Any Pharmaceutical You Want 8-23-10

Anderson, South Carolina

While eating breakfast today with someone working on the federal court, I was given quite a sobering perspective on just how pervasive and problematic the use of pharmaceuticals and illicit ‘street’ drugs has become in our nation. Glenda describes something like 80% of her docket deriving from assorted drug cases. Apparently, dealing drugs is financially akin to winning the Power Ball Lottery for people newly arrived in this country, unable to find work. They can make more in a single drug deal than in a year under the hot tropical sun. For certain, it is difficult to find fault with someone desperate to feed their loved ones.

Perhaps ‘fault’ lies with those who actually create demand and give economic incentives to other to produce and distribute life-altering substances. One has to be careful about assigning fault. Those caught in the clutches of drug addiction or alcoholism are essentially powerless to do anything about slaking their demand for self administered torture. What started out as a recreational high or buzz is transformed into a journey of unimagined torments. For certain, these substances are altering our lives and the landscape of our land. Not an hour after this enlightening breakfast encounter, I visited houses in the ‘hood that clearly demonstrate the destructive power of addictive substances. It was stupefying to see how addiction tears out the foundations of many lives, without mercy.

Working with those in recovery has given me a vast respect for the potency of drugs and alcohol. Wonderful, beautiful, handsome people with all the potential in the universe end up very cold and still on the beds of intensive care units, if they are lucky. Others much less lucky die alone at their own hand in dingy road houses, intent on ending the litany of pain that has swept over their lives.

Alas, it’s become effortless to self-medicate misery. It’s no longer necessary to even get out of the house and go to liquor stores or dealers in the ‘hood. For several years I have received e-mail touting pharmaceuticals at a steep discount. Recently a new variant has come to my in-box; offers to sell all manner of controlled drugs, the very ones I see annihilate many dear people around me on a daily basis, without the necessity of going for a prescription and faxing it someplace off shore. “We take care of prescription” relieves us of the need for a physician or his wisdom. Self-medicating has never been easier or more destructive. It’s probably safe to say that most people around me are experiencing the challenges of pervasive pharmaceutical use, illicit and otherwise.

When I receive offers to buy low-cost Xanax, Valium, Oxycotin, or Vicodin on-line without need of my doctor’s wisdom or DEA number, I have access to a slippery slope that makes an Olympic alpine ski jump look like a toddler’s first crawl across the living room carpet. As a culture that has succumbed to material, relational, sexual, and chemical addictions, to suddenly have access to self-medication is truly more dangerous than conventional warfare. Certainly, far more of our citizens are dying and disrupting the lives of those they love than ever was accomplished by conventional explosives or Improvised Explosive Devices. The potential for long-term destructive power has never been greater than that available with self-prescribed chemical warfare applied to our minds.

In a culture where divorce, unemployment, social isolation, secular materialism, foreclosure, and relational conflict have reached historic highs, one do not have to long wonder at widespread attempts to self-medicate; to blunt the pain that comes from secular lives lived under one’s own power.

In recovery, the very first lesson learned is that life lived under one’s own power does not work; it becomes quite unmanageable and faces certain destruction. An all important lesson soon follows; proving that when we have declared our efforts at running our own lives null and void and have turned them over to the care of a Higher Power, we have a chance. It is counter-intuitive in a self-made culture long preaching the mantra of self-sufficiency, to believe that giving up and yelling ‘uncle’ is the way to resurrection, power, and renewal; but it is. One finds this moment of powerless transforming many of the lives of historical figures we hold precious in our hearts.

The message of great hope in recovery is that we can experience utterly transformed lives by virtue of a spiritual encounter with God. None other than Carl Jung, the father of modern psychiatry, declared as much, very succinctly. “To me these occurrences are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.”

The early pioneers of twelve step recovery were no less global or hopeful in their assessment of the ability of God to transform live shipwrecked on the rocks of addiction. “The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God's universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves.”

Self-medication is an equal-opportunity executioner. I recognize the staff of all our local mortuaries from my regular visits. God is an equal opportunity Savior. I recognize His grace operating in my life and the lives of those who have cried ‘uncle’ and sought a new way. He has made his strength manifest in our weakness.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.