Drugs and the Face of Evil

Sat, 01 Dec 1990 00:00:00 -0500

O ne of the least understood aspects of the drug problem is the degree to which it is in the end a moral and spiritual problem.

I continue to be amazed at how often people I speak to in treatment centers refer to drugs as the great lie, the great deception, indeed as a product of the Great Deceiver. An astonishing number of people in treatment have described crack cocaine to me simply as “the Devil.” This has come up too often and too spontaneously in conversation to be ignored.

You will know what I mean, then, when I say that in visiting treatment centers, prisons, inner-city communities, and public housing projects across the country over the past twenty-one months I’ve seen what I can only describe as the face of evil. Those people who doubt that there is evil in the world need to travel a few weeks with me on the drug circuit.

Recently a police officer told me about going into an apartment after receiving a complaint and finding there a four-year-old child and a one-year-old child. They had been in there by themselves for three days. The four-year-old had been left by his mother to care for the one-year-old. Now my wife and I have a six-year old and a one-year old at home. I know something about four-year-olds and their capabilities. Babysitting is not one of them. I don’t suppose that anyone would deny that for a four-year old to be left in charge of a one-year old for three days is not very wise child rearing. When the police entered and spoke to the children, the one-year-old was still holding on to the hand of her older brother. And the little boy said, “This is my sister and my mother told me to take care of her and I will.” The little boy was manfully trying to do his best. While the police were there, the mother came in with a roll of money in her hand. She had been out walking the streets to get the money to support her crack habit.

That’s not the kind of story that’s going to make the headlines or the evening news. But that’s the kind of story that is being told too often every day in communities all over America. Child-abuse experts tell me that they think that much of the dramatic increase in child abuse and neglect is due to drugs.

You may have heard the story from the West Coast of a six-month-old child who died of an overdose of crack. How does a six-month old die of an overdose of crack? Because her mother or father, we’re not sure which, inhaled crack and then, to quiet the baby, blew crack into the baby’s mouth until the baby was destroyed.

Or you may have heard the story from Detroit of the woman who owed a debt to her drug dealer and handed over her thirteen-year-old daughter to the drug dealer in order to pay the debt.

If these kinds of incidents are not the face of evil in our time, I don’t know what is. That is why a spiritual and a moral response is required. Those who believe that because of modernity the categories of right and wrong, of good and evil, no longer apply need to take a close, hard look at the drug problem. If one doesn’t believe in the struggle of the psychomachia —what I was taught to recognize as the struggle between good and evil for possession of the human soul—then one might never get to the heart of this drug problem.

I think that the drug question, although serious in itself, is really symptomatic of a much wider problem. And that has to do with the neglect of the most important things. The most important things have to do with the teaching and passing on of certain true and time-honored values to our children. When we neglect these things, it doesn’t matter what wealth or knowledge we have. For in neglecting the task of transmitting our fundamental values, we lose everything for which this country and our Judeo-Christian religious tradition stand. A recent news report in the New York Times on teenage health problems makes the point inadvertently, but very well:

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Drugs and the Face of Evil