drug addiction social problem
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Are alcoholism and drug addiction REALLY diseases?
Or is this just an excuse for bad choices? Or are we trying to legalize and give credibility to social problems?
If nicotine addiction is the hardest one to overcome, why isn’t it treated more seriously?
Yes and no. Genes make people predisposed to get cancer and lots of other things we consider diseases. Just like they do with these “real” diseases genes can act in ways that we don’t really know about yet to make certain people more prone to addictive behaviors. Also we know some of these substances are physically addictive, so once a person makes one wrong decision they are thrown on a bad course. We should try and give them a chance to recover and change their life for the better. However at a certain point there needs to be a limit.
I don’t think nicotine is the hardest one to overcome, but it definitely is a hard one. It isn’t treated more seriously because it isn’t as much of a risk as the hard drugs and compared to alcohol a person smoking generally won’t smoke and drive and kill someone. The other reason it isn’t treated more seriously is because it is still legal to smoke and the cigarette companies have lots of money keeping it so.
Sheriff Lee Baca addresses Social Justice