Evolution of drugs in modern society.

Nowadays, drug addiction is one of the most worrying problems. Although drugs have been consumed by men and women for thousands of years, some modern drugs are much more dangerous than they used to be before. Besides common ancient drugs like alcoholic drinks or some vegetal species like coca, lots of illegal organizations have created and distributed a large amount of new, quite addictive substances to earn millions of euros and dollars selling them both to rich and to poor people. Therefore, those gangs become rather powerful at other people’s health expense.

 

Two of the most sold drugs in the Earth are alcohol and nicotine (in tobacco). The first one has been probably drunk by humans since the seventh millennium before Christ. It has been consumed in large quantities by many cultures, but drinking it too often can involve an addiction for some people: it is alcoholism, which represents a worst psychological dependence than tobacco could ever create in any people. What’s more: every addict who achieves giving up drinking will never stop desiring any alcoholic drink. However, tobacco is more potentially addictive to any people than alcohol: nearly the 100% who try nicotine become addicted to it; the percentage is just 82 % for alcohol. Anyway, there’s no relation between what this scale measure and how dangerous is a drug: the percentage of ecstasy in this scale is 20,1 %!

We can say that analgesics have unfortunately become the second or the third most consumed kind of drug in many developed countries since the beginning of this century. In the USA and Europe, analgesics are the favorite drugs for famous people, though neither using analgesics as drug nor this socially specific preference is just new fact: heroine, morphine and other opiates have been used for aristocrats and, in general, rich people, for several centuries. And there is a curiosity related with this: the heroine was created by Bayer as a substitute for morphine, which was only used as anesthesia. It is a disappointing fact that Bayer developed heroine to obtain a less addictive version of morphine!

 

As we said, lots of drugs were just consumed by rich people in the past. However, in the twentieth century, these drugs and other have reached the leadership of preferred drugs among people of any social class. Furthermore, lots of new drugs have been created in the last years. These dangerous drugs are obtained from chemical mixes in which artificial and natural molecules are used. Artificial substances come from lots of sorts of analgesics and others, even horses’ analgesics or fertilizers. Natural ones come from traditional Indian vegetables like cannabis, coca, hallucinogenic mushrooms, etc. The mix between this sorts of substances bring about disastrous effects in consumers’ brains, therefore in their whole lives too.