It is clear that our society has a problem with consciousness-altering drugs. But our "war on drugs" looks less like a solution than like a reflection of the underlying problem. Why war? Because many of us are more comfortable finding the source of our difficulties "out there," and then fighting the "enemy" we have found. One need not be psychologically sophisticated to see that the need for outside enemies shows a psychic structure not in harmony with itself. In the war on drugs, this externalizing of the problem is manifested on several levels. Most obviously, there is the war's aggressive targeting of the drug-growing countries. Focusing on narco-terrorists like Noriega and the Medellin cartel, as has been noted, neglects the obvious fact that it is demand in America, combined with our laws of prohibition, that bring into being this criminal network of drug production. Our righteous rage at the countries that export their drug crops to the American market is itself like a narcotic that helps to dull the spiritual pain and confusion that underlie the national epidemic of drug addiction. Even when we do turn to the problem within our boundaries, again the solution is sought through combat between "Us" and "Them." We bring the tools of war to bear not only on violent traffickers, but even on the unfortunate people who have turned to drugs to fill some void in their lives. The war on drugs calls for more police and bigger prisons, while the real work of healing broken lives is treated as a mere afterthought. Never mind that those with the biggest problem with drugs are generally those whose needs our society has most failed to meet-- the young, the minorities, those with shattered families and schools that lead nowhere. They are the enemy, and our leaders come to them with a punitive rather than a compassionate spirit. Finally, we pretend that drugs are the problem, barely bothering to ask what there is about us and our society that is being enacted through both our drug abuse and our hysteria about the traffic in these substances. So we demonize the stuff itself, and prepare to launch ecological warfare against plants, to drop insects on alien growing fields like bombs over Tokyo. It is not, as in an earlier age, "demon rum" that we see as evil incarnate, but other substances. The problem, however, is not so much with the substances as with the way they are used in our society. Dr. Andrew Weil, a University of Arizona authority on consciousness-altering drugs, has noted that the distinction between "good drugs" and "bad drugs" is found all over the world. But as to which is which, different cultures disagree. In our culture, alcohol is accepted in hashish is an evil thing. In some Muslim countries, it is the other way around. Most of these drugs, in one place or another, have been thought to have not demonic, but sacred properties. In the world of the Mediterranean, wine was part of sacred ritual --as it still is in Christian communion and Jewish sabbath. The Native Americans, who introduced Europeans to the use of tobacco, smoked that plant at special times as a sacrament. Other mind-altering plants have been used in other cultures to give visions to youths making the transition into manhood, and to elders seeking the wisdom to guide their community. Even our legal drugs, as we so often hear these days, wreak destruction when abused. The leaf the Indians used sacramentally is chain-smoked by millions, and daily a thousand Americans die as a result. The wine of which Dionysus was the god, which Jesus gave his apostles, and which Jews are encouraged to drink even to the point of intoxication at certain special festivities-- is also the addiction of winos lying in alleys and gutters. But conversely, even some drugs that we have made illegal, when used in the right context with sufficient care, have played a constructive role in the spiritual life of peoples. The need for visions is fundamental to human life and human cultures, and people have sought various ways to alter their consciousness. (Jesus had his crucial spiritual confrontation, it is said, after fasting forty days and forty nights.) Amid the current debate over legalization, this point has been neglected: that not all use is abuse. [Never mind that our "drug czar" is a long-time addict to nicotine. Drugs are something that "they" use, and which "we" will deprive them of.] What is good or evil is not generally the substances themselves. It is our relationship to them-- or rather, our relationship to the forces within ourselves that the plant drugs unleash. Plant drugs have been regarded as sacred because they can open up the realm of human consciousness, which is a sacred domain. They have been regarded as diabolical because at the heart of what we have called sin is treating the sacred without respecting its sacredness. This sin, or spiritual ignorance of what it is we are dealing with, is the core of the problem. And not just with drugs. Being careless with sexual energies, which are also sacred, we get epidemics of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Treating the sacred biosphere, on which we depend for our survival, as mere resources to exploit to satisfy our addiction to things, we bring our house down around us. The person addicted to drugs --whether alcohol or cocaine-- shows his spiritual ignorance in mistaking the external substance for the spiritual state that must ultimately be found within. (The poet Robert Bly said of his alcoholic father that he thirsted for Spirit but reached for the wrong one.) Not only the addicts, but also those who make war on them are running away from experiencing a poverty of spirit. To avoid facing the need for inward healing, our leaders lead the outward charge. Those who are possessed by internal forces they have made demonic are assailed by those who are afraid to confront those spiritual forces in themselves. It is no coincidence that the war on drugs intensifies at the very times when the leaders of our society are most lacking in a vision of what we are as a people and where we are going. The war on drugs is a reflection of a state of consciousness where access to visionary experience is blocked. From disciplines of meditation to Jungian dream interpretation, the lesson is that the experience that brings healing wisdom requires a kind of openness: the part that is in control must treat with respect those voices and energies it has suppressed. Where there is no vision, says Proverbs, the people perish. What we need is not a war on drugs, but to heal the spiritual ignorance that has hindered our having a healthy relationship to our visionary capacities.

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War. ??