Drugs were unknown territory during the 1960s. There were many self-proclaimed prophets making great promises of the powers and wonders to those who used drugs. This resulted in an entire generation experimenting with drugs. Everybody likes a party, but thirty years later a well documented look at the record on drug use reflects a different picture.
Drugs can retard or permanently damage the brain, cause body functions to malfunction, fail, and at the highest extreme, result in premature early death. Drugs can lead to committing crimes, such as selling drugs or stealing to support addiction, and result in imprisonment, which is a waste of human potential and a burden to society. Drugs help generate organized crime and gangs that abduct our nations children, terrorize our inner cities with gang violence such as drive by shootings and proliferation of murders, and hold our citizens hostages by preventing them from walking the streets safely.
Drugs can cloud a person’s mind and ability to make good judgments. Drugs can result in getting one fired and affect the ability to get and maintain a job. Drugs ability to affect good judgment can result in acts of violence and rage, forced or date rape, unplanned pregnancies, social diseases, AIDS, and suicides.
Drugs can cause a user to lie to their loved ones, steal from a neighbor, shoot a friend over a dispute, spend a family’s grocery money on more drugs, or throw a baby into a trash can. Drugs cause people to wreck their cars hurting or killing themselves and their loved ones, or hit a car containing someone else’s loved ones. Drug use can result in deformed or mentally retarded babies or be passed on through newborn babies and the effort required to detoxify can kill the new born babies.
Drug abuse can tear apart a family held together by love, and destroy a family forever that is barely being held together by threads. Drugs can cause a father to run out on his children, taking with him the financial and emotional support needed to raise a family. Drugs can cause a man to spend all his fortunes and live homeless on the street, and a woman to prostitute her body to support their addictions.
Drugs can jeopardize, set back, devastate, or eliminate educational and career opportunities, and the development of individual talents. Drugs can destroy and waste the enormous human potential that every single person born on this planet has to offer and live for. Lastly and sadly, drugs have killed or wasted some of the greatest leaders and talents the world has ever seen, including many incredibly talented musicians. In the last ten years alone, drugs and alcohol have killed more than 1 million Americans (or 20 times more than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War).
Consider for a moment just how much better the world would be if we could eliminate the problems resulting from drug use. Then what are the solutions?