Report on Drug Addiction Among Youth

Begin with the trend and who is affected, then cover how young people are drawn in, the effect on families, what treatment exists and what the authorities are doing. A report differs from an essay on the same topic in that it attributes claims — "according to the police", "a physician at the centre said" — instead of asserting them.

The question: Write a report on drug addiction among the youth of Bangladesh.

The format

Report a trend someone has observed

Open with what counsellors, police or teachers have noticed, in a named place. Without an observer the report has no news and becomes an essay on the dangers of drugs.

• Give an age range and a direction of change.
• Name the kind of institution reporting it.
• 🚨 Do not define addiction.

Explain through the people who deal with it

The second paragraph belongs to those who see the cases: how late families seek help, what substances they see, what happens before a student is brought in.

• Name the substances that are actually common here.
• ⚠️ Never describe how anything is obtained or used.

Balance enforcement against services

Close with what police are doing and what teachers or parents say is missing. Ending on a request attributed to others keeps the report from editorialising.

• One quotation from a counsellor.
• Name the gap — school counselling — as their request, not yours.

Model answer

Model answer (about 205 words)

Rising drug use among students alarms counsellors

Staff Correspondent

Chattogram, 5 September: Counsellors at rehabilitation centres in the port city say the number of school and college students being brought for treatment has risen noticeably over the past two years, with most cases involving young men between sixteen and twenty-two.

Staff at three centres visited by this correspondent said families usually seek help only after a long delay, often when a student has already dropped out or been caught stealing at home. Yaba remains the most common substance in the cases they see, followed by cannabis and, increasingly, misused prescription drugs bought without a prescription.

"Almost every case starts with a friend and a phone," said a counsellor at a private centre in Khulshi. "By the time a parent notices, we are already six months behind."

Police say enforcement against street-level dealing has been stepped up, with several arrests near educational institutions this year. Teachers and parents' representatives, however, argue that enforcement alone cannot address the problem, and have asked for counselling services within schools and colleges, which at present exist in very few institutions.

What earns and loses marks

• Report through the people who deal with it — counsellors, teachers, police. It gives you natural sources to attribute to and keeps the report from becoming a lecture on the dangers of drugs.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.