A Guide to Educating Children About Drugs
People take drugs because they want to change something about themselves or their life.
They can’t handle or control situations in life so instead of confronting them, they hide behind them, using drugs and alcohol to mask the pain or problem.
Here are just some of the reasons young people have given for taking drugs:
- To fit in,
- To escape or try to relax,
- To appear grown up,
- To experiment and even,
- To rebel.
The number one reason is boredom.
They think drugs are a solution to any of these reasons. But eventually, the drugs become the problem.
Drugs are essentially poisons. The amount taken determines the effect.
A small amount acts as a stimulant (speeds you up). A greater amount acts as a sedative (slows you down). An even larger amount poisons and can kill. This is true of any drug. Only the amount needed to achieve the effect differs. And yes to all you who may question this, coffee is a drug as is nicotine.
But many drugs have another liability: they have a physiological effect on the body.
Drugs can distort the user’s perception of what is happening around him or her. Thus, the person’s actions may be odd, irrational, inappropriate and even destructive.
Drugs block off all sensations, the desirable ones with the unwanted. So, while providing short-term help in the relief of pain, they also wipe out ability and alertness and muddy one’s thinking.
Medicines are drugs that are intended to speed up or slow down or change something about the way your body is working, to try to make it work better. Sometimes they are necessary. But they are still drugs: they act as stimulants or sedatives and too much can kill you. So, if you do not use medicines as they are supposed to be used, they can be as dangerous as illegal drugs.
Normally, when a person remembers something, an unclouded mind is very fast and information comes quickly. But drugs blur memory, causing blank spots. When a person tries to get information through this cloudy mess, he can’t do it. Drugs make a person feel slow or stupid and cause him to have failures in life. And as he has more failures and life gets harder, he wants more drugs to help him deal with the unhandled problem(s).
One lie told about drugs is that they help a person become more creative. The truth is quite different.
Someone who is sad might use drugs to get a feeling of happiness, but it does not work on any permanent level. Drugs can lift a person into a fake kind of cheerfulness, but when the drug wears off, he or she crashes even lower than before. And each time, the emotional plunge is lower and lower. Eventually, drugs will destroy all the creativity a person has.
Drugs have been a part of our culture since the middle of last century, popularized in the 1960s music and mass media and currently invade all aspects of our society. Young people today are exposed earlier than ever to drugs via talk at schools, on the streets, TV shows, and the internet. The 1990s RX explosion has turned our fellow humans into garbage cans of synthetic and designer drugs and other affordable opioids, such as heroin.
We need to get back to the beginning of a person’s addiction; why they started and why they keep using. It’s not a disease, it is a choice to use and to cover some underlying issue too hard to confront or handle.
Seek professional help for yourself or a loved one. Educate the youth since almost everyone knows of someone who has been affected by drug or alcohol abuse, directly or indirectly.
Don’t hide from life, confront it. Your life and the lives of others will change for the better.
