Drug use can lead to abuse, addiction, legal offenses, serious health problems, and even loss of life.
There is no way to predict the effect that a drug can have to someone, especially if it is the first time trial, and even regardless of dose and amount. Considering that each individual’s brain and body chemistry are distinct, each person would also have a distinct tolerance for drugs.
Inhalants
The effects of inhalants are the same with that of alcohol, including slurred speech, lack of coordination, euphoria and dizziness. Inhalant abusers may also experience lightheadedness, hallucinations, and delusions.
Harmful irreversible effects of inhalants include hearing loss, limb spasms, central nervous system or brain damage, bone marrow damage
Signs of Drug Abuse
There are common signs of involvement on drug as revealed by individual using drugs. While not all of these signs mean that an individual is involved in drugs and there could be some other physical or emotional problem that is causing these behaviors, there is high chance that drug use may be a likelihood which includes the following:
- weakening interest in school or work
- sudden changes on friends (hangs out with those known for their drug use)
- becomes pessimistic, bad-tempered and anxious continually
- asks to be left alone a lot
- always weary (or makes it as an excuse to be left alone)
- becomes careless and often becomes involved in accidents
- becomes caught up in a lot of clashes
- regular mood swings
- abrupt change in appearance and behavior (red or puffy eyes, weight changes, frequent complaints of headaches or stomachaches, shaking, continuous cough, brown stains on fingertips, stumbling, or a chronic runny nose)
- loss of interest in hobbies or sports
- exhibits poor judgment
- difficulty on concentration
Helping Victims of Drug Abuse
When suspecting a friend using drugs, talk to him or her. Let them know that you care. Talk to your parents, teacher, school counselor, or another trusted adult. Offer to go with your friend to her/his parents or a counselor for assistance.
You alone can't make your friend stop on drugs, but takes professional help. Counseling, treatment and rehabilitation are among the interferences that can assist someone struggling with the pressure to use drugs.
Words to be aware of
Addiction – An individual has an addiction when he becomes reliant on or craves a drug and believes he needs the drug to live. All an addicted drug user can think about is taking the next dose after getting high.
Depressant - is a drug that slows a person down. Physicians prescribed depressants to help people be less angry, anxious, or tense. It relaxes muscles and makes people feel sleepy or like their head is filled.
Hallucinogen - is a drug, such as LSD, that alters an individual's mood and makes her/him see, hear, or think things that aren't really there. It changes the way one feels time, making it seem to slow down. As the name implies, hallucinogens may cause hallucinations – thus they see or hear imaginary people or things when they think.
High - is the feeling that drug users want to obtain when taking drugs. There are many types of high, including spacey feeling, euphoria, or a feeling that a person has “special powers”, like the ability to fly or see into the future.
Stimulant - speeds up a person's body and brain. Stimulants, like methamphetamines, have the opposite effect of depressants. Usually it makes a person high energetic. The user feels tired or sick when its effects fade.
Why do others become addicted while some do not?
No single factor can foretell whether or not a person will become addicted to drugs. Danger for addiction is influenced by a person's biology, social environment, and age or stage of development. The more risk factors a person has, the greater the possibility that taking drugs can lead to addiction.
Several factors may contribute to development of drug addiction and dependence, which include:
Biological - The genes that people are born with - in combination with environmental influences - account for about half of their addiction vulnerability. Likewise, gender, ethnicity, and the presence of other mental disorders may influence risk for drug abuse and addiction. Once you've started using a drug, the development into addiction may be influenced by inherited (genetic) traits, which may delay or speed up its progression.
In researches of twins disclose that half of someone's risk of becoming addicted to drugs is genetic. Genetic causes of drug addiction appear to involve multiple gene sequences and science has not yet been able to identify all the genes involved. Nevertheless, it is known some genes, like those involved in brain receptors of nicotine, play a part in drug addiction.
Environmental – An individual's environment includes many various influences, from family’s beliefs (seen or where it's seen as permissible) and friends/peer group that encourages drug use to socio-economic status and quality of life, in general. Factors such as peer pressure, physical and sexual abuse, stress, and parental involvement can seriously influence the course of drug abuse and addiction in an individual's life.
Drug addiction can be the combination of drug experimentation with the lack of parental oversight. Other environmental factors include:
Involvement in a sport where performance-enhancing drugs are persuaded
Gender and ethnicity contribute to addiction of some drugs
Developmental - Genetic and environmental factors act together with critical developmental stages in an individual's life to affect addiction susceptibility, and adolescents encounter a double challenge. Although taking drugs regardless of age can lead to addiction, the earlier that drug use starts, the more possibility it is to progress to more severe abuse. And since adolescents' brains are still progressing in the areas that controls decision making, judgment, and self-control, they are especially prone to risk-taking behaviors, including trying drugs of abuse.
Ignorance - Some drug addicts also identify drug use and ignorance as a cause of drug addiction. Often, if a person is dealing with pain-management issues, the drug received, like oxycodone, can be very addictive. The ignorance of the drug's addiction potential, along with the physical pain of the condition, becomes a cause of drug addiction.
For many Americans, drug use begins with a prescription. Opiate-based drugs like OxyContin are notorious for both their addictive properties and their likelihood of being overprescribed. The Los Angeles Times reported that approximately 92,200 people were treated for overdoses on prescription opioid pain relievers in 2010. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes an surprising 259 million prescriptions were written for opioid painkillers in 2012 alone.
Psychological - Drug addiction appear to stem from trauma, often when the drug addict is young. Sexual or physical abuse, abandonment, or disorder in the home can be factors to psychological stress, which people attempt to “self-medicate” (reduce the stress's pain through drug use). This self-medication turns to be a cause of drug addiction. Other psychological causes of drug addiction include mental illness such as depression, inability to connect with others, lack of friends, poor performance at work or school and poor stress coping skills. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America discloses that about 20 percent of substance abusers have an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder, such as depression.
Changes in the brain - Physical addiction appears to occur when frequent use of a drug changes the way one’s brain feels pleasure. The addicting drug causes physical changes to some nerve cells (neurons) in one’s brain. Neurons use chemicals called neurotransmitters to communicate. These changes can remain long after one stops using the drug.
Avoidance is the secret
Drug addiction is avoidable. Research shows that prevention programs that involve the family, schools, communities, and the media are effective in reducing drug abuse. Although many incidents and cultural factors affect drug abuse trends, when youths recognize drug abuse as damaging, they reduce their drug taking. It is essential, therefore, to assist youth and the general public to be aware on the dangers of drug abuse and for teachers, parents, and heath care professionals to convey that drug addiction can be avoided if a person never abuses drugs.
Does the Catholic Church close its eye to the enforcement of the law?
Benedict XVI, the first pontiff of the age of addiction says that the seductiveness of illegal drugs is nothing but like other many temptations placed before humans every day (drugs, money, sex, pornography, alcohol) telling the world that it will bring them happiness, yet these things are detrimental and troublesome.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) speaks well of law enforcement: “We commend you, our law enforcers, on your new-found earnestness in enforcing the law and in apprehending malefactors, but we are disturbed by an increasing number of reports that suspected drug-peddlers, pushers and others about whom reports of criminal activity have been received, have been shot, supposedly because they resist arrest,” CBCP President and Lingayen Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas said in a statement.
However, it expresses on concern over the recent rise in killings of drug pushers, issuing a guide on the morality of killings suspects in a law enforcer's line of duty, as an “appeal to humanity.” That:
One can “shoot to kill” solely on the ground of justifiable self-defense or the defense of others. Law and jurisprudence have sufficiently spelled out the elements of self-defense, and for purposes of Catholic morality, it is necessary to emphasize that, as law enforcers, can “shoot to kill” only first, when there is unjust provocation; second, when there is a genuine, not only hypothetical, threat to the law enforcers’ life or to the lives and security of others; third, when there is due proportion between the menace caused and law enforcers own use of a firearm aimed at the threatening subject.
Killing a suspect outright, no matter how much surveillance work may have antecedently been done on the suspect, is not morally justified. Suspicion is never the moral equivalent of sureness, and punishment may be imposed only on the ground of sureness.
When the arrest of a suspect is attempted, and the suspect tries to flee escape from the scene, every attempt by non-lethal means should be taken to prevent the suspect from escaping and if shot at, every attempt should be taken to free the escaping suspect from death, unless the escape of such a victim clearly and immediately puts others in harm’s way.
Villegas said, “Let no one ever raise his hand against his brother or sister, for the blood that is shed - even if it be the blood of one we suspect of crime - cries to heaven for justice!”
Conclusion
Drug addiction has not caused death toll in the Philippines in terms of crime rate that it bring about. In fact, the PNP’s Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management has accounted 9,646 murder cases; 31,741 cases of robbery; and, 10,298 rape cases in 2015. These translate to an average crime rate of a murder every 54 minutes, a robbery every 16 minutes, and a rape case every 51 minutes. From January to May 2016, he noted the PNP recorded “a staggering number” of crime incidents including 3,615 murder cases, 3,996 rape cases, and 9,971 robbery cases. With these overall figures of all types of crimes which do not surpass the death rate caused by cigarette addiction, there’s only one determinant of this upsurge - ineffective law enforcement and corruption.
The Philippine government’s initiative to control it by apprehension both the user and the pusher is but respectable, as this innovation of pleasure disrespects life. However, exterminating them especially the users and the pushers who are the victims here through extra-judicial killing or in the disguise of self-defense on the law enforcers’ side is disrespectable, on awareness that drug addiction is but another innovation of gratification that humans explore like smoking which kills 10 people every hour (brought by smoking-related diseases and this is because of easy access to cigarettes. This translates to 240 deaths every day or 87,600 deaths every year) regular visit of porn site which casual interest over time can be turned into a compulsive addiction wherein like any type of addiction, stronger doses of is needed to provide the same levels of excitement and satisfaction, until one is hooked on the worst, the most explicit printed and film images of raw sexual violence.
Any form of crime must be controlled but overreaction on this appears to be unreasonable when other type of addiction which is a killer problem of the country than drug addiction is overlooked.
In the Philippines, 10 people die every hour because of smoking-related diseases. This translates to 240 deaths every day or 87,600 deaths every year. Scientific research reveals that no less than 12 different types of cancer are attributed to smoking, with lung cancer being the second most common cancer killer in the Philippines, next to breast cancer.[9]
If there are 240 deaths everyday attributed to smoking (based on February 12, 2015 report of Manila Times) then that would mean an approximately 979,200 (240 x 17 months = 4,080 days x 240 death per day = 979,200 deaths) deaths within 17 months. This figure is extremely preposterous if compared with 1.3 million estimated drug users accounted in 2012.
Unfortunately, the media has been extremely hyping drug addiction problem in the Philippines publicizing it on TV and print news everyday but I never recall an instance that they warn the public through a hyped news/article on a daily basis about the alarming death rate on tobacco addiction. What’s the saddest part about it is that, the immediate action against drug addiction (which is not a killer problem of the society) ends up in 10 extra judicial killings cases per day but the immediate action to regulate the use of tobacco is simply through a warning embedded in a pack of cigarette (cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health and increased excise tax.
The false promises, the lies and the fraud behind drugs should be unmasked.
The humanity has arrived at a moment in history when the free market’s ability to provide things that people need is also creating a surplus of things and experiences that people be fond of too much for their own satisfaction.
Humans’ brains have moved ahead to deal with only a particular amount of temptation; now civilization is on the way to a world in which differing damaging promises involves a disturbing amount of strength of will.
Drugs (along with sexual addiction and alcoholism) are only one feature of this addictive landscape. In some respects they stand out less than they once did: they are more greatly concealed in the thicket of temptations than 20 years ago – and are all the more consequently dangerous.
In this generation, youth no longer draw a distinction between legal drinking and illegal drug-taking. A night’s clubbing basically involves mutually. One might “pre-load” on alcohol to get in the mood for the club; then take a stimulant drug to energize dancing; then ingest a sedative to be able to come down before one sleeps. The young clubbers, drug therapists and psychiatrists affirm that this combination of pleasure-seeking experience is ordinary for today’s partygoers. The flowing together of cheap temptations has turned bingeing into the default mode for weekend celebrations, which is alarming, but also beguiling. Age of addiction cannot be trimmed down into a bundle of conspiracies by drug dealers and multinational corporations. It’s more multifaceted than that.
The pharmacology that smooths the progress of the toxic new party drugs also lies behind the growth of new cancer remedies. Scientific progresses are morally neutral. It’s their application that allows people to make money out of the “false promises”.
Technology’s rising ability to target of the pleasure centers in the human brain develops real dilemmas. The reason people become addicted – which they do, in their millions – is that they do their job too well. They flood the brain with chemicals that, in specific situations can ease loneliness and pain.
Equally, supermarkets now sell incredible variety of sugary snacks (like the enticing “mini-bites”) that are perfect for an office party. But so reliant have humans become on the little bursts of satisfaction produced by sugar that they buy themselves treats when there is nothing to make cheery – merely world-tiredness to ease .
Others teasingly compare cake to cocaine, which has a sense: sugar can produce chemical highs that are not all that far detached from a cocaine rush.
Quoting a much darker pattern of the advance of addictiveness, hundreds of millions of people now frequently browse online to visit porn sites. Their appetites are won over and extended by the same digital advancements that allow the internet to be used as a learning instrument.
The epidemic of addictions is starting to corrode at the organized difference between addicts and non-addicts that humans undervalued; the notion that addiction is a disease is deceptive, because it takes for granted the ordinary people’s vulnerability to mood-changing substances or experiences.
Keeping track of these changes, let alone managing them, is an almost impossible job for governments. The collapse of civil order in many parts of the world has enabled organized crime to turn into a hi-tech industry – one that, thanks to internet distribution, is more or less untouchable to the “war on drugs”.
However, this addictive environment should not, and must not, discourage the Church.
Prescription drugs, especially the opioid analgesics, now cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine. All of these drugs can cause central nervous system and respiratory depression. They form deadly combinations with barbiturates and other sedatives and with alcohol.
It should be noted that in the 19th century and the early 1900s, morphine usage was not only legal but more socially acceptable than alcohol. Morphine was used during the American Civil War as a surgical anesthetic and was sent home with numerous wounded soldiers for pain relief. Several hundred thousand soldiers were addicted to morphine at the end of the war.
The federal drug laws were a response to the rampant opiate addiction problem in the USA at the end of the 19th century. Over the years, we have learned that addictive drugs change the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier. By mimicking various neurotransmitters, they activate the mesolimbic reward system deep within the brain. The brain's metabolism is altered, craving is created, and one's personality is changed.
How might we do better? Although some advocates believe our “war on drugs” is a failure, legalizing drugs is probably not the answer. It would spark considerable problems.
Progress is being made in the treatment of addiction. Residential treatment programs are effective. The rate of drug use among teenagers has been cut nearly in half since its peak 30 years ago. Drug courts are now common, and the criminal justice system has become the most powerful force in the country supporting addiction treatment. Education is the key—not only teaching youth about the health dangers of specific drugs but also teaching about the disease of addiction. Finally, treatment programs should address general wellness and factors leading to addiction, including poverty, lack of education, impaired mental health, and abuse.
People within criminal justice system may need extra treatment services to cure drug use disorders successfully. Nevertheless, the types of services needed are inaccessible to many offenders. With the number of drug pushers/users ________ (quantity and link) who surrendered, the Philippine government will need treatment facilities for the victims/offenders, otherwise this would end up as they are prone to relapse once treatment is unsuccessfully met.
Just like cigarette smoking which bottom-line (its adverse effect) has not been addressed rigidly through extensive education campaign and conscientious law enforcement, government’s crusade against drugs will be a punch to the moon if law enforcement sees not the common good but its excise tax that the government could generate.
Relapse doesn’t mean treatment failure. Get back on the path to recovery as promptly as you can more willingly than giving up. Phone your sponsor, speak to your therapist, go to a meeting, or arrange an appointment with your doctor. Once you’re sober again and spared, study at what sparked and caused the relapse, and what you could have done in a different way. Choose to get back on the road to recovery and employ the encounter to reinforce commitment.
Lastly, drugs are the progressive substitute of people by things. In a civilization in which loads of traditional bonds have widened and shattered, humans seek for comfort in sensation – so much so that humans develop lives around rituals of ingestion. As a countermeasure, one way of presenting Christianity is as the substitute of things by people, of gratification by love, by offering the Gospel as a treatment to addiction.
References:
[1] Trisha Macas, GMA News The Guardian article on Duterte’s drug war riles Palace, Published January 6, 2017 4:23pm, http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/594896/news/nation/the-guardian-article-on-duterte-s-drug-war-riles-palace#sthash.jNlvcDKb.dpuf
[2] Ted Regencia, Mohsin Ali Philippines: Death toll in Duterte's war on drugs, 15 Dec 2016 14:52 GMT, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2016/08/philippines-death-toll-duterte-war-drugs-160825115400719.html
[3] National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-9561, Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment: A Research-Based Guide (Third Edition), https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/principles-drug-addiction-treatment-research-based-guide-third-edition/frequently-asked-questions/what-drug-addiction-treatment
[4] Trisha Macas, GMA News, Duterte asks Pinoy billionaires to build drug rehab centers or else...,Published December 12, 2016 9:56pm, http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/592204/news/nation/duterte-asks-pinoy-billionaires-to-build-drug-rehab-centers-or-else
[5] NB, GMA News, Rehab centers to get adequate support from DOH, Ubial tells House panel
Published November 9, 2016 4:57pm, http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/588162/news/nation/rehab-centers-to-get-adequate-support-from-doh-ubial-tells-house-panel
[6] Pia Ranada, Duterte to Church" Help don't criticize drug war, Published 6:12pmJanuary 19, 2017, Updated 8:21PM, January 19, 2017, http://www.rappler.com/nation/158888-duterte-tirade-church-help-drug-war
[7] Theodore Dalrymple, Should we be threatening cocaine addicts with execution?, 28 November 2013, http://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/should-we-be-threatening-cocaine-addicts-with-execution/
[8] Mental Health First Aird Australia, Helping someone with drug use problems, mental health first aid guidelines, http://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.ca/EN/resources/Documents/MHFA_prob_drug_guidelines_A4_2013.pdf
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