Topic: 2024-Substance Abuse
Country: Philippines
Delegate Name: Bobby Young
A major part of our culture here in the Philippines is our nightlife. Our capital city Manila is a prime location for tourists and citizens to get out and have a great night of dancing, socializing, and of course consuming alcoholic beverages. As a matter of fact about 40% of Filipino adults drink alcohol at least once a month (The Philippines’ Blind Spot for Alcohol | Think Global Health, 2023). However, for some of these adults drinking habits take over their life. And just 5 years ago these habits took the lives of 39,802 Filipinos (The Philippines’ Blind Spot for Alcohol | Think Global Health, 2023). The numbers for the years between then and now are shaky but we can estimate that about 40,000 more Filipinos die from alcohol each year (The Philippines’ Blind Spot for Alcohol | Think Global Health, 2023). The Phillipines believe that this number can be significantly reduced by being harder with enforcing identification checks with alcohol purchases as underage drinking is a widespread issue in the Philippines, as 9% of the Philippines population who is between the ages of 15-64 have alcohol abuse issues (Swahn et al., 2013). These issues can start at ages even younger than our legal purchasing age of 18. These numbers are horrific but they do not cover all of our deaths from substance abuse. We can estimate that thousands more Filipinos die from drug overdoses as well each year. We also would like to recognize the prevalence of illegal heroin production and usage throughout Asia and the rest of the world and we hope to make policy to combat the abuse of drugs like heroin. However, we also recognize the amount of deaths caused by overdoses from prescribed drugs and it is in our hopes to equally combat the abuse of illicit and prescribed drugs. We would like to take these three issues into consideration. Alcohol abuse, illicit drug abuse, and prescribed drug abuse.
To combat alcohol abuse we would hope to create a global standard that urges countries to create a system in which the name, age, and address of residence to be reported to local law enforcement with each purchase of any alcoholic beverage in order to track if minors are illegally purchasing alcohol which can help local governments catch fake ID users and catch businesses who do not check for the identification of their customers, to help prevent our children from becoming alcohol abusers in the future. We hope to combat the usage of illicit drugs by extending our education efforts on the dangers of using illicit drugs to schools and workplaces globally, as well as by creating a subcommittee whose task will be to investigate the production of illicit drugs and then report the information found to national drug enforcement agencies in the country where the investigation was conducted to bust the producers of these illicit drugs. We also hope to limit the number of overdoses from prescription drugs by setting an international standard of prescribing drugs in amounts where users of the drug will not be prescribed enough to let them take amounts large enough to become addicted after receiving their first prescription of the drug.
Works Cited:
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/philippines-blind-spot-alcohol
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10985488/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Centers%20for,were%20also%20attributed%20to%20opioids.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3890547/
