide, and since 1998, it has decreased. Everybody knows that legal drugs, dependent on age, are alcohol and tobacco, while illegal drugs include stimulates, depressants, narcotics hallucinogens, marijuana, and others that are not prescribed by a doctor.  Surprisingly, illegal drugs are not as big of a problem as the abuse of prescription drugs; it is a common fad among teens to ingest a mixture of mystery prescription drugs at parties; however, this practice commonly leads to death.

The first step to negating drug use and abuse is to use preventative tactics. There are four elements of drug prevention and control: education, treatment, public policy, and law enforcement. Prevention has three levels, which are primary, secondary, and tertiary. The United States has been making a concerted effort in recent years to address prevention on the federal, state, and local levels.  For example, the government has implemented programs that involve drug testing in the work environment since 1987, a practice that steadily decreases workplace drug use.