One of the biggest scourges in America is the abuse and over-prescription of drugs, be it legal or illegal. What is this lure that gets reasonable men and women to keep making decisions that are poorly thought through, with detrimental effects, and devastating negative consequences?
While there are a lot of reasons why people voluntarily take drugs I will discuss some of the most prevalent. For some people, there is somewhat of a misimpression that drugs will help them to cope better, to feel better about themselves, and/or to function better in society. The error in this type of thinking is not to acknowledge that life itself will have its up and downs, its highs and lows, and its challenges. Drugs don't necessarily solve the inner problem, but more often than not help to mask the problem, but the problem still remains.
For most people, you don't need drugs to feel better about yourself or your situation. You may think you need drugs but that judgment is often erroneous. People who consider themselves to be in dead-end jobs, or a dead-end life, or dead-end dreams, often turn to drugs because their life is so humdrum, but the taking of the drugs doesn't improve the life or the situation, it only possibly helps to alleviate it temporarily but the underlining problems are still there, unaddressed and unanswered.
To take away the need for drugs, often you must find a purpose in life that is outside of yourself, a drive to better the world, or to improve your neighborhood, or to help someone in need. When you have a determined purpose in life, when life has meaning to you, the need or the desire for drugs is dissipated. Additionally, one must stand up and take responsibility for their decisions and their life in order to beat-down the lure of drugs and its culture. A man with a purpose in life, a man with focused goals, will not allow himself to get sidetracked by the smokescreen and falseness of drug intoxication.
Man has a yearning desire to feel peace, to be blissful, and to be calm and centered. He wrongly believes that through drugs he can achieve these goals but in fact drugs deadens the senses, deadens the mind, and turns off the very light that man needs most. The lure of drugs is the delusion of shortcuts that man wrongly believes will bring lifelong bliss with little or no effort. Every time that you take a shortcut, you have in fact, wandered away from the straight and narrow path and have instead taken a side path to nowhere and to darkness.
While drugs rightly prescribed and taken under supervision have their place and their effectiveness, recreational drugs seldom do. While taking these recreational drugs you feel fortunate if you achieve euphoria or even bliss, but this will dissipate to be replaced once again with emptiness and hollowness. Therefore you will desire to repeat this cycle again and again, but like a rat in a cage that gets up on his exercise wheel and falsely believes that he is running to freedom or better days, you will instead be on the wheel of life that goes nowhere, takes you nowhere, and ends nowhere.