RESEARCH PROPOSAL

How Substance Misuse Impacts the Overall Society and Recommendations to Control Misuse

Abstract

Substance misuse involves the overuse of, addiction to and/or dependency on non-food items, synthetic or natural that changes and the body and mind of an individual due to their chemical composition. On the whole, the drugs of marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin tend to be the most misused substances that mostly require strictly controlled treatment approaches for an effective cessation. Though various surveys have verified that substance misuse has been declining in the United Kingdom since the beginning of 2000s however, it still remains a challenging behaviour that impinges on youth, schools, employers, families, co-workers, and overall the whole society. Intervention and prevention programs have tried to deal with the issue of substance misuse by means of a variety of procedures across quite a few ecological levels, for instance the individual, the school, the family and the society. Since society is majorly affected by substance misuse in quite different ways therefore some society antidrug programs operate mainly to put a stop to initial use of drug.

How Substance Misuse Impacts the Overall Society and Recommendations to Control Misuse

Social Work Research

“An Analysis of UK Drug Policy,” was commissioned in the year 2007 (Seddon, 2010, p.111) by the researchers Alex Stevens and Peter Reuter of the independent UK Drug Policy Commission. This document concluded that in Western Europe the highest level of drug dependency is found in the United Kingdom. Stevens and Reuter also stated that the British are among the most keenly recreational users of drugs in Western Europe and that the United Kingdom has the 2nd highest death rate due to the misuse of drugs of all Western European countries (Seddon, 2010, p.111).

Marijuana misused by around 7.4% of the population, is the most extensively used illegal drug and has turned out to be very much “normalized” amongst the youngsters, as stated by Howard Parker and his associates. After Marijuana, Cocaine is used by 2.3% of the population, ecstasy is used by 1.5%, opiates for instance heroin is taken by 1.3% (Monaghan, 2010, p.125) and stimulants that belong to type amphetamine are used by almost 1.0% population of the United Kingdom.

The sobering conclusions of the document are surprising provided that the British government's relentless efforts to prevent and control drug misuse and distribution all through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Monaghan, 2010, p.125). Though before 1970, there was a drug policy in position, the government intensified its regulation of the utilization of psychoactive substances with ratification of MDA or the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Parker, Williams & Judith, 2002, p.03). The official motives provided for the initiation and development of the Misuse of Drugs Act were twofold. Initially, it was said to assist in fulfilling the commitment of the UK to the number of global treaties it had authorized, like the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances (Parker, Williams & Judith, 2002, ...