Paradigm Lost America’s Dance with the Devil

More than a hundred years ago William James argued before the Massachusetts legislature stating that limiting medical care to a biological approach to illness was doomed to failure since the most important factor in man’s health was spiritual. Paradigm Lost: America’s Dance with the Devil asks the difficult question about the roots causes of our current drug abuse crisis concluding that because Doctors rejected the idea of consciousness playing any role in health, they failed to understand the true nature of the drug use question. We will not succeed in solving our current crisis without first answering 3 simple questions: What is a drug? What is a medicine and what is a sacrament? As we examine these questions a new paradigm of drug use and abuse begins to emerge. Our inner cities running on empty since the heroin epidemic during the Nixon administration and the cocaine epidemic of the Reagan/Bush era, we are now faced with a 3rd epidemic from heroin and prescription opioid abuse. Americans once again are searching for answers in a sea of confusing data and information. If we are going to solve this problem, we must first admit America’s dirty little secret that the United States government has been complicit in the international drug trade since the end of World War 2. According to Norbert Weiner, the author of The Human Use of Human Beings in 1953, the spiritual essence of any community can best be understood by the messages that it produces. One does not have to watch the nightly news for too long to realize that we as a nation have lost our spiritual essence.