The world has been dealing with a drug problem for so long that society has almost become desensitized when it comes to the topic. But there’s an emphasis on the “almost” because there are still plenty of people who are working with countless initiatives to help solve the widespread health problem.
Although some may say that any efforts to initiate a change have been nothing but futile. This is partly because while society is busy taking one step forward, they almost immediately take two steps back. And it doesn’t help that drugs are becoming more accessible to the public because of prescription fraud.
These drugs are developed inside the laboratories of large pharmaceutical companies. They oversee the entire drug development process, from analyzing the formulations and arriving at the right dosages to standardizing the dissolution testing of their drugs. Then, they wait for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve their drugs before they are allowed to be distributed for public consumption.
However, once those drugs land on the shelves of pharmacies and various markets, the pharma companies will no longer be able to control how the consumers use them. After all, they’re only manufacturing the drugs, which means the real people who can help solve the drug problem are already within the communities—the leaders.
There’s no shortcut to solving this massive health problem; it will be a long and winding road toward a society where people won’t have to depend on drugs to survive their day-to-day lives. But that can only happen if enough people are willing to lend a helping hand to those in need. Here are some drug prevention initiatives that can be started at the community level:
Make Professional Help More Accessible
One of the biggest reasons people who are dealing with drug addiction can’t get the help they need is because they don’t have access to it. Services like rehabilitation and treatment centers or even counseling often have steep costs, which not everyone can easily afford. So, they tend to forego treatment altogether.
There may be some facilities that are more accessible to the underprivileged, but that may also mean that they won’t have enough resources such as food, medication, or shelter to provide to everyone in need. And that’s mainly why the communities need to prioritize access to proper help.
Community leaders are the ones who can initiate change. They are the people in charge of making the community a better place for everyone, including those who want to receive treatment for their dependence and substance abuse problems. That’s why more budget should be allocated to the community’s drug prevention initiatives.
Raise Awareness to Break the Stigma
People dealing with substance abuse are often stigmatized because they are misunderstood. Society tags them as addicts or junkies as if they’re nothing more than their sickness, but that’s what addiction is. It’s a health condition that needs to be treated and managed properly because the drugs can affect how their brains work.
Everyone inside the community will benefit from learning and talking about these issues because they can affect their lives. That’s why the leaders should be holding talking events to help raise awareness about the health issue and break the stigma that people with addiction are lost causes because they aren’t.
These talking events can also be the perfect opportunity to introduce the community’s drug prevention initiatives, especially among the youth. That’s because it’s impossible to achieve anything just by instilling fear about what can happen to people if they turn to drugs as their main coping mechanism.
So, rather than bombarding the members of your community with numbers and statistics, consider using a different approach. Explore the reasons why people turn to drugs or what they think they can achieve by doing so. Initiate conversations for the issues that need to be discussed instead of simply sweeping them under the rug.
Create Learning and Work Opportunities
Lastly, another way you can reduce drug abuse rates in your community is by creating opportunities for personal and professional growth. So many of those who turned to drugs as their last resort are people that no longer believe that the circumstances can get better for themselves or their families.
They may have begun using drugs as a coping mechanism because they were fired from their job or didn’t have enough money to finish school. It could also be that they were constantly being subjected to domestic abuse, which is why they saw drugs as their only reprieve from their cruel realities.
The point is that there’s no other definite reason people turn to drugs than the fact that they can’t go through life on their own. These people may have already lost hope for their future, and that’s what community leaders can give back to them. All they need is someone else to believe that they’re not lost causes, and they still have a bright future ahead of them.
Indeed, prevention is still better than cure. But nothing good will come out of prevention if it continues to fail in addressing the problems that lead people to drug dependence in the first place. So people can hope all they want, but as long as the deep-rooted kinks in the system are continuously neglected, the global drug problem won’t be solved.
