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

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