People have used drugs for as long as they have tried to ease pain and avoid problems. Before the middle of the last century, however, most people did not use drugs. Starting in the early 1960s, this changed. Today, millions of people in all parts of the world take drugs.

A drug is something people take into their bodies that causes harm to the body but is used by them in an attempt to lessen pain or worry, to produce pleasurable feelings or to improve their performance at an activity.

Examples of drugs include heroin, cocaine and marijuana. Alcohol is also a drug.

There are also many drugs which are prescribed by doctors as medicine for their patients. These are known as medical drugs, also called medicinal drugs.

There are thousands of names and slang words for drugs.

Drugs may, and often do, become habit-forming. The person is no longer able not to take them.

Even if he does stop, however, the problems do not end at that point. The effects of drug-taking over a long time can make a person weak and damage him physically (to do with the body) and mentally (to do with the mind).

Even someone who has not taken drugs for years has blank periods. A blank period is an amount of time when someone has a complete lack of awareness, memory or understanding of what is happening around him, as if his mind is empty. For example, he may be driving on a highway. Suddenly and unexpectedly his attention wanders and for a few moments he is no longer in control of the car because his attention is not on his driving. The result can be an accident. Many accidents happen because a person has been taking drugs.

Drugs can harm a person’s ability to put his attention on something, which means he cannot work properly and finds it hard to learn.

The result of this can destroy someone’s life.

If drugs have all these bad effects, why do people continue to take them?

It happens this way. When a person is in pain or unhappy and he receives no relief (easing or lessening of pain) from treatment, he finds that drugs give him relief. For a while, the drugs seem to remove his pain or make him feel better.

However, to keep this good effect going, the person has to continue taking the drug. Soon he needs more and more of it. Eventually, he will stop making any effort to resist taking the drug. He will become dependent on it. Often he will become addicted, which means that he is completely unable to stop taking it.

Nobody wants to become a drug addict. If the person had known, years earlier, that there was any other way to ease his pain or unhappiness, he would have taken that path. But often people are told that there is no cure and that their pains are imaginary. Life can become too unpleasant to put up with. Often the person then becomes a habitual drug-taker.

The person’s problem that caused him to start taking drugs may only have been “sadness” or “tiredness.” Anything that brings relief or makes life easier to deal with, physically or mentally, will then be welcome. But the ability to face life is always reduced.

The person who takes drugs and is suffering from pain and hopelessness continues to take drugs. Though he doesn’t want to be an addict, he doesn’t feel that there is any other way out.

However, drug dependency can be fully handled.

As soon as he can feel healthier and more able to deal with life without drugs than he does on drugs, a person no longer requires them.

Scientology contains an exact technology (application of knowledge to a practical purpose) which gets a person painlessly off drugs and frees him from their bad physical and mental effects.

This technology finds and deals with the reason a person started on drugs in the first place, so he never again feels a need to take them.

Drugs prevent people from achieving mental and spiritual improvement, which is the true mission of Scientology.