Everyone knows that drugs are bad for you. As college students we have been inundated with this information ever since we were in elementary school, (or maybe it started in middle school, I can't really remember). Regardless of when it started, we all have grown up with the facts that drugs can seriously harm your health. But who knew that drugs are also harming the environment, too? I definitely didn't. A recent National Geographic article highlights just how different recreational drugs are each harming the environment in their own ways. Indoor growers of marijuana in the U.S. and Canada have to use lights, dehumidifiers, and other appliances so they can grow the marijuana in conditions just like the outdoors. Crazy fact: Smoking a single joint is worth two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. What??? The process of producing meth requires using many toxic ingredients, thus producing quite a bit of toxic waste for the environment, that can be present for years. Rainforests in Colombia and other countries are being cleared to make land for growing cocaine. Khat, a stimulant chewed by people in Yemen, is such a big cash crop that it is causing farmers to drain their aquifers in order to bring water to this plant. And they have to burn fossil fuels in order to bring the water all the way to fields where the plants are. In Afghanistan where opium poppies are grown (see picture above!), the poppies deplete the soil after having been grown in one field a couple of times - leaving the land fallow. Also, extracting sap from the poppies to make heroin requires alot of toxic substance use as well. Plus for all of the drugs you have to add in the amount of fossil fuels used to transport the drug to different places and/or smuggle it across the border. Who knew that such natural substances (excepting meth, of course) could be so bad for our environment?
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