rugs are more than just another social problem. Research has demonstrated that they are the single most destructive element present in our current culture.

The use of street drugs—LSD, heroin, cocaine, angel dust, marijuana and others—has proliferated at all levels of society. College students atrophy their brains on marijuana; schoolchildren are encouraged by educational peers and pharmaceutical pressures to pop pills; and often seemingly everyday neighbors or co-workers secretly harbor drug habits.

Widespread consumption of illegal drugs—many of which were originally prescription remedies—has created a $500-billion-a-year industry.

........................... Drugs hamper mental ability and spiritual growth. ...........................

As vicious and damaging as street drugs have proven to be, mood altering medical and psychiatric drugs form an equally destructive vector in this biochemical trend. By the 1950s, daily dosages of sleeping pills or painkillers had become so commonplace that they were hardly considered drugs. Valium was the first drug to take its place among tranquilizers of choice. Today, however, we have drugs such as Thorazine, Stelazine, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Xanax and Ritalin, which can be even more damaging than street drugs. The prevalence with which these are prescribed as a panacea to life’s various struggles and ills is often shocking to the uninformed.

Additionally, and quite apart from drugs which are now so much part of our modern world, the past century’s technological advances have produced many insidious byproducts that threaten an individual’s well-being. We live in a chemical-oriented society. Smog, for instance, was unknown before the rise of manufacturing centers in Britain. Every major city on Earth now advises its inhabitants daily about the quality of air they are breathing. A hundred years ago, the main food preservatives were salt or ice. Today, nearly any packaged food has a list of artificial additives that is longer than the natural ingredients. Environmental disasters such as the 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power station—to say nothing of radiation exposure elsewhere from widespread nuclear bomb testing—only began 50 years ago.

There is no escaping our contaminated civilization. It would be one thing if the results of all these chemicals were only physiological. But drugs hamper mental ability and spiritual growth.