Alcohol

Another poison of many young people is alcohol. Remember, alcohol is a drug. It can make you sick, and you can become addicted to it. It's a very common form of drug abuse among teenagers.

Alcohol drinks are made up chiefly of water and ethanol, which is an alcohol produced by fermenting fruits, vegetables or grain. Beer is about one part ethanol to 20 parts water. Wine is stronger, and spirits are about half ethanol and half water.

Alcohol is a drug. In fact, it is a mild poison. It is absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, within 4 or 10 minutes of being drunk. Absorption is slower if there's food in the stomach. Once inside the body it passes through the bloodstream to the liver, where poisons are digested.

But the liver can only process 28 grams of pure alcohol each hour.

This is a small amount - just over half a glass of beer. Anything else you drink is pumped round the body while it waits its turn to enter the liver.

When alcohol reaches your brain, you may immediately feel more relaxed and light-hearted. You may feel you can do crazy things. But after two or three drinks, your actions are clumsy and your speech is slurred. If you over-drink, you might suffer from double vision and loss of balance, even fall unconscious, hangover.

Drugs

In facts, all medicines are drugs. You take drugs for your headache or your asthma. But you need to remember that not all drugs are medicines. Alcohol is a drug, and nicotine is a drug. There are many drugs that do you no good at all.

There's nothing wrong with medicinal drugs if they're used properly. The trouble is, some people use them wrongly and make themselves ill. Most of the drugs are illegal, but some are ordinary medical substances that people use in the wrong way.

People take drugs because they think they make them feel better. Young people are often introduced to drug-taking by their friends.

Many users take drugs to escape from a life that may seem too hard to bear. Drugs may seem the only answer, but they are no answer at all. They simply make the problem worse.

Depending on the type and strength of the drug, all drug-abusers are in danger of developing side effects. Drugs can bring on confusion and frightening hallucinations and cause unbalanced emotions or more serious mental disorders.

First-time heroin users are sometimes violently sick. Cocaine, even in small amounts, can cause sudden death in some young people, due to heartbeat irregularities. Children born to drug-addicted parents can be badly affected.

Regular users may become constipated and girls can miss their periods. Some drugs can slow, even stop the breathing process, and if someone overdoses accidentally they may become unconscious or even die.

People who start taking drugs are unlikely to do so for long without being found out. Symptoms of even light drug use are drowsiness, moodiness, loss of appetite and, almost inevitably, a high level of deceit.

First there's the evidence to hide, but second, drugs are expensive and few young people are able to find the money they need from their allowance alone. Almost inevitably, needing money to pay for drugs leads to crime.

Unit 2

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