The Safe World

I was interested to read a letter published in the Tablet in which a Catholic housewife and mother expressed her concern that her sons were too readily able to obtain liquor at social functions promoted by the Church.

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I do not quarrel with the point she made. It is very possible that many Catholic organisations are lax in their doling out of liquor to young people, particularly on the social side of the sporting world, where traditionally hard playing and hard drinking have often gone together.

On the other hand, nothing that any anxious critic may say or shout will change the fact that moderate drinking is not in itself sinful; and legal restrictions regarding the age of the drinker do not apply to liquor served to minors under adult supervision.

Inadequate supervision is the problem. We are free ourselves to drink or not to drink, and to express view to others about the merits of total abstention, and even – though this may recoil on our own heads – to forbid our children to drink while they are under our authority. But there is no Christian sanction enjoining total abstention on the followers of Christ. There is only a clear injunction against the misuse of liquor.

It did strike me that this good woman’s comment carried with it a breath of an older and saner world, when the permanent moral danger of drunkenness was what the Church had to worry about. One’s son might get drunk and behave stupidly. One’s daughter might get drunk and lose her virginity. I do not say these dangers have vanished. They may even have increased.

But the most serious danger of intemperance among the young does not now come from the bottle at all. It comes from little pills that can be carried in a purse or folded in a handkerchief. There are signs of the beginning of a shift from a booze culture to a drug culture. A boy may act stupidly because he has had a shot in the arm. A girl may lose her virginity because she is ‘high’ on marihuana.

I do not wish to be an alarmist. The drug problem is at present no bigger than the size of a man’s hand. But the cloud could grow and cover the sky and hide the sun and the stars. Forewarned is forearmed; and it would be an excellent thing if for once we did not find ourselves slamming the door uselessly after the horse had escaped from the stable.

We should think as deeply about this problem as we possibly can, looking for causes and keeping in mind all that we have ever gained from the Church’s natural and supernatural wisdom. For this problem does not only involve our children’s morality; it may also involve their sanity.

There are two very beautiful songs inscribed on a number of modern discs which always make me stop and listen. The first is called ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. The singer asks the mysterious character with the tambourine to deliver him from the anguish and monotony of the present moment to take him for a trip on his magic sailing ship – to lead him far away on to the ‘circus sands’ where there is only the sky above and the earth below and oblivion has swallowed up all knowledge of the past and future.

The song has a most piercing quality. We might shallowly mistake it for a whimsical expression of longing for the fairytale world of childhood; for a page 649 Pied Piper who could lead the singer back to the Garden of Eden. Certainly that is part of its message. But the meaning is more brutal and particular. The Tambourine Man is a drug-peddler; the name of his ship is either M.V. Heroin or S.S. Cocaine; and the magical ‘trip’ is the experience of drug-taking.

Again, I have always found the songs of the Beatles most catchy and charming; and of all their songs I like best that magnificent surrealist lyric, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Here the present itself is transformed into a fairytale where jewelled flowers grow in the parks and railway porters are made of marzipan. And the queen of this new world, if I remember her name rightly, is the Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes.

We may be shallowly delighted by such inventions; and I have already made it clear that I think it one of the best of the modern songs. But the meaning is still more brutal and particular than some of us might suppose – for ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ spells out in code LSD; and LSD is not pounds, shillings and pence, but the highly dangerous hallucinatory drug lysergic acid.

This does not mean, of course, that our children who listen to these remarkable songs are participating in the experience of drug-taking. They may by good luck never attend a party where drugs are offered and used. But the semi-mystical experiences of escape into a safe world of mental liberty and peculiar peace in the forests and valleys of the subconscious, where dream and reality are interchangeable, is achieved in some measure by the songs themselves; and I suggest there will always be a minority who will want to make the actual trip.

Our aeroplanes have broken the sound barrier, by means of jet engines; and some of the new generation have the alternative experience of breaking the mental barrier that divides the waking mind from the world of dreams, by means of dangerous drugs marketed most cynically outside the law by men who prefer money to the welfare of their neighbours.

It is partly a problem in our uses of technology. Technology has not been given to the modern world in measured doses. It has broken upon us in a flood. Drugs, machines, heart transplants, radar, atomic fission, computers – the list could go on indefinitely; and though many of these new things are susceptible to a morally neutral or morally benignant use, it is naïve to suppose that all of them are being used in this way.

Our modern agnostic yogis who pray only to St Galileo are convinced that all such things must be good because they demonstrate the semi-divinity of man. But we Christians are forbidden to travel with them along that cloudy track towards the Secular New Jerusalem. We know that the true Jerusalem is established in the soul wherever the Cross is accepted in the knowledge that man on his own is a miserable nothing.

In regard to the use of drugs by ourselves and our young people, there are several ways in which we can make our wills firmer and our minds clearer. I page 650 do not think panic is any help at all.

Personally, if I thought – which I do not – that we had the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations with guns and bombs whenever it seemed likely that they would acquire a Communist Government, I would also think that we should take a leaf from the Communist book and round up each and every money-lover who is making his fortune out of the illicit sale of drugs and shoot each and every one in the back of the neck. It might be salutary. Is it less evil to drive thousands mad for the sake of money than to commit murder or rape on account of anger or sexual passion?

But the reaction of panic leads often to new evils. Our own Government showed symptoms of panic when they passed laws applying the same penalties to people who use or sell marihuana – a mildly hallucinatory but non-addictive drug which causes certainly no more bodily or mental harm than alcohol – as are applied to those who sell or use cocaine or morphine or heroine or LSD. The laws were probably passed in panic and ignorance. They are certainly better than no laws at all. But they are muddled, and the good intention of their framers does not excuse the muddle.

If I were asked to speak to a group of young Catholics about the dangers of drug-taking I would certainly refuse the assignment; for I would feel obliged to be absolutely honest, and I cannot imagine that any educational authority, Catholic or otherwise, would be prepared to accept this kind of talk.

Yet what alienates the young from us most is our chronic lack of honesty. If we were truly honest with them, we might provoke their violent disagreement, we might even scandalise them, but we would still have their troubled respect. As it is we try to frighten them with half-imaginary bogeys; and when the real evils arrive, very quietly and unsensationally, the young have lost trust in our leadership and have to face the darkness alone.

As with sex, so with drug-taking and many other dangerous pursuits, we must not deviate an inch from what we know to be true if they are going to lend us their attention, let alone their assent.

Supposing, though, that somebody took the risk and actually told me to go ahead and tell such a group whatever I actually knew to be true – how would I go about it? Such a task would indeed terrify me; but, for the sake of truth, I would overcome the terror and say something like this:

‘I have been asked to speak to you about the evils of drug-taking. A few of you may have taken drugs; a few of you may know others who have taken them; but the vast majority of you will know little or nothing about them. If I now say things that may seem to you strange, remember that I am saying only what I know to be true, and saying it for your sake as well as my own.

‘Civilised people throughout history have used drugs in two ways. They have used them for medical purposes, to cure sickness; and they have used them for social purposes, to give themselves what one might call a temporary holiday from reality. Now, in such matters, we Catholics are bound by page 651 Christian tradition and the Church’s interpretation of morality. The Church could have said that nobody should use drugs for any purpose. She could equally have said that drugs could be used, but only for medicinal purposes. What she has said is in conformity with the example of Jesus Christ. Alcohol is a social drug, dangerous to all people sometimes (as when we are going to drive a car) and to some people all of the time, as in my own case, because I am a dry alcoholic who cannot tolerate even an ounce of alcohol.

‘But Jesus Christ drank wine; and He even incorporated wine as one of the necessary species for the great Sacrament of the Altar, when bread and wine – wine which must by Canon Law have a minimum proportion of alcohol – are changed by Him through His priest into His Body and Blood. This is a fact which must scandalise those who advocate absolute abstinence for all Christians. Why did Jesus Christ do this?

‘He did it for many reasons; but of them all I wish to mention only one. He had become wholly a man, a member of the human community; and He wished to bless and supernaturalise whatever man had made, including the use of drugs for social reasons.

‘The people at the marriage at Cana were having a holiday from the harsh realities of their lives – heavy toil, poverty, social justice, personal sorrows, and the pains of living in a country occupied by a foreign army. And He did not condemn them for this.

‘Instead, He joined them in their social pleasure, blessing it and calling it innocent: and He even performed a miracle to give them more wine when the barrels – jars, they would have been then – were empty. Think of that. He performed a miracle to help them when they had run out of grog.

‘Therefore the Church has every reason to tell us that we have the right to use alcoholic liquor moderately as a social drug. She could not do otherwise and still express the mind of her Founder. This does not mean that people are not free to abstain, for reasons of health, or for sacrificial purposes, or for any reason whatever, and that He will not bless their intention also. But it does mean that we cannot condemn drinking as such.

‘A good many of us smoke tobacco. I do myself. You may ask me why I do it, seeing that nicotine is a drug, and smokers run an added danger of dying from lung cancer. I do it because I like it, and as part of human freedom. The Church has not forbidden me to do it. It would be, I think, no more incongruous to think of Our Lord among us now with a cigarette in His hand than it was for Him then to drink wine among His neighbours. Alcohol can kill people. It nearly killed me. Smoking can kill people. If any of us choose to stop smoking, or not to begin smoking, we may be acting very wisely.

‘But if we continue, we are not acting suicidally. We are using a drug to take a slight holiday from reality; or, more exactly, to ease the weight of the real world on our shoulders. God has not forbidden us to do this. He has not page 652 forbidden us to take risks. The world He made for us is a dangerous one; and whatever we do, there will be an element of danger in it. We should meet those dangers prudently but not in a state of panic.

‘There are many other drugs beside alcohol and nicotine which are used in the modern world. Almost every day a new drug is discovered or an old drug spruced up for modern use. If we have a pain in the head, we may take an aspirin; if we are depressed, the doctor may give us Librium; if we cannot sleep, he may give us Nembutal; if we have a special reason to stay awake, he may give us Benzedrine.

‘All these drugs have side-effects as well as the effects that we and the doctors may desire. They are medicinal, but they may also affect our health adversely, and some of them can be habit-forming. A woman who is given morphine in hospital to alleviate the pain of cancer may have to be broken off the morphine habit when the cancer has been removed by surgery. A man who takes Nembutal because he cannot sleep may find he cannot sleep without Nembutal.

‘Now, I would much rather there were fewer drugs scattered around us; and I think we are wise to use them very sparingly and under medical instructions. Half of the drug troubles of the modern world undoubtedly come from the medical use of drugs. It is one of the dangers springing from scientific and technological development. And drugs which may be fairly harmless, or at least not dangerous to life and sanity, when used under medical supervision, can be extremely dangerous if they are used socially.

‘I will give you a comparison to illustrate what I mean. All men who are sane would, I think, agree that it is very foolish to keep a tiger in one’s back yard. If you did, you might be able to saddle it and go at times for rides on its back. The time would come also almost certainly when you ended up inside the tiger. But it would be different if you had a somewhat irritable Alsatian dog.

‘The Alsatian is a relative of the wolf; but it can be domesticated. You might like having the Alsatian because there was an element of danger in keeping him which you would not have if you kept a poodle. If somebody passed a law against people keeping Alsatians, because some people are bitten by them, you would probably be up in arms. And if somebody said that you shouldn’t keep an Alsatian because Alsatians can be dangerous, you might well reply: “What’s that to you? I like a touch of danger. The Alsatian cheers me up and stops life from getting dull.”

‘And then suppose somebody else came along and said that your Alsatian had been seen in the company of other dogs who were known to worry and kill sheep, and your dog would have to be shot because of the bad company he kept – I think you might react quite violently. You would say that nobody was going to shoot your dog unless it was clearly shown that he had actually worried sheep; and you would claim that this officious somebody had it in for page 653 Alsatians from the start.

‘Well, the tiger in the back yard is the dangerous drug which people foolishly try to use socially. Morphine, heroin, cocaine, LSD, and others that are perhaps only now being discovered – these are tigers. They were never meant to be saddled and ridden. They may certainly give people a holiday from reality, but there is no guarantee that they will come back safe and whole again from the other side of the mirror. Most drugs of this kind are addictive. And this will mean that you have to go on riding the tiger whether you want to or not, till at last you are torn apart and devoured in small mouthfuls.

‘For me, booze is a tiger. I couldn’t use it socially or even medicinally without running a most real danger of dying or going mad. That is because I am an alcoholic; and once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. The only way an alcoholic can survive is by staying right away from the booze.

‘Then, you might say, “Mr Baxter will be in favour of laws prohibiting the sale and use of booze.” Not at all. With all the dangers and actual calamities that booze can cause – break-up of families, insanity, road accidents, murders, rapes, endless stupid behaviour – the free will of human beings is an infinitely greater good than being free of these troubles by restricting that free will.

‘And if you challenge me, I point to the example of Our Lord. When He changed water into an alcoholic beverage, He knew perfectly well – far better than we could ever know – that Palestine had its drunkards and broken homes, and that His example would be handed down through history as an argument for the continued social use of alcohol.

‘But He didn’t legislate. He even blessed the norm – the proper human use of a social drug. He demands of us only that we should use our own discretion. If we can’t drink properly we should stop drinking; but if we can drink properly nobody has the right to force us to stop. Booze is an Alsatian dog and not a tiger. You have to learn how to handle it or not handle it at all.

‘I have said publicly before now that I would like to see the use of marihuana legalised in this country. It will not happen, of course. People who sell or smoke reefers – that is, marihuana cigarettes – will be shoved into gaol for long sentences along with people who market or use morphine and heroin and cocaine and LSD. In this case an Alsatian dog is being classed as a tiger. I don’t smoke marihuana myself. I did once and didn’t like it. But I am not in favour of similar laws against the use of booze.

‘Take care to listen now so that you know exactly what I am saying. I am telling you the truth, possibly at a cost to my reputation. I do not advocate the people should drink booze. I do not advocate that people should smoke marihuana. I am aware that there are dangers in both practices.

‘Some people, if they drink booze, may commit compulsive thefts or burn down houses or act in a sexually immoral way. Some people – though, on the available evidence, it would seem fewer – may do the same if they page 654 smoke marihuana. I would probably discourage any friend from smoking marihuana, on the principle that there are far too many drugs, both medical and social, in use already. But I do not like to see muddled and unjust laws passed.

‘The lawmakers say that the use of marihuana can lead, and frequently does lead, to the use of the tiger drugs, the dangerous and addictive ones. That may be so; though I have known a number of people who used only marihuana, and that rarely. But the dog that was seen in the company of the other dogs who worried and killed sheep should not have been shot. The other dogs should have been shot. Then there would be no danger of his being seen in their company.

‘It is not much good if the police pick up a number of unfortunates who use the tiger drugs or sell those drugs to get money because they have become addicted and the drugs are expensive. Those are the little ones, the ones who are being crushed by the bad side of civilisation. The supply should be dried up at its source.

‘There are people overseas and possibly in Australia making millions out of the marketing of dangerous drugs. I would not mind if they were put in gaol for life. They will not be put in gaol, except occasionally, because they use their money to bribe politicians and policemen. I would not mind very much if they were executed, because they are helping to drive other people mad; though I am not in favour of capital punishment in any circumstances. But they will die in their beds, not using drugs, while their victims crowd the wards of mental hospitals and the cells of ugly gaols. It is quite possible they will die and go to Hell. I hope, though, that God will have mercy on them and bring them to repentance.

‘I have mentioned marihuana because I am forcing myself to be strictly honest. Marihuana is not addictive. It causes less bodily and mental harm than the booze does. It does, however, produce vivid daydreams which may verge on hallucination. It is an Alsatian, not a tiger. But Alsatians have to be handled carefully; and, as the law in this country stands, it is classed as a tiger, and anyone would be a fool to smoke it because the legal penalties are so great, and because one might give a dangerous example to others who have never worked out the difference between tigers and Alsatian dogs.

‘What I have told you so far concerns the practical and legal and ethical side of drug-taking. But one still has to ask why people use drugs. I think I know part of the answer. People use drugs, both medically and socially, wrongly and excessively and stupidly, because their lives have become unendurable without drugs. They use drugs because they are already in some degree sick, and can see no meaning in their lives. The people whom Our Lord knew, who drank wine at the marriage at Cana, had a very hard life, and needed a mental holiday from it.

‘But our modern booze-artists and drug-takers, and even our chain- page 655 smokers, look round them and see a meaningless, terrible, comfort-lined, boring mechanical void. They do not receive the Sacraments. They prefer a Pill that will make them sterile. They do not go about doing good to others. Instead they heap up useless luxuries, and then look at the heap in horror and boredom and run away to get drunk or take a shot. They do not hope for the Beatific Vision.

‘Instead they expect, without hope, an empty old age and a coffin lined with plush. They want to get away from it all – back to childhood, forward to death, into oblivion, into that safe world through the little door in the mind, where people are as comfy as teddy bears and no harm can ever happen to anyone. And if they become addicted to drugs, the door slams shut behind them and they are left alone with their nightmares, beyond human help and almost beyond the help of God.

‘We don’t have to be like that, not even if we do have to share in the mental grit and smog and tawdriness of our melancholy society. We are Catholics and we have hope. God sometimes allows us to transmit the sense of meaning in life which He has given us to other people. We can probably do that best if we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders all the time and take no drugs at all.’

And when I had finished speaking to the group of young Catholics, probably some good priest or Sister or member of the laity would thank me publicly and most courteously, and then ask me afterwards in private whether I didn’t have too gloomy and raw a view of the world, and why I thought it was good for people to smoke marihuana. People do like a safe world. It makes them miss the point completely whenever somebody else tries to tell the truth. You can’t win; but I do intend to keep on trying.

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