High School Drug Use
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I talk to you today not as a group of children who are uninformed about the problems of drug use and drug abuse among yourselves and your peers, but, rather, as someone who believes you are more intelligent than most of our efforts to dissuade you from using drugs. Many of the present media campaigns designed to educate you about drugs use scare tactics or exaggerate the harmful effects of the use of some drugs, particularly marijuana, to the point where you know better than to believe them. However, regardless of these previous attempts to help you steer clear of the dangers that result from the use and abuse of drugs, the fact remains, and I am sure it is a fact of which many of you are aware on a personal basis, that many of you and your peers still choose to use and abuse drugs-particularly the dangerous drugs on which I am focusing today: alcohol; cocaine; heroin; inhalants. Where these potentially life-destroying drugs are concerned, the facts are clear that you all still choose to use them to a frightening degree:While heroin use among young people remains quite low, use among teens rose significantly in eight, tenth, and twelfth grades during the 1990s. In every grade, 2.1 percent of students have tried heroin…The 1997 MTF survey found that the proportion of students reporting use of powder cocaine in the past year to be 2.2 percent, 4.1 percent, and 5 percent in grades eight, ten, and twelve re
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l development will see you through your life in such a way that you can remain healthy, aware of the reality of life, and yet still find personal meaning and fulfillment. The use of drugs takes this away from you because even if you are using them because of the condition of the society in which you must live, you only make that condition worse by adding to the general weakness of it. Using drugs makes you no hero, no tough-guy or bad-girl. It makes you more often weak, sloppy, unmotivated, and even deeper in depression than you might be before using them. All too often, you wonder why you should not use drugs when the message adults seem to send to you is that some drugs are alright to use. This is why you often turn away from media campaigns like “Just say No!” which you find dumb and insulting. Instead, you are looking for an “antidrug message received by our youth [that] might finally match the message sent by our adults,” (Donziger, 1998: 2).
THE SOLUTIONS
While there is no easy answer for helping you choose the path to education and moral development instead of the path to drug abuse, addiction and possibly even death, there is a way to find happiness and meaning in your life that does not involve the use of harmful
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1647
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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