The Social Problem of Drug Abuse Introduction

Drug abuse started in my family with my brother Camilo. As a poor, migrant family, we had to move around a lot as my father was constantly looking for work. Eventually he obtained a steady job and our family settled in the suburbs. Camilo found it difficult to adjust to all the changes that the family endured, however; making new friends only to have to pick up and move and start all over again took a toll on him. In order to find something stable in his own life he started hanging around a local gang, and then is when he took up his drug habit. The drugs really consumed him and he became totally dependent on them. They changed his character: he began lying and skipping school; before long he dropped out altogether—and then he even started stealing from our parents. It was as though he had been replaced by one of those alien body snatchers from the movies. On the outside he was the same, but inside there was some different character looking out from behind the eyes. All the same, my family has never condemned Camilo or ostracized him. He is still my brother and my parents still view him as their son. In fact, we all still get along great, like family. The only pain we experience is that we have to see him suffer: to this day, he is still a drug addict and still resorts to theft to pay for his supply. He has tried so many times to quit but never has been achieved his goal. He has been in an out of local and state prisons, and in and out of rehab programs. He is open about wanting to quit but also about how his chemical dependency is so strong now. What’s worse is that this problem is not confined to my own family but rather is a huge social problem—an epidemic, in fact, as DuPont (2018) has pointed out.

The Epidemic of Drug Abuse in Society

More than 25 million Americans struggled with drug addiction according to a 2014 survey by the Substance Abuse...

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (2015) has found that the causes of drug addiction can range from genetics to environmental factors. In my brother’s case, it was a combination of family issues and environmental factors; in the cases of millions of others, the story is the same.
However, the drug epidemic is really supported by the opioid crisis—the over-prescribing of drugs to people and the sale of those drugs into the black market (Murthy, 2016). With the streets being hit with so many pills, designed to have maximum effect on patients by the pharmaceutical industry, which also bears a great deal of responsibility in the rise of this epidemic, it is not surprising that millions of people are impacted by this social problem every year in the U.S.

The Need to Escape or Fit In

For my brother Camilo, he suffered both from a need to escape the constant instability in my own family as a result of us being uprooted constantly growing up and from a need to fit in somewhere and establish roots quickly. That is why he finally fell in with the local gang. They represented for him something that he felt he was missing in his home life—and they also represented for him a way out of the instability and problems that our family faced during our times of incessant moving about. However, he soon found a whole new world of problems as a result of using drugs, which were introduced to him by his friends in the local gang.

Camilo’s drug addiction caused our family a lot of pain. No one likes to see a family member suffer. It’s especially hard when you feel like there’s nothing you can do to help them. I know my family has often felt powerless to help Camilo because of the way the drugs take hold. One gives up one’s use of free will. It is like one becomes a slave of this thing, this chemical urge; we…