The United Nations estimates that worldwide, some 50 million people are users of heroin, cocaine, and synthetic addictive drugs alone. Of these, hundreds of thousands consequently die each year. Dr. Robert DuPont, a leader in addictive drug abuse and treatment, was the first Director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the second White House Drug Chief.

The drug problem in the world today is not like anything we’ve ever had before. This is a new epidemic. It started in about the 1960s and it is continuing to spread throughout the world. Many of the drugs that are on the list of illegal drugs, are drugs that have been around a long time.

But what’s new is even these old drugs are now used in entirely new ways. They are smoked and they are injected intravenously. That makes them much more powerful than they ever were before. Plus, there’s a whole new generation of chemicals, drugs like Methamphetamine for example or MDMA or LSD (Ecstasy).

All these drugs are all addictive substances that have devastating effects on the people who take them. The way it works is very simple, and that is, the new users are unaware of the consequences of where they lead. They are seduced into the chemical experience of using the drug in the view that they can handle it, they can control it. And of course, once they get in there, it becomes a trap that they can’t get out of.

These are pictures of individuals before and after they used the addictive drug known as Methamphetamine, a stimulant that can cause, among others, insomnia, confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, violent behavior, convulsions, heart attack, stroke, and death.

Addictive drugs not only damage one’s physical appearance, but can ruin every aspect of one’s precious life. They take away friends, family, money, self-esteem, and one’s future.

Drugs hijack the brain’s reward system. They take over the person’s thinking. So they control the person’s behavior. People who care about their families, people who care about their futures, stop caring about either of those things. You see a kind of thing that’s so dramatic.

A patient of mine last week stole money from his grandmother who was taking care of him. She was reaching out to help him, and he went and took the money, and then went out and bought crack cocaine with it, and without a second thought about what he was doing. And when I asked him about why did you do it, he said well I am a drug addict. That’s what drug addicts do. Well that kind of loss of any moral compass is devastating and it’s very characteristic of what drugs do to people.

He would lack a sense of responsibility. It is not necessarily true that he lacks an education. At present, we also have some students here with university degrees or even higher education.

We’ve had a lot of people who used to live a normal life, that means that they had a family, had a job and so on, but who went through something, a dramatic experience whereby they started to drink, lost their job, got a divorce and ended up in the street and so get in contact with the wrong means.

Now, drugs cost also a lot of money. Everything has to be paid for, and the fact that not everyone will just jump into criminality when he uses drugs, so saving accounts or the money from work will be used up and this is how you get into trouble. You definitely cannot function on it, also not at work. So my work started to suffer from it. I stopped working and this is how the problems came. I lost my apartment, becoming homeless. I had to do prostitution to earn money to finance the drugs, shoplifting.

A brain on addictive drugs is physically altered, making a person unable to think clearly.

You’re willing to do anything to get the drugs. And that leads women into prostitution, for example, and people into criminal behavior. But it also means you’re prone, to doing stupid things, like accidents when driving a car and things like anger, for example, and being out of control.

The consequences of addictive drug abuse are extremely costly. They include damaged health and families torn apart, job loss, homelessness, crime, and emergency medical attention. In many countries, drugged driving is becoming a problem as serious as drunk driving.

We are talking about traffic accidents where young people are dying, we're talking about death, we are talking about greater violence, we are talking about unwanted pregnancies; finally a series of social problems, which clearly influence social life and affect us all.

There’s a whole range of medical problems that come too. When you smoke something, that has terrible effect on the lungs. But the other way people take drugs now is by injecting. So they’ll put in a vein and that transmits diseases like HIV/AIDS for example, but many other diseases as well. Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B are transmitted like this, and bacterial diseases are transmitted. So, you get a whole range of complications to a person’s health.

Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television, as our program continues in observance of the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

Welcome back to today’s presentation on Supreme Master Television about the global challenge of drug addiction.

Despite the effects that are life-threatening, experts fear that addictive drug abuse is not taken seriously enough.

No, I don’t think people have an understanding about how bad it can be. And they’re misled by a lot of people who are out there promoting the idea that drugs are a harmless way to have fun. But a lot of it also is just from seeing other people who are using drugs and it looks like they’re in control. They only see it in the early stages of the use, before the complications have come in, before the devastating effects are there.

So there’s a kind of a false learning from seeing their friends who are using drugs. And I really think we need to have much more education in the world about the dangers of these drugs, so that people are aware that even trying it is dangerous. I really think that marijuana or cannabis is the most devastating drug, and the reason for that is because it is misunderstood and seen as benign. It is seen so widely as a trivial drug, and so it acts as a gateway drug to get people into the whole drug situation.

But it also is a terrible problem in its own right. I’d like to say it makes people stupid and lazy. And if you think about the global economy and how it works, it doesn’t help to have millions and millions of people who are made stupid and lazy by a drug.

A study of over 3,000 fatally-injured drivers in Australia showed that when marijuana was present in their blood, they were much more likely to be at fault for the accident. But that’s not all.

In countries which has relaxed a lot the perception of what is marijuana use, then they are consistently having more cases of psychosis associated with marijuana use. It also causes cancers and causes a series of diseases associated as well as with tobacco use.

I had a person say to me something I thought was very smart. He didn’t want to try it because he might like it. That’s smart. That’s somebody who understands how the seduction works.

In reality, any pleasure extracted from addictive drug use is fleeting. As withdrawal sets in, what follows is often dangerous, torturous pain.

Because Ketamine had numbed my stomach and intestines, my stomach stopped moving, and it was filled with gas, and it was so painful. The doctor gave me a morphine injection and it still could not ease the pain. I felt like going to the toilet every five minutes.

One time, I took her to the emergency department for gastric pain. Through the gastroscope, the doctor showed me that her stomach was filled with blood.

I hope no one will use drugs like I did.

When you don’t have it anymore, your body gets signals like you don’t have any control over your body. Your arm can, without you asking for it, move over there; sometimes you can’t move along. You are, yes, a wreck.

There was an example of a PhD, a scientist who studies drug abuse, who thought that he could use drugs because he knew so much about them. But he did it with his fiancée. And he came home one time from work and she was dead with a needle in her arm from an overdose. But when she died, then the emergency people came in, they got the police in and they found the drugs in his house.

And now he’s going to go to jail for the drugs. So he wrote an article about this in the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” to warn other people who have the illusion that they can control the drugs. It’s a range of problems that people have.

But it all centers on one thing and that is the drugs become more important than anything else that the person is doing. And when that happens, people are apt to do things that are out of character, that are very destructive, and then the society intervenes, and there are consequences that are often are very, very bad, including death and imprisonment.

If you go down the drug way, you will reach no more than three places: one is the cemetery that is very sad, and there are many who go there; another is the hospital and another is jail.

With deep sympathy for those who have had to cope with dependencies of any kind, Supreme Master Ching Hai has shared her views on substance addiction.

And whatever the illusion that comes from plants or drugs, they have terrible side-effects. They will make your body weak. They will make you addicted. They will make you less intelligent. They will destroy your brain power, and also destroy your physical well-being, etc., etc.

How many people die every day because of drugs? You know. How many people live a life half dead and half suffering because they lack the drug after they have been so addicted to it? You know the answer. That's why it is better to refrain from these dangerous substances for the sake of your own, as well as the people you love, and for the sake of the peace for society.

For victims of addictive drug abuse, there is hope to recovering one’s health and life. As our program continues tomorrow, June 26, the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, we’ll find out more about addictive drug abstinence treatment and other solutions to this global epidemic. Smart viewers, thank you for joining us on today’s program. Please now stay tuned to Supreme Master Television for Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May you and your loved ones be blessed and protected.

For more information, please visit Dr. Robert DuPont’s Institute for Behavior and Health at

By the lake in the sight of my God, Beautiful Mother Earth! In the early hour…

Come stay with the vibrant Peruvian people who live harmoniously on Lake Titicaca.

The two-part program airs on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 29-30, on Supreme Master Television’s Enlightening Entertainment.

Greetings, caring viewers. Today is the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. This two-part program began by raising awareness on various issues of addictive drug abuse, an extremely costly and deadly global epidemic. Today, we’ll discuss ways for a victim’s recovery and prevention.

The problem is self-centeredness in the addiction, and recovery is involved in caring about other people, and about honesty. And the simple way to say it is drug addiction makes people liars. If you have to keep something a secret from people who care about you, you’re doing something wrong.

And why does that work that way? That works that way because we fool ourselves. We convince ourselves that doing things that are wrong are really right, that we can get away with it, that it’s okay. I think the most important thing is honesty, being able to tell people who care about you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Oftentimes they don’t have a network anymore. They didn’t work for a long time, they don’t have a house, don’t know where to live and how to cope with the debts. So there needs to be offered some help to give them a steady life again.

Fortunately, today treatment programs and organizations are more available than ever to help meet their needs.

When the counselors gave me guidance, I felt that they had great compassion and patience. So I wanted to work harder to complete the program faster, and then I could take care of the kids and give them happiness. After I quit drugs, they were very happy.

Some people can just stop on their own. It’s very interesting. Once they’d had enough – I call it surrender – once they surrender, they give up, they say, I can’t do that anymore. I’ve got to stop using, to reclaim my life. But other people, many, need treatment, to help. Others will find a recovery through a religious experience, through participating in a program like the Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. There are many paths to recovery, but the key step is not to use. As long as they’re using, they’re not on the path to recovery.

No use is a single important key to a successful recovery. Families, teachers and doctors all must be firm in this regard.

There’s a kind of an attitude that is dangerous, that looks about a drug addict or an alcoholic, and it says, “We want to care about that person by reaching out to him and protecting him, even when he is still using.” You make the problem worse by your effort to care. And so you need to have a very clear standard, “No, it’s not acceptable.”

There is also another point that is often misunderstood when it comes to overcoming an addiction.

Every addict has stopped many times. It’s not stopping that’s hard, it’s staying stopped that’s hard. And what happens is when a person stops, the problems that came from the addiction go away, and the person has the illusion that they’re in control, and they don’t need any more help, and they think, “Well, I can do just a little.”

And one of the phrases from Alcoholics Anonymous is, “One drink is too many, and a thousand is not enough.” That first drink leads to the thousand. And that’s why not using at all is such an important part of that.

In addition to absolute abstinence and honesty, support from loved ones and a wholesome lifestyle are other aspects of successful rehabilitation.

It would be very hard to think about any other behavior that is as destructive to your health, including your mental and spiritual health, as drug addiction. It has a corrosive effect, not just on your body, but on your soul, on your spirit, on your values, on your character. And so, when you eat healthy, when you exercise in a healthy way, when you’re concerned about your relationships with other people, who care about and caring about them, all of those are preventives, all of those help to change.

I finished the program and my whole life has changed from black and white to a colorful one. Now my goal is to help other people. Really, we will be happy only by helping others.

Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television, as our program continues in observance of the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

Welcome back to today’s presentation on Supreme Master Television.

Effective addictive drug abstinence treatment programs focus on healthy, responsible living, and may emphasize a spiritual component as well.

Religion and any kind of spiritual belief, of faith that they have, is a protective factor against drug use. We have groups where we do meditation exercises, and the meditation is about oneself and about what happens, but it can help control stress, anxiety.

Among those who found the strength to free themselves from addiction through spiritual guidance, one of our Association members from the United States wrote this letter about her experience.

“When I was a teenager, I rebelled against society by abusing illicit drugs, which also gave me some temporary feeling of a “higher” experience. When I heard about Supreme Master Ching Hai, the Quan Yin Method and the precepts, I knew in my heart that giving up the temporary “enlightenment” of drugs would allow me to have the true experience of the Truth. Master has said that addictive drug users are often sincere Truth seekers who are looking for God but have fallen into the wrong path.

I wish to offer viewers my story as proof that the void left in our hearts by addictive drug use CAN be filled and overfilled with the Love of God. You may even forget your past worldly identity when you realize your saintly nature! With Supreme Master Ching Hai's love and the Quan Yin Method, only good things are possible!

Master, thank you from the depth of my heart for giving me not only a chance at life, but for saving me and showing me the Truth that I was looking for. In grateful tears, Beth from the USA”

The following is an excerpt from Supreme Master Ching Hai’s 1993 lecture in Austria about addictive drug abuse.

The people who take drugs take them because they are very lonely, or they are influenced by the people around them. Or they are seeking Divine pleasure and find nothing at all. They believe that these drugs will give them enjoyment.

But they are mistaken. It only brings them harm and confusion.

Once we come into contact with our inner light and sound, there is much more joy which brings long lasting happiness. Much more than drugs.

The global illegal drug trade is comparable to the international tourist trade, about US$400 billion per year. Courageous government efforts continue to stop addictive drug production, trafficking and use. Progresses include more international cooperation for helping farmers switch to alternative crops; promising inventions such as a breath test that easily detects the presence of addictive drugs; and renewed commitment by governments and communities alike towards treatment and prevention.

But the best solution is to be aware and NEVER try drugs in the first place. Therefore, parents play a vital role in addictive drug use prevention.

Not enough parents make it clear that they expect their children to obey the law, including laws about drugs and alcohol. They sort of let the kids try to figure it out for themselves. And that’s very dangerous. So that’s one thing to do: lay down a clear message to the children.

The other thing is, parents need to be very much aware of the kid’s vulnerability. The parents have a responsibility to keep track of that teenager. What is the teenager doing? Who are those friends? What about drugs and alcohol in that situation? The family needs to say, “No use is acceptable.”

And if they have somebody who’s using, they have to do whatever it takes to get that person to stop, including ultimately, depending on the age of the person, having them leave the family. You need to say, “No. If you are going to be here, you can’t use at all.” And be very strict about that.

In a 1999 lecture in South Africa, Supreme Master Ching Hai once again emphasized the absolute importance of avoiding addictive drugs.

It shrinks your brain. It clogs your nerves. It makes you hallucinate. It makes you go crazy when you don't have it and become addicted to it. It breaks your family love, relationship. It drives your girlfriend, boyfriend away. It makes you become a criminal sometimes.

We have enough confusion with work, with war, with disaster, with relationship already. Do not create more confusion for yourselves and damage your only vehicle to reach God; this is the body, the temple. Keep it well, in order, healthy, because you must use it. Drug is no, no, no, no.

Recognizing shared efforts worldwide to stop the suffering inflicted by addictive drugs, Dr. Robert DuPont spoke of Supreme Master Ching Hai’s dedicated efforts.

I am very pleased with these efforts to reduce drug abuse, and I honor the contributions that she has made, and I am delighted to add my voice of support and encouragement and appreciation.

As our program comes to a close, some of our guests send messages to all viewers on this International Day Against Drug Abuse.

As a former drug user, I want to say to the young adults: “Stay away from drugs!”

If you truly have problems that you cannot solve, you can seek help from other people or various channels. You shouldn't resort to taking drugs.

I’d like to have people more aware of the threat to our global community posed by the drugs and get people more involved in efforts to stop the trafficking, stop the use. Values that say this is not acceptable kind of behavior, and that we all have to be involved in it.

We thank Supreme Master Ching Hai for her urgent message to the world that addictive drugs are indeed one of the top killers and for her forthrightness about this devastating but preventable disease.

We also thank the dedicated professionals for sharing your expertise and concern in hopes that all shall heed the call to a drug-free path. To our interviewees who are former substance abusers, our deep appreciation for your generosity and honesty in discussing your personal pains, struggles, and triumphs. You had learned the hard lessons, so that others may avoid the suffering that you had gone through. May you be blessed abundantly with love, joy, and bright futures.

Discerning viewers, thank you for joining us on today’s program. Please now stay tuned to Supreme Master Television for Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May all lead lives to the fullest potential, in Heaven’s grace.

For more information, please visit Dr. Robert DuPont’s Institute for Behavior and Health at