On Drugs

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 27^th of October, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here,
mortals, creatures of the earth,
who each say with joy the great words "I am!"

Crown'd by sun and moon,
robed in autumn wind and the mist of rivers,
we come freely to this time of worship
here to discover the deeper freedoms
that enrich our responsibilities.

And so we pray: (together) may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

Right now, in St. Paul, Minnesota, a woman named Clara weeps in her bed thinking about the death of her beloved Senator, Paul Wellstone, as her daughter sits in a pile of costumes on the floor next to her bed, trying to pick out just the right one for All Hallows Eve.

Right now, on an island not far from Seattle, a woman named Ann gets up early, brews coffee, and reads her Sunday Times, the steam fogging her bifocals in the cold.

Right now, in Kuching on the island of Borneo, an old man named Tanjing tosses fitfully, unable to sleep. He worries that the bloodshed in Bali last week will soon be coming closer to him.

Right now, in Sri Lanka, in Kandy, a young 18-year-old monk named Aveli rises from his bed to bring a soothing tea to his beloved abbot, who is ailing and quite sick.

Right now in Baghdad, a man named Rushid eats a late supper of artichokes at a café not far from Straight Street. He thinks about his Kurdish wife, and utters a spontaneous silent prayer to Allah for her safety and his own.

Right now in Barcelona, the apartment of a woman named Elizabeth is empty, as she is attending a Unitarian Universalist conference up in Spa, Belgium.

Right now, in Washington D.C. a police chief sorts out the scars caused by being a witness to so much horror in his work, as a woman named Leslie wakes up finally after her first good sleep in months, and a Muslim convert Gulf War Veteran named DeVon lies awake thinking of how many casualties never really get reported.

Right now, in Columbus Ohio, a minister named Mark strikes a temple bowl to invite the gathered people to experience silence, where their own part in the great fabric of heart and hurt and healing that is the world might also

strike them, and set them to ringing….

(silence)

Let us declare our communion with all humankind, by imagining, in silence or even saying aloud, the names of those persons whom we love, those who have loved us, those whom we miss, those with whom we struggle, those who are ailing. Let this communion of imagination and heart be the firm ground upholding both music and word this morning.

(naming)

Let our human hearts struggling to be wise be set free in the beauties of singing. Let the bread of wisdom and the wine of compassion be set out on the table which is spread for us every-where if we but notice, a rich feast for the nourishment of lovers.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from Walter Truitt Anderson's book, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be, a fine overview of the predicaments and visions of the last fifty years.

Every society appears to have a few mind-altering substances in its repertoire; some of those are gentle modifiers of mood or energy, and some are brain-bashing invaders that transform all concepts of personal and cosmic reality. In the 1960's, when drug use came out of the closet in Western Civilization, it was commonly believed that the psychedelics, like LSD, enabled the user to "drop out" of socially constructed reality and to tune in to a "cosmic reality" beyond culture. With the right drugs, you would find the real world and the True Self.

But it became apparent rather soon, to everyone who wasn't stoned in the process of thinking about it, that the matter was a good deal more complicated. People who used drugs were still inside their cultures and their cultures were inside them.

And to further complicate the matter, people are ingeniously creating new substances and finding ways to make old ones even stronger than they used to be. Sensimilla marijuana, grown in many parts of the world today, is several times more powerful than the Acapulco Gold that blew the minds of young and old a few decades ago. And crack, some say, is instant addiction.

Although politicians effortlessly make pronouncements about what the American people really believe, the evidence is strong that at any given time, a considerable portion of said American people are shooting up, snorting cocaine, swallowing pills, tripping, smoking dope, getting drunk, or any of a myriad other ways of turning to private dramas that only have the shakiest links to the official public reality.

This is not only a matter of domestic custom, but of international agriculture and trade. Every morning, peasants in South America get up and go to work tending coca plants to produce substances that will ultimately disappear up noses in Beverly Hills, while laborers in Scotland tend their vats to produce whiskey that will ultimately wash down the throats of men in South America who make their money in the cocaine business. A lot of people in the world and a lot of land are engaged in the production of substances that help human brains play around with reality. The early post-modern years are easily the dopiest in the human history.

Anthropologists tell us that there is nothing unusual about the ingestion of mind-altering substances…indeed, it is probably the norm of human life rather than a deviation from it. Primitive societies managed to have drug use without drug problems. They successfully ringed it around with prohibitions and rituals. These were unified homogenous societies, which undoubtedly made it easier for them to manage the drug experience.

We don't have such rituals in the contemporary pluralistic world. Instead, we have rampant experimentation and enormous problems: addiction, crime, diseases spread by needles, young men slaughtering one another on city streets, countless deaths from drug and alcohol-related accidents, immeasurable damage to the health and productivity and sanity of society and the individuals within it. And the U. S. government found it necessary to launch a "war on drugs" to deal with the problem.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from Rose Macaulay, a Canadian born writer who wrote these words in an Open Letter in 1937.

You truly point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated, and we shall not, even if we abolish war, abolish hate and greed. So it might have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath?

Sermon: On Drugs [Next][back to top]

A sermon on such a topic can only be, at best, an apéritif, an hors d'oeuvre. There are a thousand things I cannot mention, for the time, and courses I cannot offer, in so short of time. But feel free, in the coming months, to discuss these ideas and issues with each other and with me, if you wish. And please take the Statement of Conscience which I have placed on a chair out in the Gallery.

I met a guy named W. three years ago. I was sitting down on a bench in the downtown area, drawing a particularly beautiful oak tree, when W. came up to me to see what I was doing.

Without a word he sat down on the bench next to me. I could smell beer on his breath. He leaned over and watched me draw for a bit. He said "hello" and I said, "hello" back, but otherwise we were both quiet. Because he looked kind of scruffy, I sort of expected him to ask for some spare change after he made a few perfunctory comments on my drawing skills to butter me up.

Then he noticed the design on the T-shirt I was wearing. It was a gift that someone brought me from Spain, with a embroidered picture of the famous Alhambra with an Arabic inscription under the embroidery.

Somewhat to my surprise, he read the Arabic aloud, clearly pronouncing it slowly, and to my mind, quite accurately.

"I see you can read Arabic," I said to him.

"A little. I'm studying it on my own. It's so I can eventually read the Quran in the original."

"Ah, so you are converting to Islam?"

"Yeah, I guess I am," he said, apparently intrigued that I even knew what the Quran was.

He told me his name and stuck out his hand. I told him my name and shook his hand.

We ended up talking for over an hour. He was surprised at my religious knowledge and I guess I was surprised at his, considering his visible rough edges.

Finally I said to him, "When you came up to me, I could tell you had had a few beers. How are you squaring that with your conversion to Islam? I thought Muslims agreed not to drink."

"Yeah," he smiled, "you're right, I shouldn't be drinking, but Ido love my beer."

W. and I continued to talk, and over the next few months he and I met several times, and I had him over for some supper a couple of times. Then it became clear to me he was doing more than beer. And it was his predilection for cocaine that eventually landed him in the penitentiary, someplace up north near Cleveland, where he was originally from.

Now of course, some of his arrest has to do with the times and places of his infraction of the law, with culture and, undoubtedly, since this is the United States, race. After all, Sigmund Freud was a white man who lived a long time ago, and an inveterate cocaine user, and no one threw him in jail, even though he wrote about it openly. This is because cocaine trafficking was not condemned in those days. But I assure you, W. is most definitely in jail.

I write to him biweekly. He writes back, with the best handwriting on earth, by my lights. He continues to study his Arabic. He is dealing with his drug and alcohol problem in some sort of group therapy situation in the penitentiary.

W. is a fine intelligent human being. Quick as can be, educated, passionate, and a precise and reliable worker when he has a job. I've known him as a man clearly looking for something real amid all of life's regrets and disappointments, looking for depth and quality of experience amid the shallows. I could tell you he convinced himself that drugs were a short cut to brilliance of experience. But I think there is far more involved here than someone just fooling himself.

You see, when I first got to know W. and asked him that question about his alcohol use, it was very clear to me that alcohol affected him entirely differently than it affects me. There was a complete personality change, at an almost Dr. Jeckyll/ Mr. Hyde level. A few beers make me sleepy. A few beers made him wild and boundaryless. I once stopped at his place to visit him on my way home from the office and encountered him high on a much more powerful drug than beer, perhaps cocaine. He was quite wild, but I clearly recognized the totality and sheer physicality of his transformation. And thus I recognized that his body is not like my body at all. It processes things differently than mine.

Yes, W. was imprisoned for breaking the law. But ultimately, W. was imprisoned because his body reacts to drugs differently than the average person. He was imprisoned for who he is physically, not who he is as a whole human person of will, need and desire.

My old neighbor Oliver was imprisoned for drug trafficking, too. In his case, the drugs he was taking daily on the ghetto streets of Oakland, where we both lived, did for him exactly what Paxil and Selexa and other modern medications do for white suburban folks…reduce anxiety and lessen depression. Oliver, however, was in a social situation, without insurance, and without a steady job, where he very cleverly learned to self-medicate. Unfortunately, it's against the law to do that.

And I used to make the long trip to the Santa Rita Jail to visit him. Just like the young girl in our story this morning. I found the whole experience of visiting Oliver in the jail to be a powerful learning experience in every way.

I, for one, am not convinced that imprisonment can teach anyone how to change their body, change their physical reactions to chemicals either within the body or ingested into it. A cell is not a teacher. Isolation is not a professor. Prison violence makes a poor classroom.

Thus, I find I am ethically bound to seek other solutions to problems associated with drug use and drug trafficking.

And let's be clear. There are problems, no matter how open some of us in this room may be to marijuana and martinis. Anderson writes clearly and cleanly about this. "Things are more complicated than we thought," he writes with a rather restrained charity, as the blood of young men killed in drug runs pours down the drains of our cities. His riff on the international character of the drug industry is witty (cocaine and Scotch), but also, oh so true.

And then, what family in North America has not been visited with some horrific drug-related problem? Can you think of one? I can't. Such problems might be a suicide, an overdose, a culture of denial and blame, the incredibly self-righteous "just say no" moralism, the economic debacles of our cities and international relationships, even the wholesale destruction of families, institutions and communities. Clearly, to say that there are no problems associated with many kinds of drug usage and present policies is simply a fiction.

Now, I need to say something here to make clear the context from which I am giving this sermon. I am going to say that all of us are drug users. Every single person in this room. I am not just talking about the drugs which we don't call drugs…coffee, tea, chocolate, Cabernet, a Mai Tai, aspirin, niacin and vitamin B, and sugar cookies. I am talking about the drug-reality of all animal life. After all, our physical bodies are partially electro-chemical in nature, our brains are awash in drugs. A worshipper at some pentacostal church, belting out a song, and waving hands, and getting excited enough to dance is not on cocaine. And a Unitarian Universalist sitting in ecstasy, as Myra plays a stirring offertory, is not on the drug Ecstasy. But some of the same lobes of his or her brain are being stimulated, with chemicals not very different from those found in a line of white powder on a mirror, or a small tablet to swallow.

Coffee can brighten a morning, chocolate can soothe an afternoon, and none of us are imprisoned for partaking, for these are relatively mild drugs. We have already decided some drugs are legal. The ordinary human situations of falling in love and deep grief both change the chemistry of the brain like a drug does. And literature and music would not exist as they do without the brain- swooning chemicals associated with those two realities washing through our synapses with every kiss and every tear.

Our bodies are actually flasks of drugs with skeletons tucked inside, in some ways. The very neurons of our brains, which light up to say "I am," don't even fire without certain chemicals, or drugs, present as transmitters.

This is my context, but, of course, I know that my beliefs do not reflect what most folks understand when they hear the word "drugs." Mostly, I think, the word "drug" means some sort of chemical imported into the body, not generated within it by experiences and bio-logical necessity.

And Anderson is right when he suggests that anthropologists have never found a human culture untouched by some sort of drug usage.

I remember once having the privilege of working on an archeological dig in the State of Illinois. We were digging up a village over a thousand years old not far from the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. What the archeologists found that perplexed them were burial pits of tiny river frogs, smaller than your little finger nail. They were so small you could barely tell they were frogs. And yet their skeletons were so large in proportion to their flesh that it was inconceivable that the Native peoples used these frogs for food. There simply was not enough meat on the bones of all them put together to keep a person alive for a day.

The archeologists studied the situation for years, until one of them suggested that the skin of the frog might be the clue. They tested modern examples of this species, and, wouldn't you know it, the frogs were a drug. A mild hallucinogen. After the venison was brought in, the fish smoked and the acorns leached and ground into flour, the social practice was to join in a circle of getting high.

But this was a monolithic society, as Anderson pointed out, with rituals and social sanctions to corral the drug use into tolerable usage. No street gangs, overdoses, no lost lives, just a little fun.

But our modern multi-cultural society has no such cultural center. Sanctions have been dropped, replaced by crisp laws. Rituals of family and religion have been replaced by moralism on one hand and anything goes on the other. Individualism rules the roost and experimentation just goes part and parcel with it. Now please, I don't condemn the modern world; after all, I am part of it, and decidedly an individual, and I certainly have experimented myself. But Anderson says, with justification, that ours is the most doped up generation in the history of humanity, and I think I have to agree with him.

And so our pluralistic modern world, bereft of a shared center, a common ritual, or even social health policies worth spitting at, has decided to declare "war" on drugs.

The metaphor is a strong one, but a destructive one ultimately. So far, the war resembles the sad and blurrily-remembered debacle called the Vietnam War more than it resembles some great triumph.

So thus I am one of many who have joined to protest the waging of such a drug war, for the same reason Rose McCauley protested in her day. You see, this war against drugs with its prison terms and stealth attacks in Colombia and Oregon does not even acknowledge the human reality behind the drugs. It simply demonizes them, blames them, and tucks them under the shadow of red-faced attempts to control and curtail. Macauley, in her letter, neatly reasons that tanks and guns don't destroy greed or hatred, they just kill human beings. The causes for the conflict are left un-witnessed and un-admitted. But she says that the American abolitionists, on the other hand, had a more holistic response. They worked to end slavery by dealing with the real issues of economics, and human dignity. They knew very well that they would not, by abolishing slavery, bring an end human need or greed or hatred. They were not utopian. But they recognized that slavery was a betrayal of all that is best in our humanity.

I think the way we have been responding to drug issues in this nation reflects neither our best thinking nor the authentic reality of our compassion. I agree that the needs and issues which drugs address in the human person will not go away even if every coca plantation is destroyed down in Colombia, and the last drug user is thrown in the clinker. And this is precisely why these methods don't work…they treat the symptoms not the reality, the symbolic ecstasy, not the whole embodied human being. The future must address the reality of drugs in a human context, a social context, a medical context, a cultural context and even a spiritual context, and there will be no easy answers, or maybe even unified answers.

But delegates to our Unitarian Universalist annual General Assembly went through a long process for several years discussing this issue. They overwhelmingly passed a Statement of Conscience about this issue last year in Quebec. This carefully crafted document is available to you as you leave the Meeting House this morning. I ask that you read it as you are able and reflect upon it as it impacts your own lives. You may disagree with some of it, agree with all of it, or it may just stimulate your thinking about this or move your heart.

But it is not this document, but my friendship with W., an Ohio citizen, which makes me keenly aware of how we treat folks who have a drug problem and who have no history of violence. Whereas Ohio is already better than many states in providing the kind of treatment that Warren is getting, I know there is a controversial proposal on the ballot in the coming election, one asking for a still more significant change in State social policy on these issues. The pros and cons about this proposal each have interesting arguments. But no matter what the objections are to creating State policy by a yea or nay vote of the populace, I personally have no doubt that social policy around this issue, both at the State and Federal level, needs to be improved. Because the problems Anderson addresses are not going to blow away using the clumsy techniques of our present War on Drugs. Our social policies need to reflect our actual physical humanity, so that human beings are treated, in part, as actual bodies who do not respond to the ubiquitous reality of drugs in the same way, and who are neither educated nor liberated by our present techniques. I'd go so far as to say that our State and Federal public health policies around this issue need to actually reflect one of the principles we Unitarian Universalists cherish so much, "the intrinsic worth of every human person." This, no matter how different our body, our chemistry or our social setting. No exceptions, ever.

W. will get out in July and try to begin his life over again. I will stand by him as he does, in support and witness and friendship. He is armed with his devotion to the Quran's teaching on a compassionate Allah, a good devotional life, and the sincere encouragement of a good medical program. I have every hope this precious human life could be saved, not lost, blessed, not cursed, if his whole society were as supportive of his dignity as his friends and his religion. And if we are not in the business of blessing, not cursing, what business are we in?

Prayer: [back to top] ( a poem from the Book of Hours by Rilke 1905)

You, darkness, from which I come

I love you more than all the fires
which fence out the world,
excluding all those not encircled
by the light.

But darkness, you hold it all.

The shadows and the flames,
the beasts and even me.

How you hold us,
all powers, all visions.

It lets me imagine a great Presence
is stirring here, among us.
I have faith in you, o night.

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