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Cause/cure of the Drug Epidemic
Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith (December 22, 1915 – September 14, 1995) was a British preacher, organic chemist, and creationist whose ministry bridged science and faith to challenge evolutionary theory and proclaim biblical truth. Born in Reading, England, to Ernest Walter and Florence Emily Wilder-Smith, he pursued higher education at Reading University, earning a Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry in 1941, followed by doctorates in Pharmacology from the University of Geneva in 1964 and from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Initially an atheist, he converted to Christianity in his 20s after intellectual struggles with evolution, influenced by his wife Beate Gottwaldt, whom he married in 1949. Wilder-Smith’s preaching career combined his scientific expertise with evangelism, beginning during World War II while working at Imperial Chemical Industries. He preached across Europe and North America, notably debating evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith at the 1986 Oxford Union Debate, where his arguments on information theory and thermodynamics gained attention. He served as Professor of Pharmacology at institutions like the University of Illinois (1959–1961) and Hacettepe University in Turkey, earning three Golden Apple Awards for teaching. Author of over 70 scientific papers and books like The Creation of Life (1970) and Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny (1968), he emphasized creationism’s scientific basis. With Beate, he raised four children—Oliver, Petra, Clive, and Einar—and died at age 79 in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, leaving a legacy as a pioneering creationist preacher.
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Sermon Summary
In this sermon, the speaker begins by describing a personal experience with a demon popping out of the middle. He then transitions to discussing the importance of the five senses and how they connect us to the world. The speaker mentions the use of morphine by Vietnamese soldiers in combat and explains how the senses play a role in pain perception. Finally, the speaker discusses three ways people try to cope with frustration, including drowning it with alcohol or drugs like heroin. The sermon emphasizes the need to address frustration in a fundamental way and find purpose in life.
Sermon Transcription
Evening, ladies and gentlemen. The subject is then, which we've just heard, and I'm going to read to you two short passages of scripture which deal with this subject. You'll not understand them, why I read them at first, but you will, if you don't go into a coma in the meantime, you will towards the end. The first one I'm going to read is in 1st Kings 19 verse 11, 1st Kings 19 verse 11. God said, go forth and stand upon the mountain before the Lord. This is God speaking to Elijah. Behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord. But, listen carefully, the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, listen carefully, a still, small voice. When Elijah heard it, the still, small voice, he wrapped his face in his mantle, and he went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Behold, there came a voice to him and said, what are you doing here, Elijah? Then the second word that I wish to read to you, ladies and gentlemen, is in Galatians 5. And I'm a bit ashamed to read this to you, because it's such an awful list, but I need to do it. Galatians 5, verse 19. Now the works of the flesh are plain, immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery. Now as a young man, that word disturbed me a lot, when I had come to be a Christian, and I read that the Bible called these works of the flesh, listed them up like that, and put among them sorcery. You know, I'd been taught that just sorcery wasn't a thing that existed, sort of witch hunts and all that. But you see, I happily had a good concordance to hand. I hope you, every man-jack and woman-jack among you, I hope you all have a good concordance. If you can't get strongs, concordance get youngs. I found it in birth. Sorcery is translated out of the Greek from the word pharmakeia. That means, you see, it's totally wrongly translated. That means it's the induction of drug trips, flipping out with drugs. You see, you have the word in your word pharmacy, pharmacy, a place where you get drugs. Here it's the use of drugs to produce a trip, a flip out. That's what it means. And it's regularly used, of course, even today, your Indians still use it. They take mescaline to get a religious experience. And that's what it means. And it's a work of the flesh. And it's one of those works of the flesh which keep people out of the kingdom. Idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, we all know about those, don't we? Selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like, I warn you as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Now, Lord Jesus, we ask thee to open again our understanding at this evening hour, now at least all the things that have gone through our minds, we ask thee to quieten us before thee that we might hear the still small voice and open the words of my mouth and bless the meditations of my heart and our hearts, all of us, that we may always be acceptable before thee, O thou strength and our redeemer, amen. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to talk tonight about the various forms of drugs which are abused and used by various forms of people. And I shall have to do it, I'm afraid, in rather an orderly manner because most people just go into discussing these things and don't know the slightest thing about the principles behind them. And I would advise you, ladies and gentlemen, if you don't take the trouble to learn the principles, don't talk, because it will surely come out, if you discuss about things you know nothing about, it will surely come out, you know, what the prophet said, that even the fool is considered to be wise if he holds his tongue. You remember the very wise word, I think it was to Eliphaz by Job. So, I want to give you the basis of drug abuse and drugs, and then you can perhaps help other people who are caught in them, because it's one of the most dreadful things in life to see a kid, thirty years old, with a mental intelligence of about nine, unable to get off heroin. You know, they shrivel, they have no life in them at all. And I knew one, I met him two or three months ago in eastern Switzerland, a man of thirty. He was completely shriveled on heroin, thirteen courses he'd been through with the police, and still was swallowing huge amounts of methadone and hadn't got off the drug. Now look, the drugs that we're going to do are the ones that affect the central nervous system. I'm not going to do penicillin, I'm not going to do hormones like insulin or Stilbistrol or estrogens, or anything like that. I mean, I'd need, as it is, to do what I'm doing tonight properly six weeks, every night three hours, and then we get through it properly. But I can only talk about the central nervous drugs, central nervous system. I can't talk about any others, so please put them out of your mind for now. We'll have more than we can do to do those. The first type of drug is the anesthetic. Now the anesthetic is a substance like ether, or alcohol, or halothane, or barbiturates, substances like that. And substances like that, they depress, are you listening? They depress the total nervous system, and will put you under the table if you carry on taking them. The five senses are downed, they're downed drugs. I shall have some more to say in just a minute. The analgesics, the second one, they're the drugs which reduce or down the sense of pain. They also reduce, of course, the respiration, so that your breathing gets shallower. They include drugs like opium, morphine, methadone, which is a substitute for morphine and heroin. And they also include, but they're not quite the same, their mechanism is action, drugs like aspirin. You know if you've got a headache, you take a dose of aspirin, and it'll sometimes really relieve the pain. Now those are drugs then, the analgesics, which just are more specialized in their down effect. They're specialized on the sense of pain, sense of the respiratory system and so on. The third type of drug is very, very interesting indeed. The most prescribed drug today, perhaps on the whole market, they're the tranquilizers. They include drugs like Valium, Librium, Chlorpromazine, one of the first ones, and Rezepine. Rezepine's not used very much today, but it used to be used as a tranquilizer and a sinker of blood pressure. Get your blood pressure down if it wasn't too very high. Now these drugs, the tranquilizers, they reduce the conditioned reflexes. Now you know what a conditioned reflex is. If you drive a car, you've learned to drive a car, and your reflexes are such that if you come too near to another car, you can't stop yourself from putting your foot on the brake, and putting the clutch out if you haven't got an automatic. It's the conditioned reflexes which are down. They don't touch much the other reflexes. So keep those. They're very, very interesting drugs, and much used today in mental breakdowns, much used by the psychiatrists to down a person who's had a breakdown. Now the fourth type of drug is the analeptic type of drug, and that is the drug that ups everything. Up, up, up, all along the line. You can't sleep after them. Your appetite is down, but all the rest, your thinking rate, they're all upped. They're called analeptics, or wake amines, and to that group includes, that group includes the appetite depressants. You know, the things those ladies are so fond of, when they find that their figure is getting a little bit out of control, they'll take these drugs to reduce their appetite. Now a highly dangerous thing to do, but plenty of people do it, and these drugs are used, are you listening to me? These drugs, I haven't got the analeptics here to dole out, but might be able to have thought of that. These drugs are used to potentiate, to strengthen, to get more out of acid, LSD. They're also used to get more out of tetrahydrocannabinol, or hashish. If you find it a little bit expensive to buy your LSD, and if it's not very strong, it's not very pure, the pushers will mix them with appetite depressants. You can step up the strength of these drugs up to 10 times by putting in speed, which makes them highly dangerous, because after you've mixed the speed type of drug, which is the last category I'm going to do, you're liable to flashbacks. That's where the flashbacks come in. Now that's the analeptic type of drug, used as a subsidiary, as a potentiator of other drugs. The last type, the bottom ones, are the psychedelic drugs, and they're called the mind expanding drugs. Now whether they do expand the mind or not, I'm not saying, but they're known as that. They have a particular way of changing the state of consciousness, and of producing a pseudo-religious experience. And it's this type of drug to which the Scripture refers, what the Scripture translates in that wrong translation, sorcery. That is the type of drug that's there included, and that includes LSD, acid, hashish, tetrahydrocannabinol, marijuana, psilocybin, and adenochrome. That's just the preliminary canter, so that we know what we're talking about. And I'm going to go through all these drugs together, and show you how they affect one another and affect us. Now, perhaps you change the next one on, would you? The present age is an age of Homo sapiens who has the biggest and best nervous system amongst all the mammals that we know of. And this nervous system is built—this is vital what I'm saying, because this will give you the key pin to the whole argument. This nervous system is so built that when you feed facts into the eyes, and the ears, and the nose—yes, you do it with the nose too, and with the mouth, and with the general proprioception, that is the general sense of where and what you are. Your proprioception, that is the perception of yourself. Now the perception of yourself is a very, very big operation in the body. You see, if I lean a little bit to the left, I feel that throughout my whole nervous system, and it comes up here above, and my stance is automatically corrected. If I have a heart attack while I'm standing up, the first thing I do is I fall down, because my proprioception can't get through, and the stasis in my body to keep me standing right goes wrong, and I fall over. It's a very, very big operation indeed. Now this system up here, the central nervous system, is built to obtain sense, purpose, concept out of all the world round about us. We're fed into our system all these things, and the brain up here makes sense of them. That's the function of the brain, even in animals, but much more so in us. Now, we're living in a time when the brain has to function to digest facts and produce sense out of them, the same as the stomach has to digest food and get energy out of it. Now you see, we've been taught for a hundred years that life arose by chance, and there's no purpose in it. All these evolutionists believe that in the last analysis. You see, we arose by chance chemical reactions, and then natural selection and mutations, which also chance, separated out the bits that survived best, and without the idea of a guiding hand over the lot, the whole of evolution arose based on no telos and no logos, no purpose. Now the brain is built to extract purpose from our environment, and if there's no purpose in the environment, then the brain gets frustrated. You understand me? I mean, my stomach, after about four hours after a meal, begins to get frustrated. It begins to make funny noises, and it begins to say, hi, a little bit more activity is indicated up there, to push down to the stomach, to get things running on an even keel again. You see, my stomach is designed for food, okay? My stomach is designed for food. Now if my stomach were designed for food, and there was no food in the universe, or in our world, what would our stomach feel like? Our stomach would feel highly frustrated, and probably get holes and ulcers in it, okay? Now we're in precisely that position, with regard to the brain and the central nervous system drugs, which I have told you about. Because we've come to the conclusion that there's no sense, and no purpose, and no love, in the whole bag of tricks. And therefore people are getting frustrated, like a stomach built to digest food. In a world where there is no food, our brain is designed to find out the purpose behind things. It's built for that. We know that. This is a fact. No arguing about it. And the evolutionists have been telling us, for 120, 130 years, that there's no such thing. To find out the purpose behind things, it's built for that. We know that. This is a fact. No arguing about it. And the evolutionists have been telling us, for 120, 130 years, that there's no such thing as food for the brain. Understood? You understand me? No such thing as purpose behind this world. If you mention purpose in biology today, that is the sin against the Holy Ghost in biology. I'm sorry it is. You mention it and try it and see. They'll either say, well the man's a fool and he's ignorant, or he's just willfully wrong. Because you must not assume that, because a purpose, you see, obviously is outside this time-space in which we live. And if you possess, if you propose a purpose, to think that purpose would work by chance, as evolution says it does, will frustrate you to the nth degree. How can purpose work by chance? You've got to rectify it somehow. Now you see, therefore, our central nervous system is in a state of frustration. You look at the faces. We walked around here a bit today, my wife and myself, and you know, we have two eyes in our heads just to watch people, and ourselves, of course, too. When you see the faces, you know, you make you weep. What people do with themselves. And it all comes from the fact that we don't really believe that we're the apple of God's eye. We believe, really, and we're taught from childhood onwards, that it all arose by chance in a primeval soup, and the rest of it was the survival of the fittest. But there wasn't any purpose behind it. And our brain is built for purpose. So obviously, what everybody's trying to do, now they've got a stomach that's built for food and there's no food to be had, and a brain that was built for purpose, and there's no purpose, telos or logos, on which this brain lives. They're sure in a desperate state, and we've got up to 60% of people running to the doctors because they've got trouble. They've got trouble. They're frustrated. I actually saw a bit of the television this morning on family counseling, which, you know, I turned it off in disgust. I'm sorry. The food that we need was just not given. It wasn't even touched, wasn't even mentioned. It's much deeper than this shallow counseling that's been given. This is a fundamental matter. Now there are three ways in which people are trying to get over this frustration, instead of going about it the fundamental way, and finding out where the purpose is. That's the way to do it, for my life, for everybody else's. There are three ways to do it, if you're frustrated because your brain's trying to get food and you can't get it. The first way is to drown it, drown the brain. You drown it and drink. You down it, until you land under the table. You're in a coma then, and you've no more problems, or if you don't want to do that, you take heroin. Heroin's in the same category, it just simply downs things, and you will get, first of all, a thrill, if your concentration curve, that I'm going to talk about, perhaps you'd put the concentration curve on, would you? If I'm going to get a real thrill, I've got to get a steep concentration curve, I'll show you that in just a minute. But you down it. Now that's considered a very uneducated way among the intellectuals of today, to get rid of your trouble. It's considered to be cheap, just simply to down the whole system. But that's way number one, method number one, down it with alcohol, down it with opiates, down it with tranquilizers, because all three will do the same, they'll down it. The second way is, listen, is to change your consciousness, not by downing it, but by upping it, to have such high speed, thank you, such high speed consciousness of everything that's going on, step it up till you exceed the speed limit, and you'll have a new sort of experience. Sure, you do, if you don't get psychotic doing it, but amphetamines, speed, will do it. And speed is one of the chief killers, that's just by doing the opposite, upping everything. The other way to do it, the third way, to get over this fundamental difficulty of the frustration of the mind, is to change it by expanding it into areas you've never had before. Now we're living in a materialistic age. We believe in time, and we believe in matter. We don't believe in heaven, the world doesn't, and certainly not now. So what they do, that's religious experience, you see, one or the other. Now if you take a psychedelic drug, you do expand your mind into a pseudo-religious experience, and that's why they do it. They're simply absolutely frustrated with things as they stand, they see no purpose in an organ that was made for purpose, and therefore they down it, or they up it, or they'll expand it in some area they haven't got before. Okay? That clear? Right. Now just let me, just you draw a little red line under that in the notes in your mind, and I'm going to do things in a logical and orderly manner as far as I can. Look, just draw a little red line and think this new thing, this new thought. If you take a dose of alcohol, which is one of the ways of downing your frustration in your consciousness, if you take a dose of alcohol, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a rhetorical question. I want to see if you're comatose or whether you're not. Take a dose of alcohol. What happens within the first ten minutes, twenty minutes? Are you upped or are you downed? You're upped. Of course you are. You've only got to go into a restaurant. Go into a restaurant in Switzerland, you know, where all the people are very dour. They're very hard-nosed, peculiar people, but they're very, very realistic people, and they never say a word. They're quiet. I'm not talking about the French Swiss. I'm talking about the Zurich Swiss. Okay. The French Swiss are a bit more on the up side. Well, now, you get them going into a restaurant, and you know, the first thing they order is a cocktail. And these state-owned directors of the banks of the world, which run America, you know, quietly, they've got all the gold. You know, they're uproarious. They're absolutely—you've never heard such voices in your life. You'd never have believed it. They're laughing at one another and shouting at one another and embracing one another and doing all sorts of things they wouldn't otherwise do. They've got garrulous. Now, you all know what garrulousness means, don't you? A thing you don't find in the Swiss as a rule, but alcohol will do it. And if you want to get out their secrets, their shop secrets, the secrets of their industry, you take them to a good dinner. And before dinner, you give them on an empty stomach. It works better on an empty stomach. You give them a good dose of aperitif, and you've got the secrets out, unless he throws up his mouth first, because he can't stop it. Now, after they've been going on the whole evening, they say, I'm not doing this. I've got something to tell you. That's why I'm doing what I am doing, this method in the madness. If you let them go on, especially if you make the drinks free, especially if you do that, they will drink till they get remarkably quiet. And if the drinks are still free, they'll land up under the table. That happens regularly if he goes on to one and two in the morning. Now, what's happened to them then? Are they up till they're down? Oh, they're down. They sure are. They're very, very much down. So, you've got to hear a drug, alcohol's a drug, you know, you've got to hear a drug that's quite a good upper. Oh, it is, it loosens the most dour tongue, but it's a very, very powerful downer. Are you listening? Any drug which does that is liable to cause dependence. Any drug which does that is liable, what we used to call, to addict, make you dependent. Once you've started doing it, there's a thrill of being put up, and then there's the easy feeling of being put down, and you can't stop it. Now, if you take a dose of morphine, say you take five milligrams per kilogram body weight of morphine, and you give it to a rabbit, you, first of all, you anesthetize his ear, nicely so it doesn't hurt him. We're very careful not to hurt the animals in any way. We're more careful than the doctors are about hurting you. They say, come on boy, bend over, and you know, like this. It'll only hurt just for a minute, and you say, yes, and it's done then, and you've got the needle in about half an inch, you see, and then he pushes the contents into your rearward portions. Now, we don't do that with rabbits. We're much too kind. We, first of all, I'm just telling you this so you don't think that I'm one of these brutes in a white coat, you know, that takes pleasure. Oh yes, a lot of people think that. I've sent people out of my lab for plaguing animals, especially in Turkey. I wouldn't have it. You know, they'll fix up a mouse in a cage about one millimeter away from a cat, and let that go on and see what the medicaments do in fright. No, I don't think that's serious science myself. Well now, if you give your rabbit, after you've anesthetized his ear with a little bit of isopropanol so he doesn't feel it, he doesn't notice what you're doing at all. When he gets this nice warm feeling, his concentration in the plasma, morphine, rises very, very quickly and he gets a high, because you put it in quickly. But after he's had that, what happens to him? Well, his head goes down, and his pupils change, and his respiration gets ever so shallow so you can't see him breathing, and his mouth goes blue, what we call cyanotic, because he hasn't got enough oxygen in his blood. And if you pinch him, he doesn't notice it. You can pinch his toenails until you break them. I haven't done that, of course, but you could, and he won't mention it. He doesn't complain at all, because you see, he's in bunny's paradise. He's absolutely, absolutely without any trouble, and he lies down there on the bench, and he couldn't care less about you, because, Jack, you see, I'm all right. And he is all right, as he thinks. What do you think the morphine's done to the rabbit? Rabbit's very happy, but rabbit's very down. Now if you put, that's five milligrams per kilogram body weight in the marginal vein of the year. Now you have 20, 50, 20 or up to 50 white mice, nice little fellows, you know, with the red eyes, lovely little fellows. And you take them, and you anesthetize them, and you put into their peritoneum, into their body cavity, you put in 40 milligrams per kilogram body weight of morphine, and as soon as you put it in, do you know what those little fellows do? They run, and they run, and they keep on running like Felix. You can't stop them from running. They'll run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and they won't stop running. And at the same time, ladies and gentlemen, their tail, which you don't usually see in the mouse, their tail goes right up, right over their back, and falls between their eyes. Now, you know what your dog does when it sees a cat, don't you? Up goes his tail like a flagstaff, and there's one huge bit of ricocheting as the rockets go off, and he's after your cat, and the cat's up the tree, and he stands on the box. But his tail is up, and his bristles are up. Now, when a tail goes up like that, it's due to inhibition of inhibition in the mouse, and that is stimulation, and the mouse is exceedingly stimulated, exceedingly stimulated. And the tail like that is called the Straub, S-T-R-A-U-B tail. If I want to find out in an unknown powder if there's any opiate in it, I just give a mouse a little. And if there's any opiate, opium, morphine, heroin in it, up will go his tail, and he'll start running. So, what does the morphine do to a mouse? Up or down? Up. Very much so. Now, if you take morphine to a woman who's having a baby, or a morphine substitute, but they're all the same, you see, I mean, chemically speaking, minor details, if you give it to an ordinary person, a woman having a child, she'll go down, the baby will, she'll get relaxed, and the baby comes more easily. You don't give too much, because it'll depress the breathing of the baby, and you get lots of blue babies that way, and the nurse is most surprised, because perhaps she didn't do her pharmacology homework, but the woman is put down. But in another case, sometimes you can't tell when it's going to come. If you put in another woman, or the same woman under different circumstances, you put the same dose of morphine in, you know she'll go into sham rage. Sham rage. She'll run around the bed, and the doctor and the nurse after her, which is a rather embarrassing situation, you can't quiet her down. You see, she's gone up, by the morphine. So you get the drug, which in the same person, at different times, will sometimes produce an up effect, and sometimes will produce a down effect, and that accounts, although it doesn't explain, the highly addicting capacity of morphine and heroin. They're uppers, and they're downers, and they do work as addictors, that is, they produce the habit-forming properties of these drugs. Now there's one thing I need to say to you about this. If you take cocaine, and cocaine's a problem with you, cocaine, if you put it on the eye, will anesthetize the surface, and you do corneal operations on the eye with cocaine. But, the substance is also a vasoconstrictor, that is, it cuts off the circulation. It constricts like a binephrine. And if it does that, that means you can get death of the tissue on which you put it, because it cuts off the blood supply by cutting off the blood vessels. And if that happens, of course, the consequences will be serious. But, if you chew morphine, if you chew cocaine, it works just like amphetamine, that is, it puts you up. So, cocaine is an anesthetic which puts you down, locally, particularly, puts you down. But it's also a very strong upper. It acts like speed. And in the Andes, the Indians, when they have to go up a hill a long way and fetch down a sheep or a goat, they'll chew that stuff. And it gives them the more power, strength to walk up, and it depresses their appetite, so they don't need food to do it. So, it's a useful thing in their eyes to drink it, to chew this substance. Now, if they do that, you've got a drug which is up, and a drug which is down, and you know the answer. It's addicting. Highly addicting. Habit forming. Now, if you snort it, put it in your nostrils here and snort it up, you know, say cocaine or any of the others, the cocaine cuts off the blood circulation, and you know, when I come to people whom I suspect, I try without letting them know, looking under and see if they've got a nasal septum, because if the nasal septum's gone, then I know what they're up to, because it's burned a hole in it, you see. You have to do that very carefully, otherwise people watch you try to peer up in their nostrils, you know, and they don't appreciate that little operation. But you can find out a lot by it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I fixed you up on one great principle, but now I'm going to fix you up properly. If you drink alcohol, say you have your aperitif in a Swiss restaurant, a good strong one, you know, you're certainly up and you're certainly down. Then you have your meal, and then they come and bring you a black mocha coffee after you've had your meal. And they'll swallow that and gulp that down. Now they gulp it, for the reason I'm going to tell you in just one minute, to get the concentration curve going up very rapidly, and that gives them a high from their coffee. They feel well on it. Now after they've had their up and down from the alcohol, they now get from their coffee, oh ye Americans, lend me your ears, they then have their coffee, and they're up. When they've had their coffee, they get out a big long black cigar, or cigarette, and they puff away at that. Now that contains a lot of nicotine. Nicotine you know, acts as a tranquilizing agent, but it also acts slightly, when you take it at first, as a nupper. So you've taken three substances, alcohol, up and down, quite powerful. Your coffee, well, just a little up, and because it only lasts 20 minutes, you go down again after 20 minutes. It's an upper and a downer in effect. Then you take your cigarette, or your cigar, and you tranquilize, but there's that little clarity beforehand which shows that it's an upper too, for a short time. When you do that, you've added three drugs together, which are all uppers and all downers. And you know the body summates that. And if you take three soft drugs, such as I've mentioned, alcohol, coffee, and the cigar, or the cigarette, you take three soft drugs, it adds up to practically a hard one. Did you know that? Do you know what I learned there? I was standing outside a coffee house, a tea room, in Bern, some years ago. And I saw a busload of old English ladies coming along, you know, real old English ladies with the big hats they have on their head. And the bus driver was threading his way through the traffic in Bern, just about five o'clock one evening. And on the side of the street, there was a big notice in English, because they do this in English to catch the people needing their fixes from England, there was a notice, tea room. Well, I saw one old lady get her umbrella, and she reached across to the chauffeur, and she tapped him on the shoulders, and she pointed, tea room. And that was it. And that poor man had to cut right across the traffic and park as near as he could, because they all started standing up to pour into that tea room to get their fix. They'd, tea, you see, does the same as coffee, and they've had all the other things as well, particularly the smoking, and the result, they needed their fix. So do you. That's how it's done. You can get dependent on these things, quick as you like, that'll fix you. The only difficulty is, when you find a person fixed, needing his fix with these things, but he needs it in morphine or something, and you need it in any number of soft drugs, don't be too hard on the man who's got caught on a hard one, because you've been caught on three soft drugs, which practically make themselves hard. I spoke to a man yesterday, was it yesterday or the day before, I couldn't tell you which, he's been around so much, but you know, he sat there during my lecture, and he smoked, and he smoked, and he smoked. He couldn't stop it. So I went over to him and said, sir, you look the sort of man who'd be very sensitive, you've got a very light skin, you look, you say, you'd be very sensitive to these things, why do you do it? Oh, he said, it's not difficult, I've given it up so often. He looked, he couldn't stop it. On the best way to getting cancer of the lung, or getting a heart attack, because tobacco will do both. Now, let me do another little experiment with you. This is very important. If you take a rabbit, a nice big Belgian hare, you know, one three kilogram, one that you've got to hold up when you put him in your arms, when you quiet him down, and you put a little anesthetic on his ears so he doesn't notice it, and you put in one milligram, one milligram of Rezopin. Now, Rezopin is a tranquilizer, and it also lowers the blood pressure, but you also increase the breathing rate, but it doesn't matter about that. You put him in, put him in one milligram into the marginal vein of the ear. Now, after 20 minutes, if you're ever so careful, you can pick him up, ever so carefully, and you can turn him around on his back, four feet upwards, like that. You try and do that to a wild rabbit and see what happens. But you can pick him up, and he'll allow you to do it, pick him up like that, and at first he'll hold his head, and then before the whole audience—I've done this before hundreds of thousands of American servicemen—it's a real experiment. It's an experiment because it brings out flashbacks, and I've done it for that reason. They don't know that, of course, but you do that privately. It comes public when they have a flashback. You push him up like this, and you hold him up there, and within 10 seconds, his head will start to fall backwards so loosely that if you didn't support his head with your thumbs, he'd break his neck probably, it holds back so far, and he wouldn't be able to breathe properly. So you just support his head a little bit with your thumbs, and you'll see his eyes then, you put the flashlights on it, the spotlights on it, you see his eyes, he goes to sleep. And he's fast asleep, up in your arms, on his back, four legs in the air, and his head right back, just supported by your thumbs. Now, you mustn't make any noise while this experiment's going on, because if you pop out of that sleep, you've never seen the quick time that he can pop out of that sleep, in a nanosecond, almost, you'd be out of it. Then you do something which is very nasty. You've got to be careful with American soldiers, because they're very kind-hearted to animals, you know. I'm not going to hurt it, but they think it might. You just let it suddenly drop, a free-fall drop on its back, on its back. Now, before it's dropped that much, it's twisted itself around with its righting reflex, and it lands on its feet like a cat. It never hurts itself. Then you can pick it up, let it go to sleep again, and this time, drop it on its head. But before you've dropped it, before it's gone two or three inches out of your hands, he's wriggled around like a cat, and he lands safely on his feet. Then you drop him on his rearward portions. You get him to go to sleep, drop him on his rearward portions, and he's wriggled around in a second, and he's perfectly awake, and you run around the table, until you pick him up again. Now, you say to the boys, look, could I do that again? Could I repeat that experiment? And they'll always say, no, he's learnt to know, he's awake, and he knows you're a white coat, and he knows you're an ornery sort of a person, and he won't let you do it again. They all think that, because the rabbit's perfectly lively on the table, so when you pick him up, and support him like that, and he'll go to sleep, and he does it in ten seconds every time, so you pick him up again, and you let him drop, and exactly the same happens. Now, I did this to those boys once, about eight or nine times, and they said he will learn, and I said he won't. Well, I proved to them that as long as you do it, that thing can't learn. And the reason is, that I told you, that the rabbit has had a tranquiliser, and it's incapable of learning. Now, I had a case, thank you, I had a case the other day, of a child that was hyperkinetic, you know, one of these, what we call wriggle bridges, do you know what a wriggle bridge is? Don't you? You know the type? Every mother knows what that means, and you know, I've had this happen twenty, thirty times, but I had another case just recently. The doctor had given that kid, to help it learn at school, a tranquiliser, just to keep it quiet, and I found out, the mother was almost in tears about this, she said, my child, just can't get promoted. He can't learn, he's ever so still, he's like cabbage, but quite still, but he can't learn anything. And I said, didn't your doctor tell you that? And she said, no. Well, I said, that's what you're doing, you're keeping the child quiet, but the definition of a tranquiliser is he can't learn anything, just as my rabbit couldn't learn anything, neither can your child, can't learn a thing. So, you've got to be very careful with these substances. There was the case of ten or fifteen doctors recently, who were told that they were suspecting that the tranquilisers they were prescribing were not only making the people incapable of learning, but they were incapable of retaining the skills they'd learned. So they put these ten or fifteen doctors on a simulator for traffic, you know, the simulators that you use not to turn out the man onto the traffic, but make him do it with a television screen in front of him and a steering wheel. And they gave these doctors in the double-blind test some of the sugar tablets made bitter with what you're happy to call quinine, we call it quinine, but I must say it right, you see, otherwise I'll have the pastor after me again for not talking, for not interpreting the language that I speak. The doctors didn't know what they were getting. Some of them got Librium, some of them got Valium, some of them got chlorpromazine, and some of them got sugar with quinine in them, okay. Then they put these men on the simulator, and before they evaluated the results, they asked the doctors, how do you think you got on? Well all those that had taken the tranquilizer said it was the easiest test we've ever done. And those that had got the sugar tablet said, oh, it was a very hard, hard test, I don't know whether I got through it. When they evaluated it, it came out that all those doctors who'd taken a tranquilizer had all hopelessly failed the driving test. And all of them thought they did it wonderful, just beautifully. You see, you lose your skills, you can't learn anything more, but you don't know it. Those that thought that they'd failed the test, and they had the sugar pills, had all passed it. It takes away your critical ability. Now this is why I've told you this. This is the reason why a small dose of alcohol in a car is certainly one of the most dangerous things you can do. Because alcohol is an upper, and it's also a donor, but it's also in small doses a tranquilizer. And a small dose of it will tranquilize you quite as effectively as some of the weaker tranquilizers, and you don't know it. Now I was on an airline here recently, the name of which will not be named, when I came here, and we had to wait to get the aircraft repaired for over an hour. And because the people were very disturbed about having to wait, they gave everybody free drinks as much as they wanted. Now when we got out here, there was an announcement put through from the captain, we are not responsible for any car accidents. They turned them straight out of that plane, fully tranquilized, into their cars. Now that is one of the most dangerous things you can do. Alcohol is certainly addictive, and you're certainly not so much of a danger when you're drunk as when you're tranquilized, because you don't know you're tranquilized. And I wouldn't take a drop of any alcohol if I have to drive a car, because I know just what it does. It tranquilizes you and prevents you from profiting from your experience. Now look, let me tell you one or two other things ever so quickly. If you have any experience in drug abuse, you'll always come up against the man sitting on the doorstep in the morning with the needle in his arm and dead. Regularly the police would come and say, would you please look at these persons, dead with a needle in his arm. Now why? If a person starts to take morphine, if he starts to take heroin or anything like that, what he'll do is, say, inject first of all five milligrams, and that's enough to start with. I give you a thank you. It is dangerous, of course, to do it, but that will give you a high. Now he tries to inject that five milligrams ever so quickly. He'll get it into his vein and whoosh, right in. Why does he do that? He does that because he knows, as you see from this graph I've drawn here, that if you've got time here at the bottom and concentration over at the other side, on the other axis, if the curve of the concentration in the blood of your morphine is on the steep rise, if it rises ever so quickly, the time that it's rising quickly will be the time that you'll get your high. And you can only get that high by putting it into a vein and injecting quickly. You can get a high from tetrahydrocannabinol if you smoke the hashish and you push the smoke down into your lungs under pressure, you hold it there. And if you can do that, most people splutter, you see, when they do it, because it's rather hard to do, but if you can do that, your concentration curve of the tetrahydrocannabinol in your blood will rise steeply. If you don't push it into your lungs and inhale, the concentration curve will go very, very gradually upwards and you won't get a high. So the slope of the curve is the important part in getting the high in these drugs. Now look, if you take the tetrahydrocannabinol just by mouth and don't push it into your lungs, or if you take your heroin or your morphine by mouth, it's very poorly absorbed and the concentration curve is like that, it's very flat, only goes up slightly, you get no high. So these boys learn to bump it in as quick as they can to get a curve like that. That's what they're after. And then they get the thrill of a high, if you can call it that way, because the thrill is often that you vomit. But they want to vomit because they know then it's going to work properly and the stuff is active. Now look, if you do that once, twice, three times a week, you will find that the second time you do it, you'll need up to twice as much morphine or heroin to get it. And if you do it a long time, you may need instead of five milligrams, you may need a thousand. I did know one case of 5,000, I mean it's incredible, incredible. But his liver, you see, learns, like our livers do learn, to deal with substances which you put into it. And what's happening is the liver gets lots of extra pep built up over the course of time and it can throw out the stuff almost as quickly as you put it in. So to get it high, you have to put an enormous amount in, and ever so quickly. And this boy, one, only one I knew of that, could get in 5,000, I mean five grams. Think of it, incredible. Now he was caught, he was busted, and he was put in prison for six months. When he came out, he boasted that he was a five gram man. Well of course, that's the thing to be very proud of. If you can deal with five grams, that's incredible. I mean, who'd ever believe it? So when he came out, he got all his cronies together, and he said, after all this time, I'm going to have a trip. And he got his five grams, and he put it into his arm, and before he got the plunger, a third of the way down, he was dead. Now why? The reason why he died was this. He was trying to get a concentration curve very steep, and so he put it in too quickly. The real reason was, the more important reason was, that his liver, if I might say so, in the six months he'd been in jug, had forgotten, if I might use that word, how to metabolize the drugs so quickly, and couldn't. He could now stand about, say, a hundred milligrams, because his liver had forgotten how to do it so quickly, and the mitochondria and the other things that do that were gone. So he killed himself before a third emptied his needle, and they don't know that. Your liver's not constant, and you can never tell how much you can deal with. The other cases happen like this. A person will take the heroin, and he'd cook it up in a spoon, and he'd inject it, and then they get festering wounds all up their arms. I had a case of a sergeant who volunteered to help me in the NATO courses, and I had injected a rabbit, and the cotton wool that we put on the ear had come off, and a little blood from the ear had leaked out onto my coat. Now, I didn't want to go in my coat with blood on it. You see, it makes a very bad impression to do that. So I said to him, just before the generals and all the people came in, would you lend me your coat quickly, your lab coat? He looked at me as I'd hit him over the head with a sledgehammer and said, no. Well, I said, look, I can't go with a bloody coat. I just can't do that. He said, and I can't give you mine. I was puzzled about this, so I said, okay, shirt sleeves then. And I received them all in my shirt sleeves, nice clean white shirt, and everything was okay. Now, I met him six months later, and he said, don't you remember me? So I said, no. Oh, he said, I was the assistant who refused to give you my coat. Oh, I said, yes, I remember. But he said, you know, I've come to Christ since then. And I had festering arms, right up my arm on both sides, and if I'd taken off my coat, you could all have seen it, and I should have been out. So that was the reason. Now, they get these festering arms, and as a result, they very often pick up hepatitis, you know, jaundice. The liver gets infected, the liver can't function. Now, when the liver can't function, you get a man, say, who can take a thousand milligrams, and he's been taking a thousand milligrams quite a long time, and he gets hepatitis, but he doesn't know what that means, that the liver can't function. And he'll sit down one night, and he'll put a thousand grams in his plunger, and by the time he's got a hundred in, he's dead. The liver, you see, has lost its capacity, and the poor man is absolutely finished. He can't stop it. He's tried to get a steep curve, and he's put that little bit in very quickly, and the result is that the man has killed himself. That's how they die. So it's most dangerous, most dangerous to experiment with these things, because your body doesn't remain the same. If you take a psychedelic, and you go into it in a good state of mind, the action of a psychedelic will be quite different, maybe quite different, from the action of a psychedelic when you're in depression. It pushes you, if you're in a depression, it may push you over to a psychotic trip, and if you're very hopeful, say you're getting engaged or something like that, then you may get a very good effect. Okay, that'll be enough for that. Now let me go on to the psychedelics themselves. I need now our George, if you'd be so kind, on our screen. This is the method of action by which psychedelics change the consciousness, the state of consciousness in which we live. It's on the other paper there. Right. Now, you know this, that we have our contact with the world round about us through the five senses. We have the eye, and at the back of the eye, thank you, the back of the eye, there's a retina, and in the retina, there are the rods and cones, and the light shines brightly in my eyes and produces photons which react with the retina, and with the rods and cones, and they produce, the rods and cones, they produce electrons which pass from the eye up through those nerves that I've put there, and there they're translated in an electronic state produced by the photons, which then go up to the brain, and you see an electronic picture. How it's done, nobody knows. You see an electronic picture of me. It's a television set really. The brain doesn't perceive anything, but there's something in the brain which perceives the image which the brain produces. Now the ears do the same thing. The sound waves beat on the eardrums, and the eardrums convert that to electrons, and you see a sound picture in your mind. A dolphin has the melon in its head, and it sees with sound waves the prey which it swims after. It sees that. Now if you take the eye, and say two boys get quarrelling with one another, and one boy lands his fist in the other boy's eye so that no photons can get in from light as long as the fist is in the eye, are you okay? What does that boy see when the fist lands in the eye? He sees sparks, doesn't he, or stars, whatever you like. Is there any light there? Well, not the light that he sees flying around when that fist strikes him. That's produced by the simple stimulation by the pressure on the rods and cones which, when you stimulate them anyway, will communicate up to the brain light, even though there's no light there. The tongue does the same. You have the four types of taste buds, and if you take a taste bud that gives you the salty taste, and you stimulate it by cooling it, you'll taste a salty taste although there's no taste there. You know if a person has delirium tremens, you know what delirium tremens is, don't you? What the alcoholics have, when they feel and see and shout, all sorts of things that aren't there. What's happening is the alcohol and the toxic products from the alcohol stimulate the ear, which then sends up to the brain shouts and noises, music, which aren't there. And they call that delirium tremens. And it's a deception of the nervous system because the nervous system is so complicated that you can fairly easily deceive it. Now, if you take a dose of LSD, LSD gets into the brain and blocks, within about 20-30 minutes, all that nervous system which I've got written up there. It doesn't block it like an analgesic, but the person will take the dose of LSD, and if he's taken it with, shall we say, speed at the same time or an appetite depressant, he'll suddenly sit himself down and he'll look into the middle distance and he's lost all contact with his environment. You can wake him, you can talk him down if you shout loudly into his ear, but he's in a trip and he's seeing all sorts of things which you know nothing about. And he'll stay in that trip like that because he's undergoing now stimulus depression. He's suppressing his stimuli coming in through the five senses. The result is he's in stimulus deprivation and he'll sit there and just look, just look, looking into the middle distance. And then suddenly, as this substance starts, the acid or the tetrahydrocannabinol, whatever he's taken, starts to disappear and diffuse out of the nerve endings, some of the nerve endings start to work. Some of the nerves are still blocked. The result is that the input into the brain becomes distorted or garbled. Now it's like a television set which gets distorted, the picture, when you have a car outside without any suppressors on the plugs, on the sparking plugs. You know the picture starts to dance and the picture starts to shoot up and shoot down and then you lose it all together for a time. And that happens when these drugs start to diffuse out of the nerve endings, you get a distorted picture. Now that's called hallucination type one. The world round about you becomes distorted, okay, just due to the input being distorted. Now after the stuff diffuses out a bit more, he'll suddenly say, Fellas, I've got no weight. My arms are as light as feathers. I can fly. And you say, I don't think you can, you know. Oh, but I can, and I'll prove it. You see, he can hold up his hands like some people during the blessing can hold up their hands, you know. And never notice that they're getting heavy, not like Moses who had to have two people support his hands up in the air. They'll hold them up in all sorts of queer positions, like this. All sorts of odd positions. You might think they were dead, they're in such odd positions. But the reason is this, that the proprioceptive impulses that they're getting through make him unable to notice the real weight of his limbs. We had one man come to London, Soho, to have a nice weekend, as he thought, with the girls up there. You know, the type of girls those are. And they gave him a good, strong dose of LSD, probably laced with amphetamines B. And he sat there on the park bench, twenty minutes, looking into the middle distance, in a trip. They're having great fun while he's having this trip. Then suddenly he stood up, and he said, my arms are as light as feathers. There's no weight in them at all. I just simply haven't got any weight left. And she said, gone. Let's see. And he said, okay. And before she could do a thing, he was up the church tower. They're open in London for prayer, you know. And up the church tower, and on to the balustrade at the top, and he flew down. Well, the girl escaped, but the police picked up the rest and buried him. That's how it happens. You see, the information he was getting through from his five senses was garbled. So he didn't know his own weight, and the result was he was undergoing hallucination type one. Now, that is a hallucination of the world round about us. This isn't a religious one. This is a very frightening one. When people get it, they'll panic and they'll run. And you've got to stop them, because there's no telling what they'll do. Because they don't know what they are doing. Because their proprioception is not working properly. You've got to stop them, and restrain them, and talk them down. Now, you can talk them down. You see, their whole system up here is just simply full of garbled impulses which can't be translated into sense. So what you do is you speak into the ear, not only for psychedelics, for morphine this doesn't work, only for psychedelics. You speak very loudly and authoritatively into the ear, by putting in a strong enough impulse, because each sense, each of the five senses, is in competition with each of the other five senses. The taste is in competition with the eye. The eye is in competition with the ear. The sense of pain is in competition with the sense of olfaction in the nose. If you can shout in enough information there, you can push the garbled impulses away, and you can talk him down. Now, while I was doing this rabbit experiment, you know, and I got him up on my arm, I said, I tell you this, because this is the way you get out of flashback. While I was doing that experiment, for about the eighth or the ninth time, and I told them if they coughed, that would ruin it, and to get a thousand American soldiers quiet, you know, is rather a job, but anyway, we got them quiet, and they were watching this, and it was very, very stressful, because they thought that something would happen and go wrong. See this thing keep going to sleep, you see, and then immediately awake again, and sure you couldn't teach it anything. That was the thing that really got them. While I was doing that, a man in sergeant's uniform got up, and he walked to me. I had a thousand people all around me in a hangar, cleared out the aircraft to do this, and he walked to me just like a robot, you know, and he fixed his eyes on me, and I didn't think he'd negotiate the steps, because you see there were steps up to the podium, but he just got up those steps, and then with a rabbit in my arms, he bawled at me, I must have help. So I gave the rabbit, gave it to the assistant, and talked, took him backstage, and I talked him down. Now you can do that. I'd seen what he'd had. You could see that from the symptoms. Talked him down. I said, sarge, what have you been doing? Well he said, until I joined the Air Force, I used to get regularly my acid, and I couldn't get it in the Air Force. I said, what are you getting now? Oh, he said, hash. So I said, what, Turkish hash? Yes. I said, what's it laced with? Well he said, we laced a bit ourselves. We put in speed. Now that's a very powerful lacing agent. And I said, and how long was it since you took it the last time? Oh, he said, six months ago. So I said, how does it work out? Oh, he said, it's like this, sir. Whenever I get stressed, I have a flashback. So I said, what does the flashback look like, sarge? He said, like this, I'm in the finance department, and we've had an inspection today. And I've been having up to 200 flashbacks a day. Now he said, today, when the officers came in to inspect us, I was offered, I was asked to show certain accounts. And I picked up the paper, and the moment I picked them up, the paper started to burn in the four corners. There, there, there, there. And it burned with a bright, bright blue flame. It burned ever so slowly, right slowly into the middle. And I was waiting for it, because I knew what would come, it's happened before. When all four bits from the four corners came together, there was a bang, and a demon popped out of the middle, grinned at me, and was gone. And he said, you know, finance department, if we do anything wrong, we're out. I know one colonel who was sacked for it, because that sort of thing was happening. He said, what can I do? Well, I said, first of all, you've got to understand what's happened, and then I'll tell you what to do. What had happened was, the boy had been taking LSD first, and lacing it with apatite depressors. And he'd done that until he joined the army, and then he'd stepped things up with a tetrahydrocannabinol, with a hash, with lots of amphetamine. And then his flashbacks had come so often that he'd stopped. But they didn't stop the flashbacks when he stopped taking the drug. A flashback is a drug experience with no drug, within recent times. So what's happened to you is this, that the liver in the body has any enzymes, which break down your own stress hormone, that is the epinephrine. When you get stressed, you produce a lot of epinephrine, you're a nervous type of person, and the blood pressure rises, and your heart starts to beat, and you're under stress because of the epinephrine in the blood. Now the body has a mechanism of getting away, breaking down this epinephrine, with these enzymes in the liver. Now if you've been taking these large doses of acid, together with speed, you've damaged your enzymes. And when you get into stress, your own enzymes don't break down your own stress hormone, your own epinephrine. And it rises to very high concentrations, so you get very stressed because you don't break down your own epinephrine, and therefore your body has to take other measures. And it converts the epinephrine from your own self to adenochrome, and adenochrome is a substance which has a similar pharmacological spectrum to LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, what they call acid. So what you're doing is every time you get into a stress, you'll produce epinephrine, and you won't get rid of it as quickly as you should, and your body wants to get rid of it. So it's converted to the adenochrome, and you're producing your flashbacks by drugs made from hormones which come from you. That's what you're doing. And every time you get a stress, you'll notice it, but when you're not in stress, you won't. He said, that's just it, I'm a perfectly normal person, but as soon as I get into stress, my character is unstable because I have a flashback. I have a trip, and I've been having, as I said, he said, 200 a day. You imagine the strain of that. So I prescribed to him this. I said I'd get him a discharge, if I just mention it to the authorities, you have privilege when you do this job, you say, because otherwise they get fired, and they don't get a pension. I got him an honorable discharge, and told him to go and take plenty of vitamin C, two and three grams a day, if his stomach could stand it, or was on a full stomach. The vitamin C helps to repair the enzyme synthesis which he needs. Then he was to go and work outside with his muscles, in the fresh air, five or six months to see if he could get rid of it. And he did, and I met a man recently, who's now in the Lord's work, who'd had exactly the same. We put him outside, gave him plenty of vitamin C, and he met me the other day with two kids, and happily married, and completely recovered. But you see, you've got to understand these things. A flashback is what makes a person's character unstable in stress. He won't break down when he's not in stress, and he'll be a perfectly normal person. But under stress, he will. Now if you've got a civilization like you have, which entails a great deal of stress, the danger is the psychedelic, which will do that. Psychedelics don't produce addiction, but they do produce the Egyptian syndrome, which is laziness, not called because of the Egyptians, but because the Egyptians use a lot of hashish, and will produce this type of flashback, which is exceedingly unsettling if a pilot finds his landing gear stuck, and he gets into stress, and he sees four airstrips in front of him instead of one. It's rather a dangerous thing to have happen if a person is in a responsible position. Now I must give you the last thing about these drugs, which is necessary for us. That's this. The five senses all stand, as I say, in competition with one another. If you had anything to do with the Vietnamese, the soldiers in Vietnam, you know, they'd fight to the last man, surrounded by the Viet Cong. Now they were usually got out by armed helicopters, who went in and produced—you'd find them wounded in horrible positions, fingers shot off, you know, toes shot off, and flesh wounds and that. They'd be able to fight until the helicopter came. When the helicopter came, they'd be in such pain that they'd have to have morphine immediately, and they were always ordered, as in the helicopters, to give them the morphine. Why didn't they need it before? Well, they didn't need it before, you see, because they were fighting for their lives. Their eyes were full, sending a huge amount of impulses into the brain. Their ears were full. They were listening for anything. And they were fighting, of course, with guns, and the noise was there as well. So their ears were full. Their whole proprioceptive system, the perception of themselves, their arms and their legs, where they were fighting for their lives, was absolutely full. And the result was that when the pain from the wound came up and asked to be received at the telephone exchange at the top of the brain, the brain was fully occupied and couldn't let the pain through. So the pain had to wait while the rest of the system, the telephone system, was full up. As soon as the telephone system was shut down, and they were taken out of the fight for the helicopters, the pain got through in its full force, and they couldn't stand it. So then you had to down the whole lot with morphine. You often find that in games, you know, people get hurt. We had a boy with his ear pulled out in rugby once, and he didn't notice it while he was playing the game, although he was red and steaming with blood. But as soon as the whistle was blown and he was stopped, he grabbed for his ear and fainted. Why not before? Because you see, he was fighting in the game, he was playing that game with all his might, and there wasn't any room for the pain to get through. Now listen, just keep that in your mind that the five senses all compete with one another for computer space on the bottom of the brain. They're all in strong competition. Now listen to this. When the astronauts were sent up, before they were sent up, they were put in simulating capsules where they had no weight. They were made to lie in warm water, so they got no weight. That's to simulate no gravity. And then they didn't see anything because it was dark, and they didn't hear anything right inside that, and they certainly didn't eat, and they certainly didn't smell. So they were in—are you listening?—sensory deprivation. Now boys and girls, in sensory deprivation, where the five senses are not working or very much cut down, they hallucinate. Now it isn't the hallucination type one, the hallucination of the world round about us. It's mostly a religious experience. It may be religious, it may be pseudo-religious, but a religious experience it is of something which they haven't had before. Now the ENASA people worked on that, and they said, we have an extrasensory perceptive system which I don't like to define myself, but as soon as you cut down on the one to five senses, a sixth sort of sense—can I say it for eternal, for it says that God has put eternity in our hearts—starts to function. As soon as you go into sensory deprivation, the extrasensory perceptions start to work. This is a well-known fact. Now in our society, we've filled up the five senses with noise, such as no race has ever done before us. We've got the television, we've got the radio, we've got the papers, we've got everything you like. And the result is you never experience much of an extrasensory perceptive experience. It's too noisy. In Switzerland, when Bergen-Münster, our station, is broadcasting, I never get Chicago, and I never get Japan. But as soon as the Swiss station stopped broadcasting, I can. Now our society is so loud and so noisy that you know they never hear the still small voice. That's why I read that out to you. They never read it. They never hear it, the still small voice. God wasn't in the earthquake. God wasn't in the storm. God wasn't in the fire. But when he went into the cave, and it was still, he heard the voice, Elijah, what doeth thou hear? He came out, and covered his face with his mantle, because of the still small voice. Now you see, we're made for that. Adam was made to walk in the garden, on earth, and use his five senses. But he also walked with God where he was, in the eternal. In the sixth sense, if you like to call it like that. He did both. You remember when Jesus was on earth, he spoke to his disciples and said, the son of man which is in heaven. The son of man was on earth, talking to the people, but he said, I am in heaven. Adam was made like that, and Jesus is the second or the last Adam, isn't he? So Jesus was made to walk eternally, even on earth, right in the midst of the crucifixion, with his father. And the awful thing was, when he had to say, father, why hast thou forsaken me? He was so used to being the hybrid, on earth, working with the people, talking to them, healing them, and all that. They forgot that he was at all times with the father. Adam was made like that. He walked in paradise, and loved his wife, kept the garden, and at the same time he walked with God. When he turned his back on God, he was only able to use his five senses, and the thin cut off his sixth, the eternal one. That's what did it. And since that time, you know, we've been longing to get back to normal. The whole idea of man is to make the five senses so loud that we don't miss the sixth. But I'll tell you this, that if I don't see beautiful things with my eyes for a long time, like when we were in Chicago, you know, we're used to the mountains, my wife and I. Do you know what we found ourselves doing on Saturday afternoon, looking at Swiss calendars? Just to fill up the eyes, you know, with the beauty we're used to. When I come out of the lab, with all those motors going, and come home at night, you know, my ears built for better things than the humming of motors and air conditioners and all that sort of thing. I asked my wife to play me a little bit of Mozart, or Beethoven, or Bach. And that meets the needs of my ears. For a long time, I was very sick, and I had a nasty hepatitis from Turkey, and they get a very nasty sort there. And when I came home, I couldn't eat any butter, and I couldn't eat any strawberries and cream for six years. Now, strawberries and cream is a weakness for me. You know, I couldn't see my children and my wife eating strawberries and cream, because I had such a longing for strawberries and cream. You know, it gets to be an obsession. And some people get an obsession like that for alcohol, they tell me, but it can be an obsession. Now look, you get very frustrated in that position. I remember the first day I tried just a little bit, after six years, and oh, how that met the bill. Now listen, you see, we're made, we're made for the five senses, okay? We're made for the five senses, and we're made for the six. And in our society, we have nothing of a real religious experience, you know. Very, very little, except here, Calvary Chapel, you know. But outside, there's very, very little. And the result is that if a man doesn't get what his sensory perception needs, he will get frustrated. Now there you have the cause of the drug epidemic. We're so loud that we never hear the still, small voice. But if you take a drug, take LSD, then you'll push down the sensory stimulus flooding we've got, and you'll quieten the five senses synthetically, with the result that you'll get a pseudo-religious experience. If you went through the war as we did, with two ounces of meat a month, and one egg, you'll understand that at the end of two or three years of that, you'd get as long as sit down at a table and eat a square meal. Now with the sixth sense, the still, small voice, we're made for that, you know. We're made for communion with the saviour. And sin has stopped that. Now with a drug, you can get an experience of that type without dealing with the sin, and that's religion in a pill. The result is you get all the toxicities I've been talking about. You get the flashbacks that I've been talking about. All these things are there. But the religious experience is not a genuine one, because God can't see sin. The only way to cure the drug epidemic, and it's a way I've seen work thousands of times, is for a man to deal with that which really keeps him from God, and that is to deal with his sin first. And when you've dealt with that, you must tell him that he must take his quiet time. As Jesus said, go into your closet and shut the door. That is, cut down the five senses. Shut the door. When you pray, you close your eyes. Why? Just to cut down the noise, the informational noise from your eye, so that you can hear in your brain better the still, small voice. And if you do that, if you get first of all the sin dealt with, which separates us from God, and then take regular, quiet times reading your Bible, you'll find that's the best way to cure the drug epidemic. It's the only way I've seen work, because it really supplies the need which every man has, the need of the eternal, which God has put in our hearts. If we do that, we shan't have any trouble with drugs. And if we do that, we shall be satisfied and less frustrated than we are, because we're made for eternity, as well as for time, both of them. And if we do that, and practice that, that's the practice of the presence of God, and you've got to be quiet to do that. We'll pray together. We ask thee, Lord Jesus, that we may learn to understand ourselves, that we may understand thee better, for thou hast made us. We ask thee that we may take time to be quiet, as thou hast told us in thy word. And the being quiet, and hearing thy still, small voice, we may rejoice in thy presence, because we do that for which we're made, to husband the garden with the five senses, and to practice thy presence in our hearts, where the Lord Jesus desires to reside. We thank thee, Lord Jesus, that thou dost do this, for thy new name's sake. Amen.
Cause/cure of the Drug Epidemic
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Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith (December 22, 1915 – September 14, 1995) was a British preacher, organic chemist, and creationist whose ministry bridged science and faith to challenge evolutionary theory and proclaim biblical truth. Born in Reading, England, to Ernest Walter and Florence Emily Wilder-Smith, he pursued higher education at Reading University, earning a Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry in 1941, followed by doctorates in Pharmacology from the University of Geneva in 1964 and from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Initially an atheist, he converted to Christianity in his 20s after intellectual struggles with evolution, influenced by his wife Beate Gottwaldt, whom he married in 1949. Wilder-Smith’s preaching career combined his scientific expertise with evangelism, beginning during World War II while working at Imperial Chemical Industries. He preached across Europe and North America, notably debating evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith at the 1986 Oxford Union Debate, where his arguments on information theory and thermodynamics gained attention. He served as Professor of Pharmacology at institutions like the University of Illinois (1959–1961) and Hacettepe University in Turkey, earning three Golden Apple Awards for teaching. Author of over 70 scientific papers and books like The Creation of Life (1970) and Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny (1968), he emphasized creationism’s scientific basis. With Beate, he raised four children—Oliver, Petra, Clive, and Einar—and died at age 79 in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, leaving a legacy as a pioneering creationist preacher.