It was all due to a well-created ad campaign that spoke to the target teen audience.
Cool. While not against drugs per se, I am concerned about addiction and abuse. Meth looks very taxing on the body.
EDIT: correct spelling.
Why Is Drug Use So Rampant In The US?
by hamilcarr 50 Replies latest jw friends
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VoidEater
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SirNose586
Cool. While not against drugs per se, I am concerned about addiction and abuse. Meth looks very taxing on the body.
Meth'll make you look quite unattractive...you've got those meth sores on the face, not to mention meth mouth...
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VoidEater
"Meth mouth"...geez, I am soooo old and out of it...there's even a slang word for it, and I didn't know...no one tells me nuthin'...!
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SirNose586
Frontline has all the gritty details. Warning: not very pretty pictures ahead!
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dawg
Yea, I'm high as Jesus right now... I have to get high to deal with the Republicans in this country and the followers of GW Bush.
Get this, one came to my house this week told me Obama was a Muslim, hated America, "won't salute the flag"... all of which is nonsense.. when I showed him proof oterhwise he walked off and later repeated the same foolish accusations... we have real problems in this country right now and this is who gets to vote.
Damn right I get high! I freaking have too. -
Tired of the Hypocrisy
drug use has always run rampant. All thru time and on every continent. drugs are an escape, a spiritual release, heck, religion has been called the opipium of the masses.....
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StAnn
I grew up in an immigrant family that started out very poor. I lived in the inner city for my entire childhood. I went to the bad schools. I saw the high crime rates. I saw the drug use. I saw students knifed before me more than once. Guess what? I moved out.
I also believed the biggest "con" in the world. It is called the American Dream. I may not be ultra rich, but I have prospered a great deal by believing this "con".
BTS, I'm glad you've been able to prosper in our society. However, I've worked with adults with disabilities and there is real suffering there. They CAN'T pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And the concept that there are plenty of "programs" to help them is a panacea fed to the public by the do-gooders and the government. There is real poverty and homelessness in this group. Many times, the medical care they really need isn't covered by "Medicaid" or "Medicare" so they either go untreated or poorly treated and thus can't maintain stability.
I have a family member who is severely mentally ill. He works at Goodwill. Now that his total income exceeds $900 mo. between Social Security Disability and his little $50 paychecks every two weeks from Goodwill, he no longer qualifies for food stamps. Could you live on $900 a month? Many of the therapies and treatments that could help him aren't paid for, so he can't get them. He's on a waiting list for help with housing costs, etc. Around here, the wait is commonly 15-20 years. A friend just got services for her daughter, who is autistic, after 15 years on the waiting list.
I knew a man who was pretty highly functioning but developmentally disabled and had mild cerebral palsy and was living in a group home. The group homes are reimbursed more money for severely disabled people so they work hard to shove the highly functioning ones out. (You can get $165 a day for highly functioning folks but $330 a day for low functioning.) This man was deemed too highly functioning to live in his group home anymore and literally tossed out on the street. I saw him a few months later in a nursing home. He'd been homeless the entire time until being hit by a car. He was so badly injured that he will spend the rest of his life in a super expensive nursing home.
It's not a level playing field. Given what I've seen with how poverty is perpetuated among those born less fortunate, I don't believe in the American Dream anymore.
Just the view from down here.
StAnn
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inrainbows
hamilton
Drug use may be spread across society but drug abuse (as in beyond recreational use to addictive use where the drug becomes THE way to have pleasure as distinct from A way of having pleasure) is more of a underclass issue, as are the harshest impacts of drug use.
Preppy students having a few spliffs is not a societal problem. Low-income areas being striken by drug related crime is.
Burn.
Yeah. Lots. East coast, west coast, Midwest, South. And I can back every one of my assertions with statistics.
I also know that centre SF has homeless and street people a-go-go. Soup kitchens a few blocks away from the CBD. Amsterdam looks like Disneyland in comparison. Other American cities I have been too fair equally badly by comparison. Even London has got far far better than American cities. Paris sucks more than London now as fas as street people go. And I do emphasise Western Europe...
In the USA the poorest 20% have 5.2% of the income. In many Western European democracies it is almost double that. The poorest 10% in the USA have 1.8% of the income, in Western Europe normally between 2.8 and 4.2%.
In the USA the richest 10% have 30% of the income, in Western Europe normally between 20 and 25%.
In the USA the rich ARE a bit richer. The poor ARE a lot poorer. Wow. How free. You must be very proud.
And quote anecdotes away, the figures show that the USA has no safety net, an imbalanced social system, and that this causes much of the societal problems... unless poor people are just bad and lazy, LOL.
You ever been to Holland?
White Dove
It's legal in Holland so no one cares and the activity does not get reported.
Wrong. Use of cannabis is decriminalised, but possession and sale is still very controlled and you can go to jail if you break the rules. There are also statistics for it up the whazoo. We're taking about the Dutch man, they are really up-tight.
The average Dutch teenager is more likely to have tried pot, and less likely to use pot on a weekly basis than a British teenager, for example.
Heroin use is so effectively contained by efficient drug education that each year the average age of heroin users goes up, as so few young people become addicts.
When I moved here I still thought the Ducth were liberal and easy going. They are not. They are up-tight but pragmatic. Pot is legal because it does society less damage that way, and because it being illegal doesn't stop people using it, QED, not because people approve of it. A Dutch person over 30 who smokes pot is considered rather odd, and the majority under 30 don't smoke it.
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BurnTheShips
So, why is it then that a seemingly flourishing world power like the US harbours most drug users in the world?
Why is it that seemingly enlightened and progressive European nations have such high suicide rates? Norway, Germany, Sweden,Denmark, Luxembourg,Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium...all have higher (some MUCH higher) rates than the US. Eastern European nations have the highest suicide rates in the world.
Maybe they need to get high a little.
BTS
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BurnTheShips
The war on drugs like the war on terror is unwinnable. The people in charge dont want it to be won because.... tada!! it provides for a huge bureaucracy.
Yup.