SPEAKER SAYS RELIGION, NOT DRUGS, MUST FEED SPIRITUAL HUNGER

The war on drugs is racist, biased against class, contemptuous of basic
civil rights, wastes billions of tax dollars, corrupts U.S. policing, penal
and judicial systems, and is used by political parties to perpetuate the
nation's deep divisions and to dodge the responsibility to ensure adequate
health, housing and education for all citizens.

In short, it is a "catastrophic moral scandal," said Steve Epperson,
program coordinator of the Utah Humanities Council, speaking Thursday at
the annual Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City.

And religious communities could and should be using their power to "call
this nation and its leaders to their senses," Epperson said. To be sure, he
said, religious groups have strong reasons to oppose drugs. Drug use can
"weaken the rational will of the user and make him/her increasingly prey to
powerful and irrational emotional and physical states of need/craving," he
said.

"The user is neither transported to a permanently higher level of awareness
nor enabled to better produce the real fruits of the religious life,"
Epperson said. Drugs also can destroy the mind, body and social relations.

But there is a "significant difference between opposing drug use on
spiritual and ethical grounds," he said, "and uncritically supporting a
failed public policy."

Indeed, institutional religions may be contributing to drug use by their
failure to provide meaningful alternatives.

People often turn to narcotics for "their delivery of enhanced and altered
states of mind and body."

Sadly, that kind of spiritual hunger is too often left unsatisfied by the
religious life, he said.

Genuine spirituality includes "enhanced states of consciousness, rational,
responsible action, compassion for the oppressed and peacemaking within the
community," Epperson said.

All of these are missing in the current struggle against drug use, he said.

Pulpit rhetoric focuses on drug abuse as an "individual character flaw," he
said, and then "invokes the therapeutics of repentance and divine grace,
but for good measure appeals to the coercive powers of the state," he said.

By neglecting social justice issues of adequate and affordable housing,
meaningful employment and equality before the law, as well as spiritual
hunger for transcendent experiences, religions "contribute to the very
conditions which give rise to the culture of drugs," Epperson said.

The symposium, an independent forum for Mormon issues and ideas, continues
through Saturday.