Alarming rise of drug habits among the young
Sunday, 14 November 2010
The trend of drug addiction is no more limited within the students and youth at the university level, it has spread to young boys and girls of schools and colleges. According to a number of studies and also reports published in the media from time to time, even medical students are addicted to drugs in increasing numbers. They have access to pharmaceutical opiates like codeine-based medications. Both female and male students of medical colleges are thus reported to be equally addicted to drugs.
Statistics from some agencies say that there are several million drug addicts of all age-categories across the country. More significant is that the rate of the creation of new addicts happens to be a rapidly growing one.
Drug addiction has now acquired full bloom in Bangladesh as a very crippling socio-economic-physical-psychologial problem. The flower of youth is getting wasted by it. Young ones from all sections of the population are becoming the victims of addiction -- specially -- and its consequences which are mainly shattered and physical mental health, their zero productivity as a result and the burden on family and society to care for them.
The addicted ones in most cases are found to rely on crimes like snatching and stealing to get money to maintain their habits. Others resort to more serious crimes specially when parents and others refuse to satisfy their demand for money to be spent on addiction. Even the costs of curing addiction form a huge drain of resources.
Addictive drugs worth millions of Taka enter Bangladesh annually from neighbouring countries. Only about 10 per cent of these addictive substances are actually seized and destroyed.
The time to set up effective resistance has been long overdue. Clearly, the different governmental bodies engaged with the problem are doing a sloppy job. Ways will have to be found out to get much better work out of them.
But the greatest barrier to the drug menace can be no other than building social deterrence to the same. Families, meaning parents and elders, must play the lead role in watching over their young ones under their charge and build a warm and truly understanding relations with the juniors to talk them out of the drug taking habit or not to be afflicted by the same.
Statistics from some agencies say that there are several million drug addicts of all age-categories across the country. More significant is that the rate of the creation of new addicts happens to be a rapidly growing one.
Drug addiction has now acquired full bloom in Bangladesh as a very crippling socio-economic-physical-psychologial problem. The flower of youth is getting wasted by it. Young ones from all sections of the population are becoming the victims of addiction -- specially -- and its consequences which are mainly shattered and physical mental health, their zero productivity as a result and the burden on family and society to care for them.
The addicted ones in most cases are found to rely on crimes like snatching and stealing to get money to maintain their habits. Others resort to more serious crimes specially when parents and others refuse to satisfy their demand for money to be spent on addiction. Even the costs of curing addiction form a huge drain of resources.
Addictive drugs worth millions of Taka enter Bangladesh annually from neighbouring countries. Only about 10 per cent of these addictive substances are actually seized and destroyed.
The time to set up effective resistance has been long overdue. Clearly, the different governmental bodies engaged with the problem are doing a sloppy job. Ways will have to be found out to get much better work out of them.
But the greatest barrier to the drug menace can be no other than building social deterrence to the same. Families, meaning parents and elders, must play the lead role in watching over their young ones under their charge and build a warm and truly understanding relations with the juniors to talk them out of the drug taking habit or not to be afflicted by the same.