Editorial October 21, 1985 Issue

Can drugs provide redemption?

WILLIAM E. MOODY

Some observers have noted that for many people medicine has almost taken on the aura of a religion for this age of advanced technology. Now there is a drug that would supposedly offer a special communion to its users—a kind of "New Age," no-sacrifice redemption.

An article in a major newsmagazine earlier this year reported on the drug MDMA, also called "Ecstasy." It is claimed to have the "power to make people trust one another," and to bring feelings of "euphoria, increased energy, greater self-esteem." The purported benefits of the drug have led some researchers "to conclude that if everyone took it the world would be a better place."^{Newsweek, April 15, 1985, p. 96 .}

That assumption is of course highly debatable. For it could be argued that a strictly mechanistic, biological view of man's nature and the attempts to alter that nature through chemical and physical means can only lead humanity on a downward path—back to the dust of more primitive conceptions of man's origin and being. The view that man is essentially an organic machine whose body and brain can be physically or psychologically manipulated into a better functioning and more worthy object surely leaves out the more profound issues of the spirit.

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