Drug Abuse: A Decades-Long Battle With No Victory Yet - Essay Sample

Introduction

The fight against drugs has been around for a very long time. The victory against drugs has been futile even with rapprochement (Robinson, 2002). The drugs are getting more dangerous each day, even with campaigns against drug users across the world. From the year 1969, the Americans increased their concern on the drug used mostly on the young people after Gallup questioned about the drug usage (Robinson, 2002). In the year 1969, forty-eight percent of the American citizens had reached out to Gallup and complained the drug usage had become a problem in society (Robinson, 2002).

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In the 1960's period, there was a sit-in, tie-dying, and large scale drug usage fears. A group of people that were referred to as hippies in the 1960s were marijuana smokers, and they were a group that had rejected the community morals (Braunstein, 2013). The kids in the ghetto also used heroin. During that same period, a professor by the name Timothy Leary from Harvard University had said the word to try Lysergic acid diethylamide, which was a hallucinogenic drug (Braunstein, 2013).

The 1960s is known as the era when illegal drug usage was prevalent and successful. Still, according to the historical data, the information states otherwise as according to a survey that was done, it is shown that the abuse of drugs was sporadic. There were correct facts about the impacts of the same drugs (Braunstein, 2013). A Gallup poll that was done in 1969 stated that only four percentage of grownups in the united states of America confirmed to have tried smoking marijuana, while thirty-four percent of the same group of people said they were not aware of the effects of the drug. Forty-three percent believed the drug to be very addictive (Braunstein, 2013).

The movies and books of the 1960s showed that men are often drunk during social events where the day ended with a cocktail hour. According to Paul Sherman who is the president at Paul Sherman and associates which is a consulting agency situate in Rye, New York that majors in helping companies handle executives that have a drug problem said that that kind of drinking was very aggressive and unpleasant, he used the word "macho" to explain the situation (Rock, 2017). According to Gallup poll, what today is considered excessive drinking was normal in the 1960s. People drunk heavily, and it was an order of the day (Rock, 2017).

The scare strategies that were used in the 1960s accelerated the antithetical messages of the end of the 1970s. Drugs had become alluring or beautiful, and they had not been well understood yet to that point of time (Hamilton, 2017). According to a book written in 1981 by John Duff and Gene Chill that was titled, "The fact concerning drugs- the body mind and you" stated that usage of cocaine was not addictive which led to the growth of its usage and the number of people who tried the drug increased in 1973 only twelve percent of adult people had tried using marijuana according to the Gallup poll, but the number of the same drug usage had double the 1977 (Hamilton, 2017).

Because of the increase in drug usage, it started now being looked at as a problem by the American citizens. In the year 1978, a majority of the American citizens, a sixty-six percent of them had stated that the usage of marijuana was not a significant case in the middle schools and high schools and thirty-five percent of the same people said it was the same case in the case of hard drugs(Hamilton, 2017).

In the 1970s in the United Kingdom, there was an increase in deaths of the youths from problems of liver cirrhosis, which had been a result of the high consumption of alcohol (Plunk, 2016). The increase was nine times higher than the average rates among the young males and females, with seventy percent of deaths being alcohol-related. After those incidents that raised eyebrows, a public debate was held that was directed to preventing the public from the nation's culture, where it was stated that it was supposed to be changed (Plunk, 2016). The prices of all alcoholic drinks were increased to reduce consumption among the people. With the increase in prices, people would not be able to purchase as much as they did before (Plunk, 2016).

According to The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) advancing alcohol research for forty years stated that in 1970 the congress was passed and the united states of America at the time President Richard M. Nixon continued to sign the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention, treatment and rehabilitation act of the 1970 "(O'Neil, 2016).

After that act was signed, it gave powers to NIAA to talk about all issues that were related to the usage of drugs as well as abuse of them by making it the federal agency.in the 1970s, the federal agency led the research, which was aimed at exploring the effects of alcohol usage to the development of fetal when there was the doubt of the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder among scientists (O'Neil, 2016). The research was successful, and in 1977 there was the first advisory that was issued about the health by the government (O'Neil, 2016).

References

Braunstein, P., & Doyle, M. W. (2013). Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. Routledge. https://content.taylorfrancis.com/books/download?dac=C2009-0-16017-8&isbn=9781136058820&format=googlePreviewPdf

Grucza, R. A., & Plunk, A. D. (2016). Public policy and alcohol use. Prevention, Policy, and Public Health, 179. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zy8iCwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA179&dq=Grucza,+R.+A.,+%26+Plunk,+A.+D.+(2016).+Public+policy+and+alcohol+use.+Prevention,+Policy,+and+Public+Health,+179.&ots=7pvjSPpHeT&sig=GU804xJjOHe8V2cY734NsksmNp4

Hamilton, I. (2017). Cannabis, psychosis and schizophrenia: unravelling a complex interaction. Addiction, 112(9), 1653-1657. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.13826

O'Neil, E. (2016). Fetal Risk, Federal Response: How Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Influenced the Adoption of Alcohol Health Warning Labels. Arizona State University. https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/175135/content/ONeil_asu_0010E_16396.pdf

Robinson, J. (2002). Decades of Drug Use: Data from the'60s and'70s. Gallup: Washington, DC.

Rock, P. E. (2017). Drugs and politics. Routledge.