Imagine this, you wake up on a beautiful Friday morning and the sunlight is coming through your blinds at a perfect angle to cast light onto your eyes to help wake you up. Your family is all home and the faint sound of bird chirps can be heard inside your home. You get up to start your day when you hear your mother call for you, only this time her tone seems shifted. You cautiously walk down your hallway into the living room and notice both parents sitting on the couch with an odd look on their faces. It is not a face that is usually recognizable, but a new face that seems recognizable but is somehow off. You sit down next to your family and carefully ask “What’s going on?”. Little did you know when asking that ‘“simple” question your world would come crashing down with a shattering response. A family member that you care deeply about, is now gone forever because they overdosed on drugs.
That is no imagination, that is a life that many people have had to live through, a life that I have lived through. My uncle was a caring man that could not shake his addictions, his words and feelings were just as human as yours. Regardless of all the drugs in his life and in many other people's lives, they did not have to end due to mistakes made when young. We all make mistakes but for people to lose everything they have ever done is wrong and something must be done.
So what must be done? How can we create a system where young people from ages 16 to 30 are not overdosing on drugs, and what solutions that we can come up with will work the best? Well, the answer seems simple to say, which is either to make people understand the severity of this drug pandemic and make everyone care more about this or make some drugs legal and tax the hell out of them to make them unaffordable. We can not say whether one will work more than the other or if they both will not work because neither option has really been done yet. Trying to make marijuana legal in some states could work but evidence has shown that in some states it does and in some, it does not. States that made cannabis legal had an increase in underage users but in others, it did not increase.
“What we know is that the legalization of cannabis can have these public health and public safety impacts, but it doesn't
— it is not clear that cannabis does cause these effects.
And so the best bet that states have is to recognize that these effects are possible, and to try to combat them in advance before they become a reality.”
Although making marijuana legal sounds bad, evidence is showing that it may not be. The best thing for drugs like marijuana to be around is for it not to be laced. When buying cannabis legally, you know it is safe and untouched from something you do not want in your system. These legal pot businesses have licensed employees and have other offers than just to smoke cannabis, you can buy THC-infused brownies and sweets to also get the use of cannabis instead of smoking it. Harris had a plan to legalize weed so we were not throwing people behind bars for such minute crimes. She felt that our country was ready to legalize marijuana and move to a better stance of helping citizens not lose their lives to laced substances.
Now this may be a solution that could work, to be honest, this is coming from someone who has not smoked or drank anything in his entire life, but if the only downside to making a drug legal is increasing underage consumers. In my opinion, that is a better way to combat this drug pandemic than what we are doing today since stopping underage consumers seems easier to handle. In this scenario as well, most of the cannabis kids would get their hands on would be legal marijuana and not likely to be laced. This can lower overdose deaths in the United States in some way shape or form. We can see that the most common drugs to be laced are medicative pills or marijuana. The leading cause of overdose deaths comes from fentanyl, which has been coming over our borders and killing our youth for years.
So if fentanyl is the main “grim reaper” drug, how do we stop the youth of America from dying to this drug? Unlike marijuana being legalized, legalizing fentanyl is obviously never a thought made nor should it be. We can see here in this video that Kamala Harris did not take fentanyl lightly and planned to correct the border issue that is helping the spread of this lethal drug.
Although Harris lost the presidential election of 2024, we the people can still vote for our governors and senators to help with this issue. No matter what side you take politically, finding ways to stop losing someone you love should be a top priority. If overdoses can be helped in so many ways we the people need to do something to help the ones we care for most. That imagination of losing someone you care about to something that you could have helped them avoid could become a reality. There is nothing more important than the people around you, we need to put politics to the side and care for those we have now in this moment before we lose them. Becoming aware of this drug pandemic and the ways to stop it in its tracks is the first step we Americans will face.
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