Substance Abuse in Modern Times Professor Ramos Blog

Substance Abuse in Modern Times Substance abuse is a huge problem today, yet, many people don’t know how big of a problem it is in the States. According to a study conducted in 2005, â€Å"22 million Americans had a problem or struggled with drugs and alcohol. 95 percent of these people were unaware they had a legitimate problem, and many were unsuccessful in finding help or assistance with this problem† (HealthyPeople.gov, 2020 Topics and Adjectives, par.1). Also as Psychology Today states, â€Å"Both substance use disorders and gambling behaviors have an increased likelihood of being accompanied by mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety or other pre-existing problems. Substance use and gambling disorders not only engage the same brain mechanisms of compulsivity, they respond to many of the same approaches to treatment† (Psychology Today, What is Addiction?). This is particularly true today where there are many cases of mental health being tied to substance abuse. Now, imagine a world where this problem was eliminated. Many families would be saved, lives wouldnt be in jeopardy, and there would be a new sense of cleanliness. Most of the human race obtain alcohol or drugs by purchasing these things at the local supermarket, pharmacy, or even the nearby corner store. However, since these two things are so readily available, it can be easy to get carried away with purchasing such goods. There’s really no way of tracking how much one has bought and consumed except at public bars. If a record system was implemented, there would be better control over these substances. A record system would be relatively easy to maintain and control. Once an American Citizen turns 21, he/she would automatically be enrolled into a system that tracks the amount of drugs or alcohol purchased by the individual. There would be different algorithms for each person, based on their background, in-house family members over 21, and financial stability. In simpler terms, if one was to purchase absurd amounts of alcohol in a short amount of time, a red flag would pop up on the persons record. This would cause a caretaker or someone of the sort to go check up on that individual. They would make sure they are okay and doing well. There would also be some slack for those who are medically prescribed a medication and need to order or purchase it consistently. This would prove beneficial because as time goes on, â€Å"eventually drug abuse can consume your life, stopping social and intellectual development. This only reinforces feelings of isolation† (Laurence Robinson, Melinda Smith and Jeanne Segal. Drug Abuse and Addiction. Par. 9). So basically when a person is going through any type of substance abuse, whether it be drugs or alcohol, or both, the desires and feelings of isolation can start to cultivate. This would cause people to start resisting help a lot more than usual. Thus, making resources for help useless. This record system would also help people see an actual visual representation of how much they are consuming. When many today buy alcohol, they arent aware how much they are actually putting into their bodies. However, with this new record. It would show them face to face how much they are buying and consuming as well. The other nice thing about this system would be that everything on the persons record or account, would be private. Only the person whom the account is tied to would be able to access all the information on the record. They wouldn’t have to feel guilty or nervous that other people would be viewing their activity. The only people that would be able to see it would be authorized professionals that only seek out to help those that raise a couple red flags. So there would really be no shame factor in this system. As was mentioned earlier, substance abuse is a very real problem that needs to be known. There are families, mental health, physical health, communities, and lives at stake every day with this tragic problem. Many try to turn to rehab and last there for years. Yet, that is often after the fact, when it’s too late. When people already realize there is a problem within them. So why not stop it sooner? This record system would open the eyes of many before problems arise. It would encourage people to think twice before purchasing drugs or alcohol. Don’t we all want a world free of addiction?  Ã‚   Laurence Robinson, Melinda Smith, Jeanne Segal. Drug Abuse and Addiction, June 2019. Help Guide HealthyPeople.org. 2020 Topics and Objectives, Substance abuse, 2014. Psychology Today, What is addiction?, 2019.

Quick Facts About the English Alphabet

Quick Facts About the English Alphabet Writers spend years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet, novelist Richard Price once observed. Its enough to make you lose your mind day by day. Its also a good enough reason to gather a few facts about one of the most significant inventions in human history. The Origin of the Word Alphabet The English word alphabet comes to us, by way of Latin, from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. These Greek words were in turn derived from the original Semitic names for the symbols: Aleph (ox) and beth (house). Where the English Alphabet Came From The original set of 30 signs, known as the Semitic alphabet, was used in ancient Phoenicia beginning around 1600 BCE. Most scholars believe that this alphabet, which consisted of signs for consonants only, is the ultimate ancestor of virtually all later alphabets. (The one significant exception appears to be Koreas han-gul script, created in the 15th century.) Around 1,000 BCE, the Greeks adopted a shorter version of the Semitic alphabet, reassigning certain symbols to represent vowel sounds, and eventually, the Romans developed their own version of the Greek (or Ionic) alphabet. Its generally accepted that the Roman alphabet reached England by way of the Irish sometime during the early period of Old English (5 c.- 12 c.). Over the past millennium, the English alphabet has lost a few special letters and drawn fresh distinctions between others. But otherwise, our modern English alphabet remains quite similar to the version of the Roman alphabet that we inherited from the Irish. The Number of Languages That Use the Roman Alphabet About 100 languages rely on the Roman alphabet. Used by roughly two billion people, its the worlds most popular script. As David Sacks notes in Letter Perfect (2004), There are variations of the Roman alphabet: For example, English employs 26 letters; Finnish, 21; Croatian, 30. But at the core are the 23 letters of ancient Rome. (The Romans lacked J, V, and W.) How Many Sounds There Are in English There are more than 40 distinct sounds (or phonemes) in English. Because we have just 26 letters to represent those sounds, most letters stand for more than one sound. The consonant c, for example, is pronounced differently in the three words cook, city, and (combined with h) chop. What Are​ Majuscules and Minuscules Majuscules (from Latin majusculus, rather large) are capital letters. Minuscules (from Latin minusculus, rather small) are lower-case letters. The combination of majuscules and minuscules in a single system (the so-called dual alphabet) first appeared in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814), Carolingian minuscule. Pangrams Pangrams are a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. The best-known example is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. A more efficient pangram is Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. Lipograms Lipograms are text that deliberately excludes a particular letter of the alphabet. The best-known example in English is Ernest Vincent Wrights novel Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939) - a story of more than 50,000 words in which the letter e never appears. Zee Versus Zed The older pronunciation of zed was inherited from Old French. The American zee, a dialect form heard in England during the 17th century (perhaps by analogy with bee, dee, etc.), was approved by Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). The letter z, by the way, has not always been relegated to the end of the alphabet. In the Greek alphabet, it came in at a quite respectable number seven. According to Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), The Romans adopted Z later than the rest of the alphabet, since /z/ was not a native Latin sound, adding it at the end of their list of letters and using it rarely. The Irish and English simply imitated the Roman convention of placing z last.