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Narrative Essay On Drug Addiction

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One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a lOne of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn 't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.
0:24I 'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it 's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It 's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer,because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop.
0:47And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help …show more content…

If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I 'll be taken to hospital and I 'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It 's actually much better heroin than you 're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you 'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you 've taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right -- those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks -- What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn 't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn 't come out as a junkie.

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