We should enforce more laws about alcohol and smoking because children have too easy access to them. Many children today have too easy of access to alcohol, drugs and even smoking products as it's starting to be seen more and more often nowadays for example walking around I've noticed more and more of this even middle schoolers getting involved with these actions. I also relate to this issue in some type of way because I've seen people in my personal life who have or are still using nic or alcohol in their life I won't say any names but I've even had to stop a younger family member once and ask them if they know what they were doing or if they understood as many just getting into things without basic understanding and as about to do the same thing all because he was curious as he said. I also want to bring up a study made in 2022 about substance consumption in preteens: “As many as 3% of the nearly 12,000 9- and 10-year-olds surveyed say they already have a friend who uses one of these substances. Those who said they did were also much more likely to be curious about trying alcohol tobacco and other nicotine-containing products themselves. Meanwhile, up to 35% of the children’s parents said their kids may have easy access to alcohol at home, while smaller percentages said the same about tobacco (7%) or marijuana (3%). And about 25% of parents said they hadn’t yet set rules for their pre-teen children about whether they’re allowed to use these substances." These are a severely high number of percentages for children to have and it isn’t very good as it seems as the years go it is getting easier and easier for children to get a hold of these substances or become too curious about them enough to try them.

 I know it is very hard to keep track of every child and stop them from making mistakes like these and getting into things they don’t understand yet but as a society we need to.  We need to understand the children and why they are getting too curious about these things. I know we can’t stop them all but the goal is to lower the amount by as much as possible and help our children better understand what they're getting themselves into. In order to do these things we must start by bringing awareness into class in middle school as it is a thing in high school but there were never classes for these things to bring awareness to the younger generations.  it shouldn’t be forced. It should be a permission slip signed by a parent in order to have this lesson. If they do not, they have to bring awareness to themselves in order to stop this issue as the more you hide things from children the more curious those children will become in the future.