Drug addiction is a disease. A disease that is curable. There are prescription drugs that are there for medicinal purposes, and designer drugs manufactured only for the purpose of giving a false sense of well being to the user. However, the line between “use” and “abuse” is very thin for people that turn into chronic users of drugs.
Addiction to any type of drugs is dangerous. Addiction not only affects the person who is addicted, but it also affects the person’s family and friends. In fact, the menace of drug addiction affects the prospects of a whole nation because it has the capacity to turn a significant percentage of the population, both young and old, into unproductive and unhealthy individuals.
Addiction is not a phenomenon that affects only a particular section of the society. The affluent as well as the poor are both susceptible to the dangers of addiction. An addiction could start with a single puff of a drug laced cigarette at any age or any point in a person’s life. Most drug addicts follow a set pattern. They start off with trying out a milder drug like marijuana either because everyone around them was trying it or because of peer pressure. That forces them to try drugs just to fit in with the crowd they are hanging out with.
Slowly, this try becomes a habit, and the habit soon turns into addiction. Often, they graduate to more potent and dangerous drugs because they either do not get the “high” that they were used to or because they want to try higher forms of drugs as a natural progression in the field. Once a person is addicted, his or her entire life will revolve around obtaining the drug irrespective of the costs to their health. Addiction can lead to stealing, and there have been many recorded instances of murders being committed due to drugs.
Initially, drugs might seem like a route to a painless world. A world with no physical or emotional pain. But what seems like a painless world is only a black hole of endless pain from which escape is very difficult. They are spiraled into a system that gives them more pain when they are actually trying to relieve themselves of the pain they have already. Drug addicts withdraw into a world of their own and become oblivious to the realities of the real world. With time, they lose all social skills needed to survive and end up being miserable and lonely. However, this fact is lost on them because the lives of addicts revolve around only similar minded people whose only purpose in life is to get high in any which way possible.
However, no matter what the intensity and period of addiction, drug addiction is a disease that can be cured. An addict can be rehabilitated with a proper rehab program and with the support and encouragement from the addict’s family. A drug rehab program will not only cure the addict of his addiction disease, it will also give the addict the confidence to face the real world with all its pleasures and pains.