Editor’s note: The following is an essay written by Maria Lewis, a seventh grade student at Indus. The essay won a scholarship competition sponsored by the Minnesota State Troopers.

By Maria Lewis, Indus School

Imagine this: You are at a party having a few drinks. You decide that you can drive home safely. You jump into your canary yellow Hummer and head west towards home. A father, traveling in the opposite direction, is heading home from a friend’s house. The father is driving along, concentrating on the road due to the pitch black sky.
All of a sudden, waking up from a blackout, you realize your vehicle is on the wrong side of the road. You try to correct your Hummer, but it’s no use — you’re too drunk to be able to. The father tries to swerve to miss you too, but it’s too late. He’s already dead. You fly into the ditch and are stopped by the approach. When you finally come to, you realize you have just killed someone. You now have to face the fact you have to live with the grief of killing someone because of your choice to drink and drive. Drugs and alcohol are no good for me or anybody else. Drugs and alcohol have side effects. Drugs and alcohol affect your friends and family. They even kill innocent people.
To begin, short-term side effects of alcohol are not only the feeling of being drowsy and unbalanced, but also not being able to remember things in the morning and having hangovers the next day. However, there are side effects of drugs that can be even worse. Short and long-term side effects are addiction to the drugs, psychosis, depression, memory loss, and death. Also, there can be permanent damage to vital organs, different types of cancer, malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies, sexual dysfunctions, nausea, and having extreme lows after you come down from the drugs. There are feelings of flying or being in the sky, fatty liver, cirrhosis, heart problems, lowered resistance to disease, dizziness, talkativeness, slurred speech, and disturbed sleeping.
As a result, drugs can be hurtful to the person using the drugs and their family. They can be depressed after using the drugs and can bring their friends and family down with them. If someone smokes around their family for most of their life then their family could get secondhand smoke and the person smoking could get lung cancer. Drugs and alcohol also affect friends and families by the users not acting like themselves when they are on the drugs. They can either be very angry or act very psychotic. Drug and alcohol users can hurt people physically by punching or kicking them and shooting innocent people on the street.
A huge 65 percent of teens get drugs and alcohol from friends and family, but 42 percent of teens whose parents talk to them about the dangers of drugs are less likely to use drugs. However, only one in four teens report their parents having this conversation with them. Alcohol, the most commonly used drug in teens, kills six times more teens than all the illicit drugs combined. Ten percent of teens that have gone to raves say two-thirds of the raves have ecstasy available. Every public school student could have a state-of-the-art computer for the amount underage drinking costs the U.S. (more than $58 billion dollars) every year. Traffic crashes are the single greatest cause of death for all people age six-33 and about 45 percent of the fatalities are alcohol related. (http://www.gdcada.org/statistics/alcohol.htm [1])
Due to this use of drugs and alcohol, dozens of people are injured or killed including my brother’s friend who was driving back from a church program when a man driving from the opposite direction hit him. The man driving the oncoming vehicle was on meth and couldn’t concentrate on driving. He crashed into our friend and killed him.
So, next time you or anyone else thinks that they are coherent enough to drive home after using drugs, think about what the consequences are. Think about what it would feel like to kill someone. You are not only hurting your friends and family in the process, but also people you don’t even know. If more people can decide not to drink and do drugs it will be a somewhat safer world for us. Drugs and alcohol are no good for me or anybody else. Drugs and alcohol have side effects. Drugs and alcohol affect your friends and family. They even kill innocent people.