The drug epidemic in America is something that is hard to overlook these days. More and more people are dying from illicit drug overdoses and prescription drug overdoses. Pharmaceutical companies continue to create new drugs for new problems. Illicit drugs continue to be manufactured both internationally and domestically, being sold in every city across the nation. For Americans, medication has become a normal part of life. The media has played a significant role in how we view this epidemic. Our human tendencies urge us to believe that someone or something needs to be blamed for the enormous amount of deaths caused by drugs. Philip Alcabes’s “Medication Nation” seeks to uncover the truth about drug use in the United States. His background
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Alcabes knows that he will get his point across to the scientific community by utilizing statistics. (If we discussed ethos in the previous paragraph and already utilized paraphrasing and direct quotes, can we get rid of this section to reduce the paper? It would be effective to just use this paragraph to talk about statistics and emotions.) This is where Alcabes uses pathos to add to his argument. (paraphrase) Alcabes mentions that over 16,000 Americans die each year from overdosing on prescription pain killers and addiction continues to rise (Alcabes 2). This statistic is both alarming and gloomy (I like that word!). The writer is able to communicate to anyone who has experienced the horrors of addiction by tying in emotional facts. Alcabes does not revolve his entire article around emotion, and in fact I am surprised that he did not target an empathetic audience more often in his article. Perhaps it is because he wanted to focus his writings on the solution rather than dwell in the problem of our nation. (added this to talk about a strategy the writer does not use some strategies). The main goal for Alcabes is to get his audience to think about the truth behind our nation’s dependence on medication. By providing powerful evidence regarding drug use in the United States, he is able to deliver logical reasoning behind his …show more content…
The media provides us with facts in a suggestive way at times. The current hot topic of heroin overdose has played a large role in some citizen’s views of immigrants because, as mentioned earlier, there always needs to be someone to blame. As Alcabes notes in one section, “Donald Trump portrays immigrants as these diseased individuals who are bringing illegal drugs into our country” (Alcabes 8) – leave this as a direct quote, it’s powerful and there’s really no way to summarize. While there may be some truth behind immigrants smuggling drugs into the United States, the writer suggests the problem is much deeper. Here lies the paradox: we do not want drugs to go away completely, but we tend to believe if they were that our nation would be a better place to live (Alcabes 9). Alcabes knows that many of his audience members will be made up of the scientific community. Communicating his arguments against current statistics without first providing strong evidence would cause him to lose his
Alcabes knows that he will get his point across to the scientific community by utilizing statistics. (If we discussed ethos in the previous paragraph and already utilized paraphrasing and direct quotes, can we get rid of this section to reduce the paper? It would be effective to just use this paragraph to talk about statistics and emotions.) This is where Alcabes uses pathos to add to his argument. (paraphrase) Alcabes mentions that over 16,000 Americans die each year from overdosing on prescription pain killers and addiction continues to rise (Alcabes 2). This statistic is both alarming and gloomy (I like that word!). The writer is able to communicate to anyone who has experienced the horrors of addiction by tying in emotional facts. Alcabes does not revolve his entire article around emotion, and in fact I am surprised that he did not target an empathetic audience more often in his article. Perhaps it is because he wanted to focus his writings on the solution rather than dwell in the problem of our nation. (added this to talk about a strategy the writer does not use some strategies). The main goal for Alcabes is to get his audience to think about the truth behind our nation’s dependence on medication. By providing powerful evidence regarding drug use in the United States, he is able to deliver logical reasoning behind his …show more content…
The media provides us with facts in a suggestive way at times. The current hot topic of heroin overdose has played a large role in some citizen’s views of immigrants because, as mentioned earlier, there always needs to be someone to blame. As Alcabes notes in one section, “Donald Trump portrays immigrants as these diseased individuals who are bringing illegal drugs into our country” (Alcabes 8) – leave this as a direct quote, it’s powerful and there’s really no way to summarize. While there may be some truth behind immigrants smuggling drugs into the United States, the writer suggests the problem is much deeper. Here lies the paradox: we do not want drugs to go away completely, but we tend to believe if they were that our nation would be a better place to live (Alcabes 9). Alcabes knows that many of his audience members will be made up of the scientific community. Communicating his arguments against current statistics without first providing strong evidence would cause him to lose his