GAC008 Assessment Event 4: Academic Research Essay

Cause and Effect:

Human Health

Student: Vicky 陈子优

Student ID: 1

Teacher: Peter P

Due Date: 19 May 2021

Word Count：: 1084

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Topic: What are the effects of government policy on illicit drug use?

Nowadays, drugs have become a major and a really serious problem that needs to be solved as

quickly as possible in today's society. Lots of people dead by taking drugs every year. Many

countries have already banned drugs, but there are still many countries think that taking drugs is a

legal thing, because they think that drugs are just like the cigarette, which belongs to the personal

hobby behavior. To prove that taking drugs is really bad for human health, I will list some hazards

about the drugs particularly, and the effects of: If these drug-legal governments banned the drug

use.

First of all, I want to list some common drugs and their hazards and why they may cause people

become addicted to them as the foundation for my following exposition. Let’s begin with the most

common one, which is also legal in lots of country -- Hemp. Hemp, especially hemp grown for

fiber or seed, is typically skinnier and taller (up to 20 ft). At times, it almost looks like long ditch

weed – hemp was actually found to grow among weeds in Nebraska, Kansas and many other states

in America. Hemp is hallucinogenic, which means that the hemp taker may get some ‘Fake

Happiness’ during the process of smoking hemp, and this kind of ‘Fake happiness’ may let people

involve in it deeply, especially for the people who get in some trouble in their life. Also, because

of the hallucinogenic properties of the hemp plant, the hemp taker will always looks dispirited and

messy. The second one that i want to introduce is -- Heroin. Pure heroin (diacetylmorphine) is a

white powder with a bitter taste abused for its euphoric effects. Heroin, a highly addictive drug, is

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derived from the morphine alkaloid found in opium poppy plant (Papaver somniferum) and is

roughly 2 to 3 times more potent than morphine. It is usually injected, smoked or snorted up the

nose. It exhibits euphoric ("rush"), anti-anxiety and pain-relieving properties. Actually, lots of

drugs today used to be some kind of Narcotic drugs, which are available during the process of the

medicine operation such as morphine, cocaine and so on. However, it is precisely because of

human abuse of drugs that these 'narcotics' eventually become the harmful drugs. But why we

need to ban drugs? That’s because that Drug are really bad for human health, and even the whole

society.

Take USA as an example, US is a typical drug-legal country, as a data from Statista in 2021, there

were more than 60 million people in USA who used select illicit drugs in the past years, also, there

were at least 11.6 million criminal incidents were reported to law enforcement agencies throughout

the United States in 1999; by 2018, that number had declined to just over 8.4 million despite a

population increase of 20% during that time. During this period, we can see that the crime rate in

America is declined, that’s because of the number of new drug users in the United States each year is

also decreasing, while the number of successful drug addicts is also increasing. On the other hand,

there were half a million Americans were homeless. Someone is counted homeless if he or she

“lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to the U.S. Department of

Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “In January 2018, 552,830 people were counted as

homeless in the United States. According to the data above, we can clearly see that there are

thousands of homeless people in USA, and in this group, there are more than 87% of them used to

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take drugs, although we cannot say that they are homeless because they take drugs, but we can

obviously know that drugs do have connections with the homeless rate. Also, it seems that taking

drugs in America has became the ordinary entertainment little by little.

As the saying goes, ‘comparison hurts’, above, I listed one country where drugs are legal. Next, I

will take China as an example, which represents countries where drugs are illegal. According to

the National Narcotics Control Commission — the country’s foremost anti-drug organization —

there were an estimated 2.5 million drug users in China at the end of 2016. The same body

classified around 1.5 million of them, or 60 percent, as users of so-called new drugs — that is, the

synthetic drugs mentioned above instead of “traditional” drugs like, say, heroin and cocaine. In the

same year, 445,000 people started using drugs in China, of which 81 percent were classified as

substance abusers. However, these figures only include drug users whose details are known to the

country’s public security organs; the actual number is likely much higher. As part of an

investigation into sexuality in China, I conducted a series of nationwide surveys that targeted 18-

to 61-year-olds and included questions about their history of drug use. My results showed that the

proportion of men who had tried new drugs increased from 3.4 percent in 2010 to 5 percent in

2015, while women who used new drugs increased from 0.8 percent to 2.1 percent. The oldest

person who admitted to using drugs was 50 years old. Therefore, if we discount all participants

older than that, then 3.9 percent of all 18- to 50-year-olds have tried new drugs. As of the end of

2014, China had about 680 million people aged between 20 and 49 years old. We can therefore

conservatively estimate that approximately 26 million people from that age group have used drugs

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at some point in their lives. The tons of data above seems that there are lots of people in China

were taking drugs, but based on the population base of China, these people are a rare breed. That’s

because the Chinese government takes this thing really serious, because Chinese had suffered so

much on drugs. As we all know, in the period of World War Ⅱ, China was the losing country  in the

early period, that’s because of the corruption and incompetence of the Qing Empire, and it

made the Chinese people knew as ‘The sick man of Asia’. Hence, in the modern China, most

citizens hate drugs really bad. But on the other hand, human’s curiosity may drive them to do

something illegal just like taking drugs. But also, the homeless rate in China is really low, about

0.83%.

Conclusively, illicit drugs can help our society stay balance and peace. Also, although the fact is

that there are still plenty of people taking drugs in the drug-illegal country, the people in these

kinds of countries have more sense of shame and guilt on taking drugs, because they know they

have offended the law, which means that they would be easy to get rid of drug. The prohibition of

drug use can help us create a better social environment and atmosphere, which has quite strong

positive benefits for a country or even the whole world.

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Reference List:
Ben J(2019) 10 facts about homeless people in America [online]. Available from:
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america#:~:text=1.%20Half%20a%20million%20Americans%20are%20homeless.
%20Someone,were%20counted%20as%20homeless%20in%20the%20United%20States.
[Accessed September 23 2019]

Cicero TJ(2019) Heroin Drug Facts: NIH: National Institute on Drug Abuse [online]. Available
from: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/heroin [Accessed November 7 2019]

Deborah T(2019) Hemp, Kentucky State Penitentiary, Labor, Featured Article [online].

Available from: https://civilwargovernors.org/hemp-hazards/ [Accessed August 9 2019]

Hutchinson S(2021) Hemp vs Marijuana: Similarities & The differences, MINISTRY of HEMP
[online] Available from: https://ministryofhemp.com/hemp/not-marijuana/# [Accessed
January 17 2021]

John E(2020) Number of American who used illicit drugs in the past year 2019, by drug type
[online]

Available from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/611152/illicit-drug-users-number-past-year-in-

the-us-by-drug/ [Accessed September 22 2020]

Macro T(2021) U.S. Crime Rates [online]. Available from:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/crime-rate-statistics [Accessed January
5 2021]

Pan S(2018) The Truth about China’s Unknown Millions of Drug Users [online]

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Available from: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001599/the-truth-about-chinas-unknown-

millions-of-drug-users [Accessed January 23 2018]

Sara A(2020) Crime Rates in the United States,2020 -- Best & Worst States [online].

Available from: https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state/ [Accessed April 16

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