The National Institute on Drug Abuse has been in existence for over seventy years acting as an agency to thwart drug use and addiction in our society. Numerous efforts have been made by the organization to deal with drug and substance abuse in modern society, yet, the situation is worsening every day. For the past years, I have volunteered in different institutes fighting the menace, but I didn’t observe any improvements to deal with the vice. I have also worked with the World Health Organization from 2016 to 2018, and during that time, I learned a lot concerning statistics on health issues. Are you aware of the percentage of youth who have been affected by drug abuse? Seventy-eight percent of youth in the USA have at one time in their lives used illicit substances (World Health Organization, 2015). Isn’t that alarming? Does it not indicate that at one time, everybody will be exposed to illegal substances? The strategic plan that I have developed is one that will be crucial in the fight against drug and substance abuse. I will ensure that I address all the concerns in this presentation.
Almost everybody can bear witness that in all of the efforts directed in the fight against drug abuse in our agency has been focusing on stopping or preventing escalation to addition in the case of those who are already using the illicit substances. However, have we ever thought of how we can prevent the initiation of drug use? We have misidentified our targets, and this is the reason for the high rise of incidences of drug and substance abuse. We ought to invest in research and have an improved understanding of how drugs are initiated to individuals and build up epidemiological findings to address the run-away substance abuse (Harvey, 2017). We need to find out factors that put most people at risk of drug abuse and prevent this from happening.
References
Harvey, I. (2017). Drug and substance abuse. Folens.
World Health Organization. (2015). Catalogue of World Health Organization publications. Geneva: World Health Organization.