Every day it seems we look on our Facebook feeds and see terrible news. From a mother killing her own children before taking her life, to an all-time high of heroin overdoses in Central and Eastern Kentucky. Drugs are an integral part of American culture. Yes, they're the part that we shove away into the closet and try not to talk about, but chances are, drugs have influenced your life in some way if you have lived in Eastern Kentucky.
These influences can range from an alcoholic uncle who happens to have just a little too much every once and a while, to more devastating effects that can ruin the futures of the unfortunate souls caught up in such a mess, and tear families apart. With what has happened in Mount Sterling, there have been a reported 12 overdoses with the numbers going up in surrounding counties. At least one of these victims has passed away. These overdoses could be stopped if we took time to talk about them in our day to day lives, but instead we stigmatize drug users and put a brand on them that makes it seem as if we don't want them to get help.
When we look at someone and say that they're just a "drifting druggie," or "another pothead" we have to realize that these are actually people. They have their own aspirations, their own hopes, their own dreams. Some of them have families to go home to at the end of the day, and children to raise. It should be perplexing why we look at them as if they are monsters instead of trying to get them the help that they not only need, but also deserve.
Before we can even get into talking about getting them that help, we should first look at prevention methods. These prevention methods lie within grade school and beyond. A survey taken by the United States Department of Health and Human services in 2009-2010 inferred that 4 percent of High School students grades 9-12 did not receive the care they needed for illegal drug abuse. That may seem to be a small percentage, but that would mean that between the 655,642 students who are attending public school in Kentucky in 2016, 26,225 of these students have not only been abusing illegal drugs but are also not receiving the treatment they need. More would be using them.
If we are to solve this problem, then we should first look at these school students. As it stands in the United States, Sex education classes and health classes are generally taught by unlicensed coaches who refer to abstinence-only education rather than speaking on effective methods of birth-control. If they are teaching that for sex education, it should chill you to think what they speak of on drug abuse. With this being the case, it can be hypothesized that with the rate of teen pregnancy falling as more and more states are providing sex education beyond abstinence-only, that the old method is mildly ineffective.
These issues are obviously greater than most individuals would initially think, with the staggering statistics and terrifying studies that have been undertaken in order to get the statistics and data provided. They can be fixed, however, if we start within our own education systems. We should push less for abstinence-only education, and more for teaching teenagers effective methods of birth control. We should stigmatize the drug user less and focus on getting them the help they need. We can do that within our own communities merely by telling a friend, or just talking about these issues. It can be hard, but it is something that must be done.
