Persuasive Essay On Teen Drug Abuse

A few years ago, my community’s city and county schools were merged, and my small class size of fifty people was quadrupled. Suddenly, instead of seeing the same faces every day, I was struggling down the hallway while trying to avoid the hundreds of students I had never seen before. The first year after the merge, I met many new people, a few of which were involved with things I had never imagined high school students would be involved with. At first, all I noticed were cigarettes and vaporizers being used behind teachers’ backs, but then I began to notice more and more illegal substances being used. A growing problem in the small community of Wayne County, Kentucky is the use and abuse of drugs by teenagers.
I have researched reasons as

Abuse and misuse of prescription drugs are also high—for example, in 2013, 7.4 percent of high school seniors reported non-medical use of the prescription stimulant Adderall in the past year. (“Drug Testing”)
While the results of these statistics are of high school students nationwide, the numbers definitely prove that teen drug abuse is a real problem. Problems like these can be avoided with a simple solution; the implementation of a mentoring program.
Mentoring programs, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, are used as an opportunity to help lost children find their way back onto the right path. In these programs, an older, more responsible citizens volunteers to take a troubled child under their wing in a fashion that resembles sibling relationships. Programs such as these have been put into place all throughout the country. In 1995, Public/Private Ventures conducted a survey concerning the children of Big Brothers Big Sisters. This survey evaluated both matched and unmatched children, and found that the children matched with Bigs (i.e. Big Brothers or Sisters) were “46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs” (“Big Impact”). Implementing a program such as this would surely benefit the children and teens of Wayne County. If these troubled youths sign up for a local mentoring program and are paired with a Big that will teach them and look out for them, they have a better chance of staying away from harmful substances and bad