This is going to be a post about an issue I care deeply about, because it is an issue that marks my life. I am a 10 years in-recovery substance abuser. I had a serious drug problem that persisted from about the age of 18 until the age of 21. For three years I was literally high all the time. I did a lot of marijuana, drank, and hard drugs as well. It was through God's grace, good people, and luck that I found my way out. In the years since, I have tried to steer people away from these activities. I believe them to be a supreme evil in our society, and one that needs to be stamped out. Here are some things I learned along the way:
Most people who do drugs and alcohol do not get addicted. Recreational substance use usually causes little to no harm for a person. The lie that those who oppose drugs and alcohol use that somehow doing drugs will automatically mean you will mess up your life, does not help matters. Those who experiment with drugs and find out that they were lied to, tend to become more involved in the life, not less. We do our children no good by trying to use terror tactics to dissuade them from drug use. Many parents will warn their kids against marijuana use while drinking on a somewhat regular basis. Yet when those kids try marijuana, and drink a little, they find that the two are not that different. This throws into question everything their parents tell them about drugs in general.
Yet I believe that drinking to any excess and drug use are terrible evils. You see, the very fact that drugs might not affect you that badly is a reason not to do them. If drugs destroyed every life they touched, no one would do drugs. And those whose lives will be destroyed would probably not do them either, as their would not be enough of a market to maintain the sale of these substances. If you, you there, can do drugs and drink without great consequences, then you by your normalization of the process invite in other people, who are likely to have extreme consequences. There is a kind of aristocratic element here, too. As most of the people in the middle or upper classes have the family support, the easier life, to keep them from falling to far into the hole that drug use represents. And even if they do get arrested or have some consequence, they have the money to mitigate that consequence.
But the lower classes...the poor and the underlcass, when they experiment with drugs and alcohol to any degree, they take a much higher risk. They look at the culture of substance use, both drugs and alcohol, and they see that people engage in it with limited consequences. They enter into that culture and it almost always destroys them. They do not have the kind of life that offers anything better than the drugs that they are taking, and they can only gain that kind of life if they do not do drugs. They do not have the money to hire the lawyers that will keep one night in jail from ruining their entire lives. In this way drugs and alcohol are a kind of oppression... the rich and middle class get to have their little fun, as they support a way of life and an institution that rots their poorer brothers and sisters like a cancer. It is a bit disgusting.
There is also a religious aspect to all of this. This is God. Right here, right now, this is God. You will never be closer to God than you are right now. The world is your contact with the Divine. Any drug and all but the smallest intake of alcohol, filters your contact with the world. It separates you, even if to a small degree, from reality itself, and so from God. To run away from the world as it actually is, is to run away from God. Even fiction and play, which I so often commend, are only useful if they are actually increasing rather than decreasing our contact with what is ultimately real. Drugs and alcohol are always a way of running from yourself and the world around you. They are sin make manifest in physical form. As sure an incarnation of satan as the great empires Apocalypticists railed against.
However, I believe that the drug problem is not best faced by the legal 'war on drugs'. As much as I hate drugs and alcohol, I hate the war on drugs more. The truth is that sin is a disease, and drugs are an instantiation of that disease. The acceptance of alcohol and the rejection of drugs is hypocritical, and creates an inconsistent legal system that is bad for society. Moreover, countries that have legalized drugs across the board have lower rates of drug use over time. Drugs are kept exorbitantly expensive and that helps fund organized crime. Further, the government has to resort to questionable tactics to fight this war, turning neighbor against neighbor, using systems of informants that amounts to creative entrapment, and using search an seizure patterns that are all but evil in and of themselves.
We need a new way of approaching this problem, that is cultural, religious, and medical. Allow people to go to clinics for their fixes, and get told by a doctor all the evils it can cause and ways in which they can find help. Use the money from the sale of the drugs to set up recovery centers, and the saving on law enforcement to focus on actual crimes. To use an analogy: I believe that pornography is one of the great evils of our society, and rots our collective soul in a way we can't even imagine. Yet I do not want to make the practice illegal. I want to change people by appealing to reason and the heart, not by legal force, unless absolutely necessary to protect citizens from each other.
So to sum up: unless there is a medically compelling reason (including the reduction of extreme pain), using mind-altering substances of any kind is, to my mind, separating oneself from God and thus literally devouring sin. Fighting this evil, which is a cancer in our modern world, will take a new mindset and some new approaches. Finally, the War on Drugs is wrongheaded, misunderstanding the nature of the problem and surviving only on misrepresentations of the problem that hurt primarily the underclass.
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