Critical analysis(mini essay) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Critical analysis(mini ) - Essay Example t of harmful patterns in settings such as vulnerable families, schools, and communities, and universal strategies to reduce attractiveness of substance use. Regulatory interventions aim to increase perceived costs and reduce availability and accessibility of substances. Increasing price, restricting settings of use, and raising legal purchase age are effective in reducing use of alcohol and tobacco and related harms. Screening and brief intervention are efficacious, but efficacy of a range of treatment approaches has not been reliably established. Harm-reduction interventions are effective in young people involved in risky and injecting substance use. One of America’s leading health and social problems is the abuse of addictive substances, specifically drugs and alcohol. In the late 1800s, during the industrial revolution, the medical profession began to recognize the effects of alcohol abuse on factory workers and on pregnant women and their unborn children. Malnutrition, brain damage, liver disease, fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse were linked to the habitual use of alcohol. The effects of substance abuse are widespread. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol is involved in more than half of all child abuse cases, rapes, traffic deaths, felonies, fire fatalities and homicides and a third of all suicides. Conservative estimates indicate that the problem of alcoholism and drug addiction exists in four to thirteen percent of the population, with those affected coming from every economic, educational, and age level and from every race and gender. Furthermore, each substance abuser directly affects at least four to six other individuals, whether a spouse, children, or innocent victim of an accident or crime. Substance abuse plays a major role in accidents resulting in head, hand, and spinal cord injury, and in other impairments typically requiring rehabilitation services. All too often, the substance abuse is left