Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Ex Input:
Paragraph: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Surgeon General Jerome Adams made the announcement, with Azar calling marijuana “a dangerous drug.” Officials said President Donald Trump has donated $100,000 — one-quarter of his annual government salary — toward a digital campaign to raise awareness of the risks. Trump has forgone his official salary since taking office. The warning comes as legal marijuana has grown into a $10-billion industry in the U.S. with nearly two-thirds of states legalizing it, mainly for medical uses. Possessing small amounts of marijuana for adult recreational use is legal in 11 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The list includes California, Colorado, Michigan and Maine. Federal law still treats it as a controlled substance akin to opioids. Adams said science shows that marijuana is harmful to the developing brains of teenagers and to the human fetus. The drug has also gotten stronger, with a three-fold increase in the concentration of the active ingredient THC in cultivated plants over the last 20 years. “This ain’t your mother’s marijuana,” Adams said. The American Medical Association said it strongly supports the government’s effort, adding that it for some time it has been recommending against marijuana use by teens, pregnant women and women who are breastfeeding. The surgeon general said his advisory is a direct result of scientific research that runs counter to changing social mores. “Marijuana use is a risk to the developing brain,” Adams said. “Over time there has been a change in attitudes about marijuana creating a false sense of security.” While the White House has made the opioid epidemic a top policy and political priority, marijuana previously had not gotten such high-level attention. Federal officials say they fear the trend toward legalization may make it more enticing for teenagers to try marijuana. It’s a commonly used drug among youths, they said, along with alcohol and e-cigarettes. No states allow recreational marijuana use by teens. States with medical marijuana programs, Illinois among them, generally allow use by minors with consent from a legal guardian and certification from a doctor. Adams said that for teens it carries a risk of affecting brain development, which continues in the 20s. Frequent marijuana use by teenagers is associated with changes in parts of the brain that are involved with attention, memory, decision-making and motivation. Among pregnant women, marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, with about 7% reporting they had used it within the past month in a 2017 study. Some women use it to help with morning sickness. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics advise women not to use marijuana during pregnancy, and to discontinue the drug if they find out they are pregnant. HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir said pregnant women taking marijuana to relieve morning sickness should stop. “If you have morning sickness, talk to your physician,” said Giroir. “There are FDA-approved drugs to help with morning sickness. Taking marijuana for morning sickness has never been shown to be safe and effective.” The government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse is paying for several studies on marijuana use in pregnancy, including one involving women who have chosen to continue using the drug to treat morning sickness despite warnings. While some studies have suggested that marijuana may be harmful to the developing brain, the evidence isn’t conclusive, explained NIDA Director Nora Volkow, who said she strongly supports the surgeon general’s warning. “We cannot close our eyes and say this is not happening. It’s happening,” said Volkow. It would be a missed opportunity not to continue the research to find conclusive evidence on how the drug affects the fetus, she said. “My view is that the way that you change things is by providing evidence,” she added. ___ Associated Press Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this article. Claim: ‘This ain’t your mother’s marijuana,’ surgeon general says.

Ex Output:
Federal health officials issued a national warning Thursday against marijuana use by adolescents and pregnant women, as more states legalize the increasingly potent drug for medicinal and recreational use.


Ex Input:
Paragraph: For Simmers, a retired Hagerstown police officer, that helplessness developed into frustration as he and his then 18 year-old daughter Brooke ran into a series of roadblocks and administrative red tape in seeking treatment for her heroin addiction in late 2013. “We tried all the things that we thought would help,” said Simmers, during a special lecture sponsored by the Shepherd University Department of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Sport Studies at Erma Ora Byrd auditorium Monday night. However, after multiple tries to get and stay clean, accompanied by a succession of relapses, Brook Simmers, then 19 years-old, died of a heroin overdose in April 2015 when she was found in the back seat of her car in a church parking lot. Simmers’ attitude toward drug addiction was somewhat different in the early1980s after he had graduated high school. “When I finished school, President Ronald Reagan had a big push then for the war on drugs,” Simmers said. “The way we were going to do it is handcuffs and incarceration.” Simmers joined the Air Force where he trained dogs to sniff out narcotics. Discharged four years later, he was hired by the Hagerstown Police Department in the early 1990s where he was assigned to the narcotics unit and eventually became part of a Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force. “I was targeting users and dealers — any type of narcotics,” Simmers said. “My feeling back then was ‘make as many arrests as you possibly can.’ ” Simmers recalled the day his daughter called him in late 2013 to ask for help, telling him she had developed an addiction to the opioid pain killer Percocet. The next year and half would be an in-the-field education for Simmers and his daughter, running into seemingly counter intuitive administrative regulations to securing Brooke immediate addiction treatment. According to Simmers, Brooke was initially refused insurance coverage for treatment because she was deemed a non-critical candidate. “Her addiction had not progressed to the point where she needed in-patient treatment,” Simmers said “It was not serious enough, they said, because she had not been arrested, she had not overdosed, and she had not been hospitalized.” Instead, Brooke was approved for out-patient treatment where she would go to daily classes every night. “I didn’t want to take that as an answer,” Simmers said. “If you are having a heart attack with chest pains, the doctors are not going to say, ‘well you’re still conscious. Let’s not call an ambulance just yet.’” After attending two weeks of out- patient classes, Brooke dropped out, telling her father she had her addiction under control. She returned to work In a few months, Simmers again heard from his daughter. “She had lost her job, and she had started to look unkempt, which was very unlike her,” Simmers said. “You could tell that things were spinning out of control again. She said she was now addicted to heroin and was shooting up every morning.” Now 18 years old, Brooke had to be the one to commit to treatment. Brooke was eventually accepted to an in-patient treatment facility in early 2014. However, Simmers later found out that she had checked herself out against medical advice and had relapsed back to drug use. After a few more attempted recoveries and relapses — including an overdose at a heroin dealer’s house in Baltimore, Maryland. Seeing his daughter’s drug addiction struggles first hand changed Simmers perspective on drug abuse and its unrelenting pull on the user. “An addict is not a weak-minded person,” Simmer said. “I am not of that camp anymore.” In the wake of his daughter’s death, Simmers and his wife Dana decided to start “Brooke’s House,” a public charity whose goals is to build a long-term, residential treatment facility for young women suffering from addiction in Smithsburg, Maryland. The HPERS department presented Simmers with a $300 donation from the Vince Gonino Fund to help with the construction of Brooke’s House. “This is one small way for HPERS faculty and students to give back to community and help fight drug addiction,” said Professor Stacey Kendig, department chair of HPERS. ___ Information from: The Journal, http://journal-news.net/ Claim: Daughter’s addiction changed former officer’s perspective.

Ex Output:
Kevin Simmers knows the feeling of helplessness in fighting heroin addiction first hand.


Ex Input:
Paragraph: The powerful magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked the Mojave Desert town of Ridgecrest south of Death Valley National Park as darkness fell on Friday, jolting the area with eight times more force than a 6.4 quake that struck the same area 34 hours earlier. California Governor Gavin Newsom placed the state Office of Emergency Services (OES) on its highest alert and requested federal assistance. He told a news conference in Ridgecrest on Saturday that he had just got off a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump, seeking a presidential emergency declaration. “I have full confidence that the president will be forthcoming, in immediate terms, with the formal declaration,”  Newsom said, flanked by first responders. There were several minor to moderate injuries, OES Director Mark Ghilarducci told reporters. “No reports of any fatalities, so I think we’re very lucky there,” he said. There were reports of building fires, mostly as a result of gas leaks or gas-line breaks, Ghilarducci said. State officials said all roads damaged by the quakes had been repaired and reopened. Violent shaking also caused water-main breaks and knocked out power and communications to parts of Ridgecrest, home to about 27,000 people some 125 miles (200 km) northeast of Los Angeles. Officials warned there was sure to be a significant number of aftershocks, including possible powerful ones, and advised residents to ensure they had necessary supplies. “I’ve said this ad nauseam: be prepared for the worst,” said Newsom, who on Saturday met victims in the hospital and visited a hardware store where the earthquake hurled products from shelves and left ceiling tiles scattered across the aisles. Standing outside her damaged home in Ridgecrest, life-long  resident Sierra Wood said it was heartbreaking and scary. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this,” she said. “I mean - they say that it’s happened and you’ve heard about it. But once you’re in it, it’s completely different, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying.”  Her husband, Keith Wood, said the aftershocks were grueling. “It’s like when, when do we get a break from it?” he said. “When is enough enough? Mother Nature has had her way. Give us a break now, OK?”  The sprawling U.S. Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake just northwest of Ridgecrest was evacuated of all non-essential personnel following the quake. The facility, which at more than 1.1 million acres (445,000 hectares) is larger than the state of Rhode Island, reported no injuries. Authorities were assessing any damage to buildings or other infrastructure, according to a post on the base’s Facebook page. Friday’s earthquake was widely felt across Southern California, including greater Los Angeles, where shaking in some areas lasted about 40 seconds. Low-level rumbling extended as far north as the San Francisco Bay area and beyond to Reno, Nevada, and as far east as Phoenix, Arizona. Seismologists said the initial quake on Thursday, and scores of smaller ones that followed it, proved to be foreshocks to Friday’s larger temblor, which now ranks as Southern California’s most powerful since a 7.1 quake that struck near a U.S. Marine Corps base in the Mojave Desert in 1999. The U.S. Geological Survey said Friday’s quake was immediately followed by at least 16 aftershocks of magnitude 4 or greater and warned of a 50 percent chance of another magnitude 6 quake in the coming days. Geologists put the chance of another magnitude 7 tremor at 10 percent over the next week. There were hundreds of aftershocks of 2.5 magnitude or greater in the area surrounding the epicenter, according to USGS data. Victor Abdullatif was helping clean up broken bottles and other debris inside his father’s liquor store, the Eastridge Market, which sustained damage to its ceiling, and found the periodic aftershocks unnerving. “They’re still scary because you almost don’t know, ‘Is this going to be a full earthquake?’ You have to kind of have faith that it’s just an aftershock,” he told Reuters. The last major destructive quake to hit Southern California was the 6.7 magnitude Northridge quake in 1994, which struck a densely populated area of Los Angeles. It killed 57 people and caused billions of dollars in property damage. The comparatively limited damage from Friday’s quake, which packed greater force than the Northridge event, was a function of its location in a remote, less developed area. Its ground motion, however, startled seismically jaded Southern Californians over a wide region. Pools in Los Angeles sloshed wildly, and TV cameras at Dodger Stadium were shaking as they filmed the night Major League Baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres. A television anchorwoman ducked out of sight during a local newscast as shouts of “get under a desk” were heard in the background. Claim: Shaken communities take stock of damage after Southern California quakes.

Ex Output:

High desert communities in Southern California on Saturday assessed damage and braced for potentially dangerous aftershocks from a major earthquake that shook buildings, ruptured gas lines and sparked fires near the remote epicenter of the second temblor in as many days.