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Everyone agrees that something must be done about the tremendous physical and emotional health problems that drug abuse causes. Concern about the abuse of drugs is so widespread that recent polls indicate it to be one of the most serious problems in today's world, threatening the security and freedom of whole nations. Politicians, health experts and much of the general public feel that no issue is more important than drug abuse. America's other pressing social problems- disease, poverty, child abuse and neglect, and corruption- often have a common element; that is drug abuse. The use of illegal drugs such as cocaine, crack, heroin and marijuana cause extensive harm to the body and brain. Yet, even after knowing this many people want illegal drugs to be legalized in every aspect.
The last thing we need is a policy that makes widely available substances that impair memory, concentration and attention span; why in God's name foster the uses of drugs that make you stupid? The campaign for drug legalization is morally disgusting. The number of people who are addicted to illegal drugs or are users of these drugs is quite shocking. Drug abuse is clearly an injurious and sometimes fatal problem. No one escapes death. Human happiness seeks to wall out the threat of death; however, the Biblical reference (I Thessalonians 5: 2 - 3) at the end of the story reminds us that death comes "like a thief in the night, " and even those who seek "peace and safety...
shall not escape. " In the article Crack in the Box The writer Pete Hammil compares the difference between Television and the common street drug known as Crack Cocaine. The essay starts with a story of a young lady hooked on drugs and living in poverty with a couple of children. She was twenty-two, stiletto-thin, with eyes as old as tombs. She was living in two rooms in a welfare hotel with her children, who were two, three, and five years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human woe: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack, tricks with johns in parked cars to pay for the dope.
I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in an empty way and couldn't really answer beyond "makes me feel good. " The children are almost hypnotized by the television as Hamill is interviewing her. As Pete Hammil is walking back to his office he is thinking about all the drug problems in the world and how there affecting society today and comes to a claim which is a claim of cause. Hamill's claim is actually a whole paragraph when he is thinking about the drug problem and the 60, s to the present and concludes that there was one major difference between that time and this, Television. The claim that is made in the essay Crack in the Box is simple, which is a claim of cause along with sub claims of facts.
The claims of cause is stated by relating the 60 s to today when the drug movement started. The facts with that claim are that in the 60 s the drug problem was small and insignificant, now the drug problem is huge... They were additional casualties of our time of plague, demoralized reminders that although this country holds only 2 percent of the world's population, it consumes 65 percent of the world's supply of hard drugs Pete Hammil states a fact that The united States represents only 2 percent of the worlds population, yet, it consumes 65 percent of the worlds supply of hard drugs. Now Pete Hammil also questions politics and the George Bush presidential campaign. Only thirty-five years ago, drug addiction was not a major problem in this country.
There were drug addicts. We had some at the end of the nineteenth century, hooked on the cocaine in patent medicines. During the placid fifties, Commissioner Harry An slinger pumped up the butt of the old Bureau of Narcotics with fantasies of reefer madness. Heroin was sold and used in most major American cities, while the bebop generation of jazz musicians got jammed up with horse. How Bush offers the traditional American excuse it is someone elses fault.
Bush never asks why so many Americans demand the drugs. There is nothing to back those statements up in the paragraph. There is allot of comparison to back up the claim such as The increased sales of televisions from the 1960 s to the present. In the 60 s there were 31, 700, 000 television sets in the country, which has doubled 6 times over to an amazing 184 million T. V.
sets. Now the comparison of Crack and Television comes more into play when Pete Hammil suggests that people embraced it, were diverted by it, perhaps even loved it, but they werent formed by it. That is a good sub claim to link television and Crack cocaine together because when people do crack they become addicts, or want more and more, which seems to be the same thing television is doing. Another claim of fact is that in the 60 s there were only 1, 234 drug arrests which climbed to a staggering 43, 901 drug arrests in the 80 s. They confiscated ninety-seven ounces of cocaine for the entire year; last year it was hundreds of pounds. During each year of the fifties in New York, there were only about a hundred narcotics-related deaths.
But by the end of the sixties, when the first generation of children formed by television had come to maturity (and thus to the marketplace), the number of such deaths had risen to 1, 200. The same phenomenon was true in every major American city. The amounts confiscated by law enforcement has increased. Now its increased to hundreds of pounds a year.
The support of the main claim of cause is that there are disturbing similarities as stated in the essay by Pete Hammil. How Mr. Hammil states that Television itself is a consciousness altering instrument. That says that you can escape reality with the touch of a button, which, is something you can do with Crack Cocaine. In the essay Pete Hammil states that he has interviewed many people with drug problems and that none of them know why they do it they just give him a look like it makes me happy. The doper always whines about how he feels; drugs are used to enhance his feelings or obliterate them, and in this the doper is very American.
No other people on earth spend so much time talking about their feelings; hundreds of thousands go to shrinks, they buy self-help books by the millions, they pour out intimate confessions to virtual strangers in bars or discos. Our political campaigns are about emotional issues now, stated in the simplicities of adolescence. Even alleged statesmen can start a sentence, "I feel that the Sandinista's should... " when they once might have said, "I think... " I'm convinced that this exaltation of cheap emotions over logic and reason is one by-product of hundreds of thousands of hours of television. The essay was very informative I thought, but I fail to see where the writer effectively sets forth ethos, pathos, and logos. There was not enough evidence to back the story up to make it believable. It was more of an opinion paper that might convince people that are looking for something to believe about the drug problem and why it exists.
Although there is a connection between the two. Television is an escape from reality as are drugs. But I dont think that they can be linked to each other because they are 2 different worlds. The facts that are stated throughout the essay are a good way to apply ethos, pathos, and logos, although, they are not convincing enough to make a believer out of everyone who reads the paper. Hamill's claim is inferred in my opinion, it is in the middle of the paragraph and it is Hamill thinking and he then comes to a conclusion that seems to be the claim. Now ethos is applied when Hamill is telling the story in the beginning about the woman on drugs.
The story supports Ethos and makes it emotionally appealing for the reader, so the reader will be interested right away. The warrants are stated as facts throughout the essay, by stating facts when analyzing TV and drugs. The end of the story also has a sub claim of policy, by asking the question what can be done referring to the drug problem and TV addiction. The sub claim of policy is backed up by suggesting ways to better peoples understanding on TV and its effects, the drug problem, and taking action on the issues that Hamill presents.
The end of the story has a sub claim of policy as stated earlier. Which is a stated claim when Hamill states As a beginning, parents must take immediate control of the sets, teaching children to watch specific television programs, not "television, " to get out of the house and play with other kids. Elementary and high schools must begin teaching television as a subject, the way literature is taught, showing children how shows are made, how to distinguish between the true and the false, how to recognize cheap emotional manipulation. All Americans should spend more time reading.
And thinking. For years the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin Cartel. Worked Cite: Hamill, Pete "Crack in the Box" in Perspectives in Argument. Nancy.
V. Wood. 2 nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. pg. 599 - 603 web web
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