Drug Addiction In Young Adults

I was a freshman in high school when I first tried drugs. My parents were out of town for the weekend, I was left alone with my brother who gave me the idea of smoking a little marijuana. I loved it, it made me feel good and helped me relieve stress. As time went on I experimented with drugs more and more, I wanted to know how each one made me feel. I started taking prescription drugs to get high. When I broke my ankle, I was prescribed oxycodone and hydrocodone. Later my prescription expired leaving me with none. I started to steal money from my family to pay for the pills. Even though I knew I was wrecking my home life I couldn’t stop, I was addicted. Being addicted to drugs wrecked my life, I was stealing from my family and losing friends

Years later when I was drug free, I looked back on my life and saw all the damage my addiction caused my friends and family and mainly my future. I’m writing this essay to encourage youth to not make the same mistakes I did and to educate others who can help addicts recover. Drug addiction continues to be a growing problem for young adults in the US. In this essay I will address drug addiction, a disease that affects millions of people worldwide. According to CNN, nearly 40% of all 12th-graders surveyed had used some sort of illicit drug in the past year. I continue to see people abuse drugs in my community, it’s time to start bringing light to this problem and hopefully an end.

Drug abuse has been going on for hundreds of years, only recently scientists and medical professionals have come to understand that addiction is actually a disease. Despite what researchers have said, many people still consider addiction a choice and those who suffer from it have bad

The first multiple times a person uses drugs it’s their choice. When someone continuously uses drugs the chemical balance in their brain changes. Prolonged drug use will lead to addiction. Drug addiction is classified as a chronic brain disease that causes a person to compulsively see out drugs, despite the harm they cause while doing so. Addicts often relapse due to the fact that the chemical changes made in the brain, are lasting ones. The brain is vital for survival, it generates everything we feel and do. The brain processes information from the outside world such as the smell of food and from inside the body such as the feeling of hunger. Using all this information, the brain makes an appropriate response driving behaviors that help us survive, for example, eating when we are hungry. When an activity that warrants a reward is done, a chain reaction in the reward system begins. Signals are sent from the ventral tegmental area to the ventral striatum (VS). Once the signal reaches the VS it is then passed to the nucleus accumbens, the brain 's pleasure center. When the nucleus accumbens is activated neurotransmitter are released. Acting as chemical messengers, neurotransmitters travel between different cells allowing for communication in an activated