Persuasive Essay Example: Suffering Drug Addictions To Prison?
In America, twenty five to forty percent of people with a mental illness will be put behind bars at least one time in their life (Ford). Many people who are mentally ill go to jail for drug possession. About twenty five percent of people in jail are there due to drug possession. These people turn to drugs to help them, for example, people who struggle with depression sometimes use cocaine to help make them feel good and to help their mood. Then people get addicted to the drug and cannot live without it. People who have a substance abuse disorder need the drug to reach a normal state of mind. Addicts get locked up when in reality they just need help. Mental illness and addiction is not something that can be fixed without the needed help, so it does not make sense that addicts are thrown into jail where they cannot get the help they need. Addiction is a mental illness and drug addicts should be treated like it is one. No other illness is treated with incarceration so addiction should not be either. Addicts should be able to go to therapy or rehab and try to better their situation instead of being thrown in jail and being treated as a criminal.
Addiction is the uncontrollable use of a substance despite it being mentally, physically, and emotionally harmful. When a person is addicted to a substance, they become dependent on it. When someone takes a drug, it has to get to the brain. Inside the brain, drugs disrupt the brain’s normal functioning. The amount in which a drug is effective depends on its ability to increase or decrease the amount of neurotransmitters spread. For example, hallucinogens prevent serotonin from being released, because of this, the brain’s chemistry can now be altered by the drug. Each time a drug is used, the brain slowly gets rewired. In the beginning, when you take a drug like heroin, you do not feel any pain and all. It becomes hard to live without the drug, feelings of stress and anxiety begin, which in turn, causes you to take more of the drug. Your brain adapts to the drug, you don’t get pleasure from it anymore but you crave it more and more. You then can feel withdrawal pains from the drug. “Everything hurts. It hurts to comb your hair. It hurts to shave. You have no energy. You feel weak. You feel a sense of desperation. You have a constant impending doom and anxiety, because you realize that with one pack of dope you can change how you feel within a matter of 10 seconds” (Mehta). People who have experienced withdrawal compare it to the worst flu of your life. When addicted, you can do things you could never dream of doing to get a drug. Also, you now need the drug to get to your normal state instead of using it to get a high.
About half of people who have an addiction also have a mental illness and vice versa. Many people who experience a substance use disorder (SUD) simultaneously experience a wide range of anxiety disorders. 43 percent of people in treatment for addiction of opioids have symptoms of depression and anxiety. When used early in life, drug use can cause SUDs and can lead to mental illness. There is a correlation between drugs and mental illness that needs to be addressed.
Many people with a mental illness attempt to use drugs to try to self-medicate. People pick different drugs based on what they think will help better the way they feel. “ Those who hear voices and have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder often turn to heroin to regulate their sleep… ‘I’ll ask, ‘Can you eat or sleep without this?’ and they’ll say no’”(Ford). Other ways people try to self-medicate is by using drugs like marijuana to help calm themselves. The drugs can then take over their lives, and now not only are they battling a mental illness, they are also battling addiction.
People may argue that drug users are criminals, and they believe that starting in 1971, President Richard Nixon did the right thing in starting a war on drugs. Most drugs are illegal and possessing them and using them is a crime. Drugs destroy neighborhoods and drug use is detrimental to the brain. Drugs also have the ability to tear up families and friendships due to the way they toy with the brain. Drug dealers are pushers who profit off of the addicts taking them. There should be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to drugs. Dealers along with addicts should be in jail for selling, buying, possessing, and consuming illegal substances.
Rebuttal
Drug use has been looked down upon by society since the 1930s. Once alcohol was legalized people only saw drug users as criminals and part of the counterculture despite alcohol being an addictive and abused substance. “Alcohol would be sold and celebrated; narcotics would be vilified”(Clark). This caused addicts to be treated as criminals not as people who are sick and need help. In the 1950s addicts were sent to hospitals that were actually prisons. These places were overcrowded and did not help prevent relapse. In California, when Narcotics Anonymous (NA) was founded, people were happy to be able to go and find relief in therapy instead of the prisons that they were cooped up in before. Recovering addicts helped others through the process of getting sober. These meetings caused addicts to not have to pick between their sobriety and their life, they were able to have both. When in prison, addicts lose out on being able to maintain relationships with family and friends. This program helps in creating social supportive networks that can assist people in staying positive when they are going through treatment. Furthermore, this causes people to be more successful in their treatment.
