rotecting Kids from Alcohol
and Other Drugs

    In this day and age children need facts early to show them the reality of drug and alcohol abuse. You might want to sit down with a 10 year old child and have a heart to heart conversation. The facts:

Alcohol Abuse is of 3 types
1. An overdose. If a human being drinks too much, such as on a dare, the ability to breathe is decreased and the ability to not choke if you throw up is decreased. Drinking half a bottle of vodka for example is like taking an overdose of sleeping pills. A kid can vomit and choke to death on his puke. This happens on college campuses every year.
2. Poor judgment. People think they can drive well, or fight well, or jump across a stream well or swim well when they are high on 3 drinks. Some people kill themselves or their friends in this state. Others get hurt. Others get sexually transmitted diseases or get pregnant. Alcohol makes your judgment poor.
3. Weak personality. If a person gets high regularly when they are young (12-26) they frequently end up unable to handle life well. They mess up in their personal or professional development or perhaps in both. You see a perfectly normal kid at age 14 who begins to get high several times a week. If he keeps it up, by the time he is 24 everyone says, "Whatever happened to that great kid? He now can't handle his job or his girlfriend. His friends have all changed. They all drink or drug. It is sad that such a great kid has become so weak." How did that happen? You can understand it if you think of a basket ball game. When a person plays a game of basketball, he might  try a lot of experiments. Some work. Some fail. After the game, the kid thinks about what worked and didn't and why. It is called "learning from your successes and failures." Even if every experiment failed, the next time he will be a better basketball player.
    If the kid went out and had one or two beers after the game, all of the analysis of the new moves would be distorted. It would be almost like never playing the game at all. The kid won't be a better player just because he was high right after the game.
    Life is like that. Teachers bother you. Boyfriends and girlfriends break up. Bosses are rude to you. In life you try to handle these situations. Some things work and some things don't. You need to be straight when you think about how you handled these problems.
    Getting high regularly messes up this "thinking about things." Having a good 14 year old personality is good when you are 14; it is not good to have a 14 year old personality when you are 24. People who get high regularly don't learn how to develop a strong personality. This is the most dangerous part of drinking and drugging.
    (Regular heavy alcohol consumption also causes addiction, called alcoholism, and scarring of the liver. But these happen after a long time and young kids usually cannot relate to that.)
 Marijuana
Marijuana causes short and long term problems.
1. Getting high impairs your judgment. See Alcohol #2.
2. Getting high regularly gives you a weak personality. See Alcohol #3. The mechanism of action is the same. People who get high regularly on pot seem to act a lot like people who get high regularly on alcohol. They don't learn from their successes and failures.
3. Smoking one joint of marijuana a day causes the lungs to react as if a person is smoking one pack of cigarettes a day. This is probably due to the fungus that is found in the majority of street marijuana and/or due to other chemicals in marijuana smoke.
(There are long term consequences like breast enlargement in boys and decreased sex drive and lung problems, but this happens after a long time and young kids cannot usually relate to that.)
 Cocaine
Cocaine is bad news
1. Cocaine can kill you the first time you experiment with it. A person can use cocaine 1,000 times or 100 times or the first time and unpredictably it can cause a fatal heart arrhythmia or a heart attack or a stroke (brain bleed). It is rare! But dying to see what cocaine feels like makes no sense. Hospitals use cocaine (rarely) for certain nose operations, and they always have a heart defibrillator nearby to save the life of the person who goes into a heart arrhythmia. (I would recommend that someone leave a party if someone is going to use cocaine. It is terrible to watch someone die in front of you knowing you can do nothing to stop the death.)
2. Cocaine can become addicting to a some of people who use it. Cocaine makes the person feel "complete" or "normal." Drug rehabilitation programs (and prisons) are bursting with smart, normal people who got caught by cocaine. Cocaine use depletes the pleasure causing drugs in the brain so that when the person 'comes down' from the cocaine 'high' he is more depressed than he would normally be. Heavy cocaine use depletes these chemicals and causes brain depression that can last for MONTHS! This is why rehabilitation is so hard.
 Heroin
Opiates like heroin cause anxiety (feelings of fearfulness and agitation)  to disappear. After a short time the body gets addicted. The body needs heroin to feel 'normal.' Needle use of any drug can give you AIDS, but even snorting heroin can make a person addicted. This is another bad news drug.
Other drugs
 Uppers, downers, acid etc. Many things have been invented to change the state of the human consciousness. Doctors might prescribe some of these for certain conditions. Unfortunately street drugs often are counterfeit (fake) and even if they are real they sometimes don't act they way people want them to.
Reasons for Abuse
 Most teenagers and young adults abuse alcohol and other drugs for one of two reasons.
1. They have some psychological problem. It is better to see a counselor and take care of the problem, than to be left with both the psychological problem and the alcohol or drug problem.
2. Many teenagers and young adults abuse alcohol and other drugs because they don't know how to feel any pleasure when they are completely quiet. Feeling glad to be alive is not like a thrill on a ferris wheel; it is pure pleasure in existing when nothing is happening.
    A person needs to feel glad to be alive many times a day--when he sees his friends, his clothes, food, the sky, a tree...Those who don't feel this pleasure are quite right in saying they are missing something. An ocean of alcohol and drugs will never fill up the missing feeling. 
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