Article October 1, 2013

Thinking it through: we can win out over drug abuse with God’s help

Originally published in a 1991 special edition Christian Science Sentinel “We can win out over drug abuse with God’s help”

The image of war has been used to rally support against drug abuse. But the image of a popular uprising against a tyrant may be more to the point. With the supposed absolute power of a dictator, drug abuse and drug trafficking enforce their own ruthless rules.

The oppressor here is not simply the power of illegal drugs over those who use, sell, or produce them. The tyrant is the fundamental enslavement to the false promises of materialism, the false highs and lows of a life defined exclusively by physicality—by physical environment, scarce resources, and scarce opportunity.

When we look at the lives and communities where drugs are being successfully driven out, many of the resistance fighters are relying on power that is not physical. The mothers and grandmothers who stand up to dealers and crack houses, the teens who serve as counselors to their peers, the parents who band together on behalf of schools, build on a deeper strength. Some of these individuals will say outright that their strength to rise up is from God. But even when individuals may not make that claim for their struggle, we can still discern a divine impetus behind a fight for genuine freedom. That divine impetus is what gives the capacity to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

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