Why Do People Take Drugs?
A. There is a war-like strain in our European culture that drugs
tap. Soldiers will tell you that the public wants a military kept
in a box marked "Break glass in case of war." To keep the warlike
strain alive, we have all kinds of cultural symbolisms working.
But the actual spirit needs a more visceral cultivation. Alcohol
is okay for carpet bombers of WWII vintage, but if you want somebody
to burn hootches and bayonet babies, you need stronger drugs to
shape their spirit. Dropping smart bombs down chimneys, again,
calls for a different sort of soul formation. If we could weed
the imperialist out of our heritage, we could weed out this aspect
of drug use.
B. On the other hand, our culture offers little or nothing for
healthy, peaceful spiritual development. "No daydreaming!" is
the actual translation of "e pluribus unum." Our prickliness,
insularity, coldness, and fetish of hygiene put our imaginative
life up in some cosmic deep freeze (GNP and body counts, horsepower
and cup size, footnotes, all sorts of empty symbolism). We go
to church and are told that we can ignore what is going on in
our minds, God doesn't promise us that kind of peace. Against
all that, drugs offer a haven. Once you stop demonizing the drug
user, you can measure the social wasteland by what the users put
up with to escape it.
Chris Rushlau
Portland
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