Persuasive Essay On Drug Addiction

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Drug addiction is a problem that has been increasing immensely throughout our country. With 23.5 million Americans who are addicts and 50 to 90 percent of people who relapse after a period of time in recovery, It seems that our country should take a different approach towards substance abuse. I believe the misconception of addiction in our country has pushed addicts further away, we need to help addicts reconnect and rediscover themselves back into society. By punishing addicts and making them suffer more, we believe that would discourage them and give them the incentive to stop but it’s time we treat our drug policies as health issues instead of criminal issues. Our drug policies are not the only thing that needs to change, there are a …show more content…

Alexander helps us understand this issue more. Between the 1960’s and 1980’s, white laboratory rats lived in very poor conditions. They had to live in solitary confinement cellblocks which they could neither see nor touch each other, with no visual stimulation or exercise. Many experimental psychologists began to study drug addiction inside these poor conditions. They started to perfect techniques that allowed the rats to inject small doses of a drug into themselves by pressing the lever. Rats then would press the lever often enough to consume large amounts of heroin, morphine, amphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs. The results seemed to prove that these drugs were irresistibly addicting. Alexander believed it was more complex than that, by putting a rat in an empty cage it will have nothing else to do but those drugs. So he built a cage called “Rat Park” which was filled with toys, tunnels, and loads of friends and they have two water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. He then discovered that the rats almost never used the drugged water, none of them overdosed, and none of them used it compulsively. The rats go from almost 100 percent overdose when they 're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected

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