Position Paper

In the first two years on the war on drugs by President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, many alleged drug users, dealers and pushers were killed without due judicial proceedings. Now, the eradication is advancing towards the public, starting from the high school students in the country. This action of the government is pretty wise and substantive because it is timely and relevant to the society; it is a safe step in wiping the use of illegal drugs in the country because of the following reasons:

First, adolescents are prone to peer pressure in using drugs. When teenagers were surveyed, many answered that they started using it in the first place while 55% of them stated that it was because of the peer pressure from their friends and because they wanted to look cool and popular (Bellum, 2012) . Furthermore, this supports that these 55% of the sampled teenagers tried drugs because of social influence and that peer pressure is a huge contributing factor as to why most teenagers use these.

Second, many drug dealers use them. According to the article What Dealers will Tell You (2013), “Dealers know this. They will approach you as a friend and offer to ‘help you out’ with ‘something to bring you up’.’ The drug will ‘help you fit in’ or ‘make you cool.’ Drug dealers, motivated by the profits they make, will say anything to get you to buy their drugs. They will tell you ‘just try crack once and everything’s gonna be okay; it will make everything go away.’ ” These tag lines by these most dealers are what made most teenagers turn to them. They manipulate the gullible high schoolers to actually try illegal drugs by give them such absurd hope that after taking these bad contents, it will make them feel better and actually forget all their problems.

Third, most drug pushers use high schoolers to be their carrier. Taking advantage of their age, most pushers utilizes them and asks them to be their courier by compensating them anything. One of the most common compensation is money; however, some of them gets curious and actually asks for drugs to be their payment. Most drug pushers maximize these teens because if they get caught, they are to merely experience counseling, intervention and rehabilitation mostly because they are still minors at the time the criminal act was done.

However, there are loopholes with this program. Many argued that it violates the students’ rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Additionally, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (2017), “This policy presumes students to be guilty until proven innocent. Students who randomly are selected to undergo a drug test must prove their innocence by having a clean urine sample.”

As a conclusion, this new program is a huge step in the eradication of drugs in the country; because, it would undermine the ludicrous doings of these teenagers and the people who influenced them to do it. Furthermore, with this implementation, hopefully it would decrease and totally deplete the number of drug users in the country especially with these teenagers; because they will be the future of our today.

References:

Bellum, S. (2012). Why Does Peer Pressure Influence Teens To Try Drugs?. National Institute on Drug Abuse for Teens. Retrieved from: https://teens.drugabuse.gov/blog/post/why-does-peer-pressure-influence-teens-try-drugs.

What Dealers will Tell You. Foundation for a Drug-free World. (2013). Retrieved from: http://www.drugfreeworld.org/drugfacts/crackcocaine/what-dealers-will-tell-you.html

Why Student Drug Testing Does Not Work. American Civil Liberties Union. (2017). Retrieved from: https://www.aclu.org/other/why-student-drug-testing-does-not-work

Laurence Julien Sebios

HUMSS 11 Weber