Society`s Drug Problem Is Spiritual
By Ralph Lynn
[Dr. Ralph Lynn is a retired Professor of History at Baylor University. He is a regular contributor to this journal.]
Up to now, our national wars against drugs, announced with much fanfare by successive presidents, have been uniformly unsuccessful.
On the assumption that millions of people resort to drugs to make empty, unsatisfying lives bearable, it is clear that we are fighting wars against symptoms rather than causes.
If we ever get serious about a war against drugs, we should understand that we cannot treat the problem successfully apart from the entire configuration of life among our tragically large underclass.
This configuration of life includes poverty, physical abuse, discrimination, neglect, disease, unemployment, ignorance, and the depressing experience of living among the wretched ruins of large sections of our cities or in impoverished pockets of rural areas.
Of course, a great many people in the upper social and economic brackets also try to fill empty, unsatisfying lives with drugs. These people, however, have access to many kinds of aid beyond the reach of the forty or so millions among us who are too sick, too old, too ill-educated, and too lacking in self-discipline to cope with life without society`s help.
Without a successful campaign against the entire configuration of life among our underclass, a victory over commonly used hard drugs would only call up an unending supply of alcohol, designer drugs, and other kinds of chemical crutches. Even now, liquor and tobacco-both tragically legal-take a far greater human and economic toll than the drug trade.
If this argument is at all valid, then society needs a broad frontal assault on the entire configuration of life among our underclass. Probably we should at the outset come to terms with some unpalatable facts.
One is that the task of helping the helpless help themselves will take not just one or two presidential terms but one or two generations.
Another is that we have been throwing money not at problems but at people. We have done so partly in anger and impatience and partly in fear of and contempt for our underclass-much as the Roman rulers threw money at the masses watching their victory parades.
We must attack our social problems not in impatience and anger but in the cool fashion of the scientist in search of a cure for a physical malady. And we must adjust to the fact that solutions for social maladies cost enormous sums of money just as the development of reliable treatments for physical ailments such as cancer and AIDS entail enormous sums for research and development.
Our business leaders, our sociologists, our educators, and our medical professionals are quite capable of devising effective programs within the framework of our traditional freedoms. Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries have demonstrated that it can be done.
It may have been noted that I did not list politicians among the people who can help solve our problem. The hard fact is that we cannot expect politicians to take the lead in any program for which they have no public support-which leads to a final unpalatable fact.
Our chief obstacle to the solution of the "drug" problem is neither material nor intellectual. It is spiritual; it lies in the areas which our spiritual leaders claim as their own.
So long as the inhabitants of ghettos do not break out to mug us or burglarize our homes, we millions of fortunate people seem willing to allow the shiftless, the sots, and the potheads-as we are likely and somewhat self-righteously inclined to think of them-to do without public assistance pending their decision to stay sober, avoid drugs, and take whatever employment they can find.
When the ghettos explode, we scream for law and order, for the right to carry concealed guns, and for vengeance-thus making the case that our problem is spiritual.
A recent letter in the local newspaper, in reaction to the murder of two women of the underclass, chillingly portrays our spiritual bankruptcy.
"Every family must be armed. Its only hope is to be able to defend itself. Every man and woman should be armed and trained in the use of weapons.
"None of us should feel the least guilt or hesitancy about using guns for the clearly determined purpose of killing anyone who threatens his family."
The author? Not an obscure member of the National Rifle Association but the popular pastor of one of the two or three largest churches in a city of more than a hundred thousand.
There is a better way.
