October 20, 2016

Dear Mr. or Madam President,

Imagine you have a child. Your child grows up a straight A student and in middle school, they get mixed in with the wrong crowd. These new found “friends” are into drugs and alcohol. You realize that your child now comes home everyday high, intoxicated or both. How would that make you feel? Would you feel you failed as a parent? That’s how some families are feeling at this very moment because either they’ve lost their child or their child became an addict due to excessive use of illegal substances, most commonly, heroin. My purpose for this letter is to help with the abuse of this elusive drug with teenagers and other influences that may be in that child’s life that encourage them to use drugs.

“Minneapolis has the highest purity of heroin in the United States, with the lowest average cost of about ten dollars per dose, it has an extremely high chance to intrigue younger “first-time users” (teenagers). “Heroin is a drug that has haunted our country for generations, but in recent years it posed as an increasing threat to American youth. Since 2007, the number of heroin users in the U.S. has doubled, and half of all first-time users are younger than twenty-six years old, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” (Sullivan) To this, I think it is only necessary that we take actions into our own hands. We need to enforce the law to make sure that our children are safe from drugs and alcohol, as early influence may affect their lives heavily in the future.

“ 27 percent of high school students who smoke and drink progress to marijuana within a 5- to 6-month follow-up period, only 2 percent of those who have not used any legal substance do so. Marijuana, in turn, is a crucial step on the way to other illicit drugs. While 26 percent of marijuana users progress to LSD, amphetamines, or heroin, only 1 percent of non drug marijuana users and 4 percent of legal drug users do so.” (Kandel) There are many solutions to this problem. Parents of drug users may consult doctors, therapists or even try to take care of the problem themselves. In addition to this our law enforcement could make it harder for our youth to acquire drugs and we may have more thorough checks at the border for illegal smuggling of the drugs that our children may be consuming.

Mr. or Madam President I hope that your plan includes helping the children and the families that are going through this hardship because our nation’s image is dependent on your work towards the safety of our youth. It could very much be more tainted by the automatic thought that all of them are on drugs or intoxicated? We need our government and law enforcement to take action upon this matter so that we could prevail as a nation not only as a country that is separated by what is shown that our government officials are doing nothing about the availability of illegal drugs to the very core of its being, our youth.