Drugs and war: savage selfishness

It doesn't matter which way round you mix these two nouns with a preposition or conjunction, it's all a caricature about blindness: the drug war, the war on drugs, the drug of war, the war drug, drugs and war, drugs for war. They have something in common, drugs and war. They tell the same story about us, they are facets of the same coin, no matter which way you flip it.

Both are savage. Drugs savage the lives of addicts and their families and the innocents caught up in the melee, as the individuals descend into the dehumanity of substance addiction and its consequent compulsions. Wars savage the pasts and futures of their survivors, not to mention the unspeakable horrors attendant to those that don't.

These savage destructions eat away at the very foundations of human society. Depriving us of many of our greatest minds and talents, at the same time as they demand copious quantities of love and resources to heal the wounds inflicted on all around. The dehumanization of both war and drugs festers in our societies long after the events have passed. Much of the pain and many of the scars living on in the remaining souls, with nowhere to go but to the grave with their bearers. Those who have lived through drugs and war, and emerged the other side, know this. Those still at war and in drugs cannot see it from where they are. There is no more point asking a soldier in a tank if war is worth it, then there is asking a heroine addict if they really need their next fix. Neither can answer the question because they do not see a choice, and neither would you if you were in their place.

These observations and understandings are as old as literature and repeated telling has not given them the weight of history, as measured by lessons that could be learned. It is the similarity of war and drugs that peeks my interest and leads to asking for answers that might apply to both.

For one thing, they betray our deep desire to retain for ourselves the certainty of our sanctity, even in the face of facts. Is our certainty so precious to us, so valuable to our psychology, that we will pervert everything we know to sustain it? Evidently so. So if not for ourselves, will we care for others enough to let their suffering move the veils from our eyes? No, apparently not. For in both war and drugs, we have the capacity to dehumanize the victims in order to maintain our righteousness. So don't tell me we are fighting wars or drugs to save anyone other than our own illusions of our purity, and I won't tell you that you're defiling the humanity of your soul if you do.

Such is our savage selfishness. We destroy ourselves to protect our illusions and in the process destroy countless innocents. For thousands of years our most ancient traditions have understood the connection between illusory thinking and drugs and violence. There are five addictive and destructive behaviors spelled out, they are: hurting, stealing, lying, substance abuse and sexual abuse. The key to understanding these is that they are not just harming, they are also compulsorily reproductive. In their very action they inspire the illusion that their action necessitates and so drive a spiral of repetition and deeper and deeper illusion.

This is not a hopeless affair. It is our task to break the cycle. It is our opportunity to grasp, as it has been for our forebears, and will be for our posterity, if we do not. The task at hand is to stop the delusion. To stop our own self-delusion with all the care, forgiveness and love we have.

In the matters of drugs and war, today, here in this moment of our world now, we must drop the illusion that it is we who are the victims of others. We are not perpetrated against, we are the masters of our destiny and the creators of our fate. If we cannot stop ourselves from desiring and consuming substances, we have no business punishing others for providing them. If we have made ourselves dependent on resources we do not have, we have no right to subjugate others for owning them. The severed heads rolling across the disco floors of Mexico and the severed family links floating down the Tigris are both a direct result of the savagery of our savage selfishness.

Enough! We must own our own responsibility if we are to regain our right to our integrity. The drug of war and the war on drugs are the same tales of two coins. On the other side we can find people, humans in all their imperfect frailty and as worthy and deserving of our love and forgiveness as they are of our calling to them to take the higher road to land light side up.

Now think of Afghanistan...
We savage the people we fight, whose fighters we support by illegalizing the violence we import that savages our own social fabric. What price this selfish delusion?