Drug Abuse Facts - The Shocking Truth

The most up to date information regarding drug abuse comes from NIDA (The National Institute on Drug Abuse) and relates back to 1992. These drug abuse facts included an estimate for the total cost to the US economy of overall drug abuse (including alcohol abuse and alcoholism) of over $245 billion. Of this total figure, over $97 billion is attributed to drug abuse alone.

These costs are a combination of treatments, preventions costs, miscellaneous healthcare costs, plus economic factors such as lost work productivity, social care costs, and criminal costs.

Drug abuse facts indicate that of the whole total, 46% of the costs are picked up by the government, whilst 44% relate to the abusers themselves and others residing in the same household.

In the period between the previous survey of 1985 and this 1992 study, these associated costs have risen by a dramatic 50%! Over 50% of these total costs are put down to drug related crime.

When we analyze drug abuse facts, it shows that that not everybody is affected or is indeed liable to drug abuse and/or addiction in the same way. The different factors that have a bearing on the likelihood for addiction includes a person’s biological make up; in other words their inherited genes.

This gene mix, plus the environment in which they live, accounts for 50% of the risk factor towards becoming addicted. Other influences include a person’s gender, their ethnicity, and their mental condition including the presence of any mental illness.

One of the drug abuse facts relates to the way that a person’s environment can influence the probability of drug addiction. These environmental considerations include peer pressure, physical and sexual mistreatment, general stress, and the influence of parents.

Another of the drug abuse facts concerns a person’s development, and at what stage in their lives they first get involved with drugs. The tendency is that the earlier that the first drug experience happens, the greater the probability that they will develop a serious drug abuse habit.

There is another consideration also, which relates to brain development and the fact that the brain of an adolescent is still easily influenced. Early drug abuse may adversely affect judgmental and decision making skills, and may also worsen risk taking behavior.

The way that drugs affect the brain is perhaps the most concerning of the drug abuse facts. Drugs work their way into brain and affect it in one of two ways. Firstly they can mimic the chemical messages that the brain sends out, or secondly the can saturate the brain’s “reward circuit”. Drugs like marijuana and heroin act in the first way by fooling the brain that they are chemical messengers and result in the brain transmitting abnormal signals.

Drugs like Cocaine behave in the second manner producing large amounts of chemicals that interfere with normal brain functioning. Both ways result in the production of excess dopamine which is the chemical that effects movement, emotions, determination, and pleasure. This results in the feelings of euphoria experienced by those who take drugs. This reaction also has the effect of persuading the brain that the experience is to be repeated, setting the addiction process firmly into operation.

Knowledge of these drug abuse facts, if more widely known, could prevent some people from embarking on such a perilous path as experimenting with drugs in the first place.

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Drug Abuse Facts - The Shocking Truth

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