By comparison, 71% of the population has smoked cigarettes and 82% has tried alcoholic beverages”(infoplease). Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. There are many method that people use to stop drugs. People go to rehab or they try to get over the addiction by themselves. “According to polls one out of ten people overcome their addiction” says (Szalavitz, Maia 0-1). So seeing these statistics it is really hard to stop drug abuse. Drug abuse can start with one drug and move to all the others and after that happens be really hard to stop doing the drugs.
There are many legal consequences for abusing drugs. Eighty percent of people that are arrested have abused drugs. If someone is arrested connected with drugs they can pay around 25,00 dollars the first time and up to 50,000 the second time someone gets caught. Some fines can get up to 500,000 dollars. The amount of years someone will go to jail if they are caught with drugs if around 25 years. For the worst offense for drug abuse is 1,000,000 dollars and 30 year in jail. So these people are wasting all this money and years just for a couple minutes or hours of …show more content…
According to Prescription Drug Abuse Statistics “In 2005, 4.4 million teenagers (aged 12 to 17) in the US admitted to taking prescription painkillers”(Prescription Drug Abuse Statistics 0-11) and “A 2007 survey in the US found that 3.3% of 12- to 17-year-olds and 6% of 17- to 25-year-olds had abused prescription drugs in the past month”(Prescription Drug Abuse Statistics 0-11). In the book by Powell, Jillian, and John G. Samanich it said that “ one out of three 12th graders had used marijuana”(Powell 8-9). All of the statistic had young people starting drugs which will be harmful to them in later years. 6.7 percent of 12 to 17 year olds were using marijuana in 2007. In the US 94 million people have admitted that they have taken drugs at least once in their life time. The drug with the highest kill rate is not a pill it is alcohol. According to Prescription Drug Abuse Statistics “In Europe, recent studies among 15- and 16-year-olds suggest that use of marijuana varies from under 10% to over 40%, with the highest rates reported by teens in the Czech Republic (44%), followed by Ireland (39%), the UK (38%) and France (38%)” (Prescription Drug Abuse Statistics 0-2). 13 to 14 is the average age that people take their first drug. The statistics of the young people who have taken drugs is not good for the human race and for the people who take the drugs