Drug use, at least in its early stages, feels spiritual — there is a sense of getting to the heart of things, of transcending the petty and mundane irritations of ordinary life, of entering something large and beautiful and peaceful. There is a sense of being insiders in a world to which square, conventional people are excluded. Drugs heighten interior perceptions, open windows and doors to what seems like transcendence.
And so the first thing that parents must understand about drugs is that there is almost always a spiritual element in adolescent drug-taking. We can never comprehend it if we view it simply as a matter of … rebelling against parental or societal standards. …
Only by firmly establishing this appreciation and understanding of spirituality as a context is it credible to then assert that drugs are fraudulent spirituality. Initially, they provide the illusion that matters of soul, meaning, love, destiny, beauty, and cosmic connections are being dealt with, but they always, sometimes soon and sometimes late but always, turn out to be the cruelest of illusions.
Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up with Your Teenager, by Eugene H. Peterson, pp. 92, 94
Out of Babel 
I have other thoughts on drugs of various sorts, but this one is definitive on how they are addictive.
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I’ll leave a real comment when I get home.
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Our current society’s full blown schrizophrenia on all things spiritual (an evolutionistic furor of materialism on one hand, while at the same time people are clamoring after psychics, etc in unprecedented numbers) makes me wonder how much longer people can go on without a complete mental breakdown. I think we’re seeing more of this, but what concerns me is when we see it on a massive world wide scale.
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Well, sadly, I think that is the normal human condition. We are falling back into the sort of society that existed in the ancient pagan world, complete with no sexual protections for anyone vulnerable, such as children. On the plus side, we have a spiritual resource that they didn’t have back then. “The gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
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