Dear future President of the United States,

Hi, my name is Sarah. I’m from Iowa, and I think that we need to find a way to fix our drug problem. One of our biggest problems today in the U.S is drugs, we need to find a way to fix that problem. There is currently more drug abuse in the U.S. than there has ever been before. Most of the drug imports are coming from the southern border. We need to find a way to secure our southern border to stop the drug flow. Marijuana is the most used drug. Drugs are also the second leading death in teenagers, about 570,00 people die annually from drugs that is an insane amount and means in a decade there are 5,700,000 deaths from drugs.

Drugs also affect your mental state, drugs still affect your brain long after you have stopped using them. Drugs cause so many things, one of the things drugs do is change your mental state. Drugs still affect the brain long after you have stopped using that drug, maybe even permanently. 45% of individuals with untreated substances-use disorders commit suicide. Drugs also cost a lot of money. Illegal drug users make a lot of emergency room visits, some estimates is 527,000 each year. $1 in every $14 of our nation's health bill is spent on people with smoking-related issues. Today 1 in 4 deaths is drug relatable. Drugs weaken the immune system so you can get infections easier. Drugs can cause heart-attacks, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, causes the liver to work harder so you could have liver failure, causes seizures, and strokes. Drugs also cause body changes such as breast development in men. It causes dramatic fluctuations in appetite and increases your body temperature. Drugs highjack this “reward” system causing unusually large amounts of dopamine to flood the system. Some of the behavior problems that drugs cause are paranoia, aggressiveness, hallucinations, addiction, impaired judgment, impulsiveness, and loss of self control. Drug offenders account for more than one-third of the growth in the state prison population and more than 80 percent of the increase in the number of federal prison inmates since 1985.

There are a lot of different reasons why people use drugs and there are differences in reasons between the young people doing drugs and older people. These are just some reasons on why people do drugs but no one knows except the people that do drugs. It is said that people want to change something about their lives. Here are some reasons that young people do drugs: to fit in, escape or relax, relieve boredom, rebel, and experiment. I think that people who come from bad homes typically are the ones that are the ones doing the drugs, that is not entirely true but that is what it seems to be. Our country spends $50 billion on fixing this drug problem but obviously the money that has been spent on this hasn’t helped. We need to make our drug addiction help centers open to all drug users who want to quit. 90% of people who want treatment can’t get it, meanwhile thousands of people are forced into treatment because they got caught. If they aren’t even going to try to quit then they shouldn’t be getting help we need to help the people who are willing to try to get over their addictions. We need to tell people that it is ok to tell the police about their drugs. Many people die of overdose and they won’t call 911 because the are worried about getting arrested. Many of the crimes in America are tied back to drugs. Once we fix the drug problem a lot of other problems will be solved with it. It’s not just the people that do drugs that get affected, their families are also affected, and businesses are affected because they can’t depend on these people coming to work. Please take this into consideration when you're making important decisions in the U.S. Presidential Office. Thank you for taking your time for reading.

Sincerely,

Sarah