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Saturday, April 2, 2016

The Exterminator of Youth

         At teen court, I constantly get cases about kids who are addicted to marijuana, and have been using it for years prior to the time they were caught. They're completely addicted to it, yet ironically many of them are well versed on the consequences that the drug can have on their body. They realize that it can destroy their entire future and know that it will destroy their aspirations. Yet they continue to illegally waste their money buying marijuana under the counter, and consuming it as if it were a candy bar. This raises the question in my mind of why teens are willing to drop everything in their lives to have something they know isn't right.  I would spend a year designing a social experiment to try to find the answer to this question that floats in my mind without respite.

The reason why I want to get to the bottom of this is because I’ve seen so many kids walk through Teen Court who are gifted and talented, but succumbed to the ruse that is marijuana that lead to their downfall. Imagine a world where drugs didn’t exist. This isn’t the case, but what if it was? We’d be in a world where people with addictive and curious personalities put their genius into their passion rather than into figuring out how they can get their next supply of weed.  This is why I would want to spend a year trying to figure out what the source is for millions of kids to be willing to destroy their lives over a plant.  If we can learn this maybe it would be the first step to day where we can completely end one of the evils that the world presents.

There were 19.8 million people consuming illicit marijuana in a single month in 2013 in the United States according to www.drugabuse.gov, so why am I focusing on teens rather than everyone. The reason is that if we want to end marijuana permanently we have to find why kids are abusing it, because if a 15 year old is smoking marijuana once a day, in 10 years there will be yet another adult who is teaching their child bad habits through example. Also kids are a lot more impressionable, so stopping a kid from a future with marijuana will have a much bigger toll on his perception than it will have on a 40 year old addict. Kids are the future. If we find the answer to this question, then the future will get a lot brighter for them.

If given the opportunity, I would spend a year of my life to discover why teens destroy their lives to get an allegedly good feeling for a few minutes. With the answer to this question, we could end the reign of the greatest mass murderer, depressant, and destroyer of millions of families, otherwise known as marijuana. One year of persistent searching is minute in comparison to possibly discovering the first step to the answer to a great problem that tries and haunts all of us every day.

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