We live in a culture of drugs.  We have street drugs, booze drugs, prescription drugs, hormone drugs. Even, some might say, the natural opiates, and dopamine chemicals we trigger by our addictions to shopping, gambling, sex, Nancy Grace, eating, and so many unpleasant and hideous addictions.  We see crime, racism, even murder due to drugs both in alleys and gated estates.

So, wassup wid da drugs, man?

It is a puzzle as old as culture itself. There is no one answer as to why we have become so saturated in snake-oil solutions and piled under pills. There are many answers. Greed is one.  People get rich selling both legal and illegal drugs. Real illness is yet another answer.  A child wanting to be one of the gang is one answer, as well.  A time tested tradition, a cultural ritual is one reason. Widespread easy access through improved commerce and technology can share some blame.

There are almost as many reasons as to why human beings have come to rely upon drugs as there are boner pill commercials on television.  Is anyone else out there sick to death of those ads, and the three page ads with tiny print about disclaimers and side effects?  It is enough to drive you to, well, drugs.

And yet, there is one total and complete commonality that every kind of drug use, both good and bad, we can readily identify.

People have always, and will always, take drugs to avoid pain and alienation. They avoid pain of real injury. They avoid pain of feeling alone. They avoid pain of the madness of our polluted, war mongering, and hate-filled world.  Yet pain of not belonging is not always doled out in the street in holocausts. The pain to be avoided may be subtle.

Steroid abuse, for example, might have an element of greed to it. The guy with the most muscles is going to earn more right? But at the very core of it, why does someone want to earn more than others?  Why is he inadequate without biceps that look like flour sacks? He wants to avoid the pain of poverty, failure, alienation, and more.  What about someone taking Meth? She is desperate, and has to sell her body to get the fix. But she began with the first hit as a way to escape some kind of mental, emotional, or even physical pain.  Addiction is a devastating side effect of turning toward chemicals, and it destroys individuals, families, communities, and apparently, planets.

What about the example of the business man who just frequents the same bar and gets pleasantly buzzed a few times per week.  He is surely not just trying to escape pain is he?

Pain comes in many forms.  He may be masking the pain of not feeling up to the task of spending that time with his wife and children instead. Or he may just find that he truly “belongs” with his fellow bar flies, and what is wrong with that?  There may be plenty wrong with it as far as his liver, or fellow drivers in traffic, might come to detect.

The reason we are in such a drug deluge is that we are a self-deluding species. We have internal and external pollution and feel powerless to get off terrible treadmills of modern stress, garbage and ugliness.

The world, fortunately, has a welcome remedy that does not come in pill, syrup, bottle, or needle. The answer is the world itself.

When we turn to our natural connections, and natural medicines of the outdoor world in which we evolved, we find that belonging that so mercilessly eludes all of those lost in a bottle, trapped in a pill jar, passed out in a crack house, or pumped up on steroids.

Belonging to one another, belonging to the air, water, soil, and food sources of nature connect us to them in ways no artificial chemicals ever can.

Does this mean we don’t have to take our medicines, or that we have to give up prescriptions or a nice bottle of wine.  Of course not!

It just means it is time to realize that we are zoning out of life, over-medicating, and escaping the most precious gifts of abundant joy that there could ever be, our gift of belonging.  Connection fills in where alienation-driven “addictions” fall short.

When human beings realize we need to love and care for one another, our fellow creatures, and for our one creation, and our oneness, we can do better.

Whenever it is possible then, take a walk, don’t take a pill.