The treatable threat
THE “2016 World Drug Report” released last June by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a United Nations agency focused on helping member states address issues of illicit drugs, crime, terrorism, and political corruption, showed that the number of drug-dependent adults worldwide stood at 29 million in 2014, a first-time increase from the 27 million recorded six years ago. It added that, in 2014, the reported cases of drugrelated global deaths were estimated at 207,400, a figure it considered “stable” though “unacceptable and preventable.”
On the local front, close to 1.8 million Filipinos, aged 10 to 69 years old, are current drug users according to the results of the Dangerous Drugs Board’s “2015 Nationwide Survey on the Nature and Extent of Drug Abuse in the Philippines” announced early this week. It also revealed that 4.8 million of the same sample population have used illegal drugs at least once in their lives.
Drug addiction, as defined by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is a chronic disease that causes people to compulsively seek and use drugs despite their harmful long-lasting effects in the brain, which can lead to users’ damaging behaviors.
It begins with the person taking the drugs voluntarily, but as constant drug exposure affects his brain functions over time, he loses the ability to stop.
“That is because drugs increase the levels of dopamine in the brain,” said Alvin Joseph A. del Pilar, program director of Reach Treatment Rehabilitation Center which will open in Batangas this month, in a recent interview with BusinessWorld.
Dopamine is a substance naturally present in the body that is responsible for controlling the so-called brain’s reward and pleasure centers.
“It is like, for instance, you’re craving cake. The more you eat the cake, the more dopamine levels get released in your brain, making you unable to stop eating because your brain tells you that it wants more cake,” he explained, adding that all kinds of drugs induce pleasure-seeking. As a disease, he said drug addiction has four levels of progression: primary, progressive, chronic, and fatal.
Primary is when one decides to use drugs for the first time. It could be because of peer pressure or a major family problem, or other possible reasons. This experimentation stage is also when a user gets his drug of choice.
This could then lead to the progressive level wherein one actually starts to regularly seek and take drugs. Problems regarding his drug use begin to arise, though his life may still appear