Modern American society is influenced by various internal and external factors that cause serious mental and physical interference with people’s lives. The most common triggers are both licit and illicit drugs and stress factors. Dependence on different substances has become not only a major issue within the country but a significant part of the American mass culture. The most vulnerable social group in terms of drug abuse in adolescents and college students who can be easily influenced by public opinion and peer pressure.
Many specialists today are aimed at combating this issue with the help of various prevention strategies. According to Levinthal (2014), there are two groups of factors that influence an individual’s patterns of drug behavior. The first group is connected with risk factors that make a person more likely to abuse drugs, while preventative factors help decrease this probability. When specialists deal with preventative factors, they pay attention to both mental and physical ways to resist the drug. The physical aspect includes medication treatment that helps drug abusers withdraw without severe implications.
The mental aspect, on the other hand, encourages people to experience moral support from close ones, or the ones who once experienced drug addiction on their own. The symbiosis of these procedures is exceptionally efficient in terms of the drug rehabilitation process when a person is provided with medications and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). However, the cost of such treatment is quite frequently too high for abusers and their families. In your opinion, how the prices could be decreased to become more affordable? Are addiction centers that provide free help as efficient as the fee-based ones?
Reference
Levinthal, C. F. (2014). Drugs, behavior, and modern society (8th ed.). London, United Kingdom: Pearson Education.