Dear Future President,

Although my community is not really affected by drug related issues, they do happen in other places around me. There are people who overdose on illegal drugs all the time and their brain isn’t functioning correctly. Our government is spending too much money on rehab and other things that are supposed to help drug abuses. We need to spend that money on our education system or on people who are too young to help themselves, resulting in better ways to spend our tax money and fewer people who feel the need to use drugs.

Our nation is spending more than $ 94 million on substance abuse treatment. That is a lot of money. I mean for the fact our schools can hardly afford books for students or even music for the arts students. This money could be used for much better things. The government is starting to provide narcan to people who overdose, so that’s pretty much saying that it is okay to do drugs and you won't die because we have another drug that brings you back to life. We are also starting to have a needle drive where you can go get a new needle whenever your friend needs one so you don’t share and spread diseases. Yes that is a good thing but giving people a new needle to do more heroin with is just stupid. We want there to be no more drugs not an easier way to be able to them.

People do drugs and we cannot stop them, but have you ever thought why they do them. Well some people get hooked on them for depression or even just peer pressure but this leads to horrible things. Some people are pregnant when they try drugs and then that fetus has a very high chance of being addicted themselves and it is not their fault, so we need to spend more of that money on them who don’t have a say in whether or not the become addicted to drugs or not. Drugs cause people to be mean or even antisocial, they began to steal from other members of their family and hurt the ones around them. We need to find a better way to help these people other than arresting them or sending them to rehab centers that most of the time don’’t have any affect on the person.

I have a very strong personal connection to people doing drugs. My biological father used to be on drugs all the time, finally my mom decided to take me away from him until he got help and he did and it worked for a while but then he got back on them after just a few months. He has gone to jail, rehab, church and everything, but somehow he always ended up getting back on them. One time my niece and I went on a trip with him and to our surprise he had a meth lab in the back of the car, he got arrested and he went to rehab but nothing seemed to work so why should our government pay for treatments that don’t work? That’s my question. Also my sisters friend died of an overdose and he was only around 20 years old and that affected the community a lot, they had a walk for him and his mom came into school to teach us to not do drugs because things like this happen too often.

So Future President it is up to you to help our education system by taking some of the money used for drug addicts. If you do this you could help schools in more ways than one, otherwise the drug addicts will continue to do drugs while our education system is failing.

Sincerely, Chloe