Drugs in Decline?

A former disciple of Timothy Leary says that “the scene” is beginning to get “disenchanted” with drugs and that the “new scene is to be straight.”

Allen Y. Cohen told a Catholic student audience in Dubuque, Iowa, last month that ten years of research prove it is “impossible to misuse any drug and get away with it. There’s no way you can last—the drug abuser either quits, dies, or loses his mind.” But he added that the message is not getting through to junior-high-school students. “That’s the problem.”

Cohen is now an assistant professor of psychology and dean of men at the experimental John F. Kennedy University near Berkeley, California. In an address at Loras College he traced his life for four years as a “psychedelic utopian,” living with Leary first in Mexico and then on a large estate in New York.

He said “everybody figured that LSD was going to change the world,” but it didn’t. Nor did it provide a solution for those seeking higher forms of spiritual motivation, he said.

Cohen declared he had concluded that drugs are totally useless for spiritual advancement. He added that he believes there is the possibility of achieving real higher consciousness without chemicals. “There are ways to discover the fountain of inner happiness. But the use of drugs is not one of them.”

One of several incidents that fed Cohen’s doubts about drugs involved a friend who after “turning on” with pure LSD ended up in a mental hospital after trying to set fire to his wife and child.

“It just kind of struck me,” he said, “that if these guys were the saints of the Western world, we were in for big trouble.”

After “dropping” LSD about thirty times, he said, he realized that “no matter how good the experiences were, we always came down and nothing really changed inside. We thought they did, but people were acting pretty much the same way they always acted.”

Cohen attributed the “explosion” of experimental drug use by young people in the mid-sixties to a “powerful, brainwashing effect on our culture,” namely, “the use of chemicals for ‘instant relief of anything.”

But drugs are not the real problem, he contended. “Life is the problem. Drug use is just a symptom of what is going on in our time.” He warned adults to get to the heart of the issue.

“If you give young people something better than drugs, they’re going to stop drugs,” he stated. “Sooner or later every individual realizes that drugs are not good sense.”

Cohen added that the “challenge of the age” is to provide young people with alternative opportunities to develop themselves on the physical, sensory, emotional, intro-personal, creative, aesthetic, intellectual, social, political, and spiritual levels—by non-chemical means.

Logos Afloat

No one at Operation Mobilization is questioning the power of prayer to move a mountain. The evangelistic organization’s “mountain” is a Danish ship, Umanak, named for a mountain in Greenland. This month, the 2,390-ton ocean-going vessel will move to India; next May it will travel to Thailand for six more months.

Purchase of the ship fulfills long-time dreams and needs of OM. Previously, the vehicles essential to the group’s literature distribution and evangelistic crusades in India had to be driven overland from Europe, an expensive operation in time alone. Further, India’s six-month residency restriction for cars required the vehicles’ evacuation twice a year. Now they can be transported, repaired, and stored—nearly fifty at a time—on board the ship.

The 21-year-old ship cost OM $168,000—“no more than a good-sized church in the United States or Great Britain,” according to OM head George Verwer, Jr. A similar vessel, new, would cost about $5 million. Two other bids were higher than that of Operation Mobilization.

Before the ship, renamed Logos, can sail to India, however, it needs some repairs, and some Dutch Christians have provided a dry dock in Rotterdam where work is proceeding on the damaged propeller shaft and other problems. None of the 150 international crew members, including Norwegian Captain Bjorn Kristiansen, has a fixed salary. Each is considered a missionary, raising his own support.

In addition to garaging cars, Logos will store tracts and Scripture portions and even house a small printing press. But it will not neglect evangelism; sealed plastic bags containing tracts will be dropped along the mainland and on islands. The ship will also provide a place for housing missionaries, training new workers, and conducting Bible conferences for natives. In case of emergency, the ship could become a relief vessel, supplying food, medicine, clothing, and tents to disaster areas.

By broadening activities to include all areas of human need, Operation Mobilization leaders hope to convince unfriendly governments that Logos is more than a base from which to disseminate propaganda. “Some ships such as gambling ships give themselves 100 per cent to the works of darkness,” notes Verwer. “Why not a ship given 100 per cent to the works of righteousness?”

THOMAS COSMADES

A Damper On Violence

Events in Northern Ireland were quieter this past summer than was generally expected. A wet season may have helped to lower the political temperature. After heavy floods inundated houses in some of Belfast’s trouble spots, Catholic and Protestant neighbors found themselves helping one another clear up, with troops assisting. One thankful resident remarked, “It has taken an act of God to get us together again.”

An article in a religious journal drew attention to the disclosure in a Belfast paper in May, 1966, of the details of a plan by the outlawed, anti-Protestant Irish Republican Army to create extensive disorder in the north. These plans included: indoctrinating students and organizing them to act as pickets in strikes and demonstrations; organizing protests on housing and in other ways capitalizing upon grievances; promoting sectarianism and strife.

Military intelligence in Northern Ireland was reported to have knowledge of more than a hundred militant left-wingers from European countries who had visited that part of the Emerald Isle which still gives allegiance to the British crown. Many of these militants belonged to Maoist and anarchist underground movements, and some are known to have taken part in riots in European countries. A Catholic bishop some time ago warned his subjects against strangers who came to foment disorder.

S. W. MURRAY

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