DRUGS:

THE CANCER OF OUR

SOCIETY

By: Aman Maity

Class: XI
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to express my gratitude to our biology
teacher Ms. Sagarika Basa for
providing her invaluable guidance throughout the
course of the project.
I would also like to thank my parents for providing
me with this amazing opportunity.
 INDEX
PAGE NO. CONTENT

1 WHAT ARE
DRUGS?

2 WHY ARE DRUGS

U SE D ?

3 E FF E C T S O F
DRUGS IN
HUMAN BODY

5 E FF E C T S O F
DRUGS IN
SOCIETY

8 F E NT A N Y L : T H E
S E C O N D O PI O D
E PI D E M I C

10 DETOX AND
REHAB

11 CONCLUSION
 WHAT ARE DRUGS?

Whenever we think of drugs, we think of

medicines that actually help us in our day to day
life but we also think of the “bad drugs”, one of
thing our parents said to stay away from along
with alcohol and bad company. Well what are
these kinds of drugs?
According to United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crimes:
A drug is any substance (with the exception of
food and water) which, when taken into the body,
alters the body’s function either physically and/or
psychologically. Drugs may be legal (e.g. alcohol,
caffeine and tobacco) or illegal (e.g. cannabis,
ecstasy, cocaine and heroin).
Psychoactive drugs affect the central nervous
system and alter a person's mood, thinking and
behaviour. Psychoactive drugs may be divided into
four categories: depressants, stimulants,
hallucinogens and 'other'.

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 Why Are Drugs Used?

People use drugs for a variety of reasons. Some of

these include:
- To have fun, relax, forget problems or as a form
of escapism
- To gain confidence and socialise
- Out of curiosity
- To lessen inhibitions
- To remove personal responsibility for decisions
- To celebrate or commiserate
- To relieve boredom and stress.

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- Self-medication to cope with problems.
Friends, parents, older brothers and sisters and the
media can also have some influence over a young
person's decision to use drugs.
Some people become depressed, angry, aggressive,
sleepy, unmotivated, paranoid, anxious or
talkative. Drug use can also lead to social and
emotional problems and negative effects on
relationships with family and friends.

Effects of Drugs on
Human Body
The effects of drugs will vary from person to
person depending on the persons characteristics
(such as physical size, gender, mood, diet, fitness,
age, expectations and health), the drug itself (such
as the amount used and its purity), and how it is
taken and the environment a person is in when
using the drug.
Some people become depressed, angry, aggressive,
sleepy, unmotivated, paranoid, anxious or
talkative. Drug use can also lead to social and

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emotional problems and negative effects on
relationships with family and friends.
Different drugs have different effects on the
human body. Drugs like LSD can make you
hallucinate your biggest nightmares, marijuana can
make you forget about your problems, synthetic
opiods like fentanyl can make you feel like you
have no problems in life but a single milligram of
overdose of fentanyl can be fatal for you.
After repeated use of drugs a person ca become
drug tolerant, it’s a situation where the person
needs to take more amounts of drugs to achieve
the same effects as earlier.
The pursuit to get the same effect may cause drug
overdose.
Opiods like fentanyl can be extremely fatal as its
overdose may cause the hypothalamus to stop
sending the signal to lungs to breathe.
Marijuana can decrease the cognitive skills of a
human body, and can also make you hallucinate to
a certain extent.

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 Effects of Drugs on
Society

According to National Center for Health Statistics,

No. of drug overdose deaths in the USA:
70,237[2018]
Imagine 70000 people dying just because a small
pill.
Drugs are not a cheap commodity and to get their
hand on drugs people try to steal, shoplift and rob
others. This in turns increases the crime rate of that
region.
People sell their clothes, furniture and a lot of
other commodities just for drugs.
According to United States Drug Abuse Report,
2019
past month 6.6 percent of 8th, 18.4 percent of
10th, and 22.3 percent of 12th graders reported
marijuana use in the past month.
According to UNODC,

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Minor who use drugs have a higher rate of getting
trapped in a drug trafficking racket.
When asked, the minors said that they stole money
from their parents to buy the marijuana.
Drugs has been slowly killing the younger
generation but the past decade these numbers have
seen high rise due to the introduction of opiods
like codeine, which can be found in strong
prescribed cough syrups. These cough syrups are
then added with soda and other drugs to form
“Lean”, a prevalent drug in the west cost of USA.
The use of drugs even for recreational purposes
alone can make people feel lazy and sleepy, due to
marijuana, or filled with anxiety, due to cocaine
and heroine.
In Florida 2 people die every day due to opiod
abuse. There has been a 37% increase in drug use
in the state of Florida alone.
In a report released by UN, India has seen an
increase of 30% in the last decade.
The report estimated that of the 271 million people
that used any drug, 35 million suffer

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 from drug use disorder. The death toll also
increased, with 5,85,000 people dying in 2017
from drug use. Opioids are the drugs that present the
largest cause for concern due to the severe impact on
the health of users.
Sixty-eight per cent of overdose deaths in 2017
were due to opioids.
According to the report, 50 per cent of those who
inject drugs live with hepatitis C. This is due to the
sharing of injections among drug addicts.
HIV is also prevalent among drug addicts which
results in premature death.
These drugs have been destroying not only the
people that use them but also their families.
Most of these fentanyl, like many illegal synthetic
are made in China, who has been regularly
pumping opiods in many countries like USA,
Canada and Mexico. The rise in deaths due to
opiods has been linked to the rise in production in
China

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 FENTANYL: THE SECOND OPIOD
EPIDEMIC

This much amount of Fentanyl can easily kill a

healthy human being making it the deadliest
prescribed drug ever known to man.
Fentanyl is 50 times stronger and 20 times more
profitable than heroin, making it the drug dealers
new favourite drug.
It was actually first made by Paul Janssen in 1960
as a strong pain killer but after 32 years the patent
expired and the big pharmaceutical companies
created it in their own labs and started pumping
them in the market.
By this the people got addicted to it and illegal
drug manufacturers in China saw an opportunity in
it and the rest is history.
Unlike in heroin where the person abusing it gets
the withdrawal syndrome every 3-4 days, in
fentanyl a person can get the withdrawal syndrome
every 12 hours and it can get extremely painful.
- The first opiod epidemic was seen when
Oxycotin, a strong painkiller was pumped into
the market recklessly and people started
abusing it.
- The second opiod epidemic was seen with
fentanyl, when companies like Isys and
Cephalon used the same tactics that was used
in Oxycotin and made huge profits at the
expense of thousands of lives.
NALOXENE: THE ANTIDOTE
Naloxene, often hailed as the magic drug can
efficiently and quickly save an opiod addict from
the chains of death itself.
This drug has been in the market for quite some
time now and if it wouldn’t have been found then
the no. of death due to overdose may have been
higher.

DETOX AND REAHAB

By the process of detoxification and rehab many

patients are given the opportunity to actually get
their life back on track and leave the dependency
of drugs from their body.
Detox and rehab for organic drugs like cannabis
and opium is easy whereas rehab for opiod addicts
is tougher due extremely painful and fatal
withdrawal syndrome.
During the withdrawal syndrome,
- The patient can lose appetite for days
- The patient will be under acute bodily pain
- Their nervous can misfire
- They can be under acute depression
- They can lose sleep for days due to constant
shivering and twitching of body.
There also have been attempts to commit suicide
as the patient couldn’t bear the pain of the
withdrawal syndrome. Therefore, in the case of
opiods the patient is given weaker and dilute
opiods like methadone or buprenorphine for
maintenance treatment and then slowly taken off
of it.
The quest to get into a rehab centre is extremely
tough, and extremely long as most of the rehab
centres have an extensive waiting list of 2-3
months. Most of the times the patient doesn’t even
have this much of time.
If there would have been more efficient rehab
centres then maybe there would have been less
deaths due to drugs.

CONCLUSION

Humans have been trying to get their dopamine

levels higher in their body for a lot of time. Back
in the day people drank poppy tea, then people
tried to smoke the poppy, then people tried to
inject heroin. This has been an endless cycle but
with proper education, management of drugs and
coming together as a society to fight it can actually
curb this issue.

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