05/14/2012 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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DARE Essay By: Evan Baker Before DARE, I always knew drugs were bad for you but I didn't know the details. Once a week, Officer Young came to our classroom to teach the DARE program. He taught me many things to help me in the future. I learned about the facts of tobacco, marijuana, and alcohol, how these facts make me feel, and how to avoid using these drugs. Tobacco can do a lot of bad stuff to your body. One of the things that causes these is the two hundred poisons tobacco has in it. It also has something called nicotine that makes you addicted to tobacco, which means once you start it's hard to stop. If you smoke tobacco it can cause breathing problems and heart disease. If you're young and you smoke, it can affect how you grow. One of the worst things tobacco causes is cancer. Tobacco is the leading cause of lung cancer. It also causes throat, kidney, and bladder cancers. Every year three thousand people die from breathing the smoke from other people's cigarettes. Not only that, there's also a different type of tobacco, that's called chewing tobacco. Chewing tobacco can cause mouth cancer and can make you lose your teeth. Tobacco kills 400,000 people in the United States every year! Marijuana can cause a lot of the same problems as tobacco but some are even worse. Like tobacco, marijuana is addictive but it has more tar than cigarettes. If you smoke marijuana you might have breathing problems and more colds or upper respiratory problems. It also causes cancer; in fact, it has fifty percent to seventy percent more cancer causing chemicals than tobacco does. Some other things it might cause are short term memory loss, inability to concentrate, and it slows your reflexes and coordination. It can also affect your ability to judge distance and speed and slows your reaction times. That would be bad if you are playing sports and especially when you are driving a car. For these reasons marijuana is illegal in the United States. Some people think alcohol is more acceptable but it can sometimes be worse than tobacco and marijuana. For one thing, it slows down your brain and body. This causes a lot of problems. It can slow your reflexes, makes you lose your self control, gives you memory lapses, and affects your speech. Also, it can cause poor judgment and you can lose coordination. If you drink alcohol it can increase the risk of many diseases. It affects every single organ in your body. If you drink too much, you might go into a coma or die. If teens drink it, it affects them more than adults because they are still growing. Also, it is dangerous to be with someone who drinks because of their poor judgment. Every fifty minutes a person dies from a drunk driving accident.