I honestly think the majority of us know how the three are, in many cases, connected. Many youth in our most vulnerable ages (teenage) tend to have some kind of attraction to things that make us feel accepted and recognized and things that make us feel more mature than we actually are.

Take foe example, us girls usually develop an eye for things like make-up, clothes, fashion accessories, latest music, relationships and thing that will attract simply anyone!

Boys on their part, also have to be something close to ‘most wanted’, look the best they can, have his word heard and not seconded, be the best at something popular, show their potential to attract as many girls, in short, be respected as ‘the man’!

However boys especially among a smaller percentage of girls have some other negative and also harmful attractions to drug abuse, alcohol, etc and anything that’ll get them into high spirits where they feel invincible, uncaring about anyone but themselves and where they can escape from their worries and frustrations as well as the boundaries they’re limited to.

These are a few of the many simple facts about these habits which later grow into addictions. In fact, "adolescents are more vulnerable than any other age group to developing nicotine, alcohol and other drug addictions because the regions of the brain that govern impulse motivation” Yale university researchers have found.

Addiction to alcohol and drugs is also the root cause of many widely spread problems among the youth such as; teenage depression, brain damage (especially from drugs like marijuana), suicides, juvenile delinquency, even obesity (though mostly common in America),

Even worse, these side effects affect females in more negative ways and quicker than they do males, and even those who drink less than males get more intoxicated and are more prone to liver and heart damage than males! So fellow Rwandan girls, if you’re a victim, you might want to check on it and correct it much faster…

For the youth actively involved who are and to those who know them, you definitely don’t want to see this being the controller of your life and neither do you want it to decide how far you go in life! We might feel that this is not enough to help you see the problem and therefore you can still go on, but as you do that, remember to start counting the years you’ll actually be normal because each time you take in these intoxicating substances, brain cells are damaged in your brain!

Apart from that let’s look at tomorrow. If it is granted to us, what do we want to make of it? Wherever it is that we might be, what legacy would we want to build both for ourselves, families and our country?

Ends