This is Chapter 8 of Kent Nerburn's book "Letters to my son" It's a hell of a book written by one
heck of a writer. Great for a father to give to his son..one chapter at a time. 
_-.'


I AM SITTING in a little cafe. There is a man at a table
across from me. He is drinking.
His eyes are heavy. He fades for a moment, lists to
the side, then jerks himself up. He is on the edge of sleep,
yet still he continues.
He seems to be a good man. There is a gentleness
in his face. Perhaps he is feeling lonely. Perhaps he is
nursing some private hurt. Perhaps he is an alcoholic.

His features are getting puffy from the drinking. His
 cheeks are slack and there is no alertness in his eyes. His
lips hang like weights. He raises his hand to the waitress. She brings him .
another beer. He thanks her, too intensely. She turns
away quickly before he is done talking.

How sad this is to see. No matter how happy this
man thinks he is, loneliness hangs over him like a shroud.
He is a man alone, drawing his truth from a bottle.
I watch this man. He is not so different from me, I
could be him. You could become him. He is just a person who got trapped
by alcohol, one of the great tricksters.

I call drugs and alcohol the great tricksters because
they hide their true faces from our view. They begin by
enhancing the ordinary, but end in their own darkness.
This sounds dramatic and full of false alarm. But it's
 a sad truth that too many learn too late. In fact, when you
first feel that rush of clarity from a drug or first find your-
self filled with loving warmth from a few drinks, it is
inconceivable that there can be trouble waiting. Your first response is, "There's nothing to fear
here. This can be good if I use it correctly. It's excess that causes the problems, and I don't need
excess:'

But drugs and alcohol are great seducers and de-
ceivers. They offer you the world in a new way, but from
that first moment they are at work on your chemistry.
And your chemistry has a logic of its own.

Soon, in subtle ways, they begin to own you and
demand that you serve their will. And it is only a matter
of time until they cause you to harm yourself or other
people.

 DRUGS AND ALCOHOL page 69

And you never see it coming.
 Consider alcohol. A few drinks and the lights become brighter, the colors richer. Your tongue
begins to speak from your heart. The world becomes graceful and, suffused with a warm glow.
You are at peace.

What can be wrong with something that produces such truth and such honesty?" You will never
know until the day when it tricks you. And it will. There will come a moment when the alcohol
will tell you what to do, and you will follow.
 Maybe you'll be lucky. Maybe it will only cause you to utter a hurtful word, or perform some
foolish and embarrassing action.
 May be you'll be unlucky and great harm will be done. Maybe you'll get a girl pregnant because
your love seemed so strong and real. Maybe you'll take the life of a friend, because the warmth
that surrounded you made you feel that you could drive faster or longer or with less care.

 Maybe you will wake up one day to find that you are one of those people alcohol grabs and
refuses to let go, demanding that you start each day with a drink, or guiding you through each day
with a gnawing hunger until at last you can take the bottle and find the peace that only
it contains.

70 LETTERS TO MY SON 

You will never know which of these awaits you. But " ,
one of them does. Drinking is a devil's bargain. You get, , : :
something extra in the present, but you pay for it in the future. And you never know the real price
until it is due.
Drugs are even more seductive. They make you think you have control, then deceive you by
taking control themselves, and making you the pawn in a great chemical game
that the human system is powerless to resist.
 They are even more treacherous than alcohol, because at first they seem to offer so much more. 
Who can deny the thrill of cocaine, the mysticism of peyote
and mescaline, methedrine's sense of mastery, or any of  the other drug-induced experiences that
seem to lift life so far beyond the ordinary

In my youth, when I did a lot of drugs, I always said that they moved my life from black and white
to technicolor. They gave me insights that changed me. I was able to step outside myself and see
my life for what it really was, and then set myself a new course. I believed I tasted food for the
first time, felt the breeze for the first time, truly made love for the first time. All was new and full
of joy.

Then slowly, I saw it all turn. Words would escape me. My memory would fail and my mental
quickness was gone. I felt vague pains in my body and vague fears

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL  71

overtook my mind, Free time became dead time; I
 wanted to fill it with drugs, because reality without drugs
seemed boring and drab.

I saw my friends who did not do drugs as fearful, their lives as lacking. I could not imagine that
they were having the fun I had because they were not seeing the world as I saw it. I found myself
hanging out with people, with whom I had nothing more in common than the drugs we shared.
Soon a friend died. Other friends began coughing up blood. One lost his mind, and it had been a
beautiful mind. He returned to his parents' home where he lives, even today lost in wild and
terrifying delusions. To be sure, there are others who are well. Some still even do some drugs.
But we are all tainted. Something was taken from us even a something was given to us We
have a knowledge, but it was not without a price. And I don't want you to have to pay that price.
The knowledge is there to be gained in other ways.

I don't know how to explain this in a way that will
touch your heart. The world is full of slick slogans, like
"Just say No" -slogans meant to simplify and scare and
sell abstinence. Everyone who has seen the down side
will tell you horror stories calculated to stop you out of
fear. But the true issue is much more complicated.

72 LETTERS TO MY SON

Drugs and alcohol are not, in themselves, dark and abysmal horrors, But they carry the seeds of
dark and abysmal horrors, and they plant them in your mind, your heart, your very chemical
makeup. No matter how benign they seem, no matter how elevated the experience they create,
they are giving you something at the expense of something else. They are a devil's bargain -
a promise of power in exchange for a service yet unnamed- and it is up to you if you want to
make that bargain. 

I am afraid of that bargain for you, because I do not know what service will be demanded That I
am well and others are well does not mean that there is still not a service to be demanded, And
even if we were set free, you may not be. You must not take the risk and sell your future for the
present.

 I say all this with full knowledge of the "other" truth that to some people drugs have been sacred,
drugs have been medicine, drugs have been the window into other truths; that to some people
alcohol is a part of daily life in a civilized and genteel manner, or part of broader
rituals of spiritual freedom. But always there is the bargain, even though it may be unspoken or
unrecognized.

I do not wish to lie to you. There were moments on
peyote when I heard the springs run underground and
heard the wind and the trees as a symphony. There were

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL 73 ,

moments making love on drugs when I thought I was going to be transfigured by the beauty. But
none of those feelings lasts, and always there was the shadow

How to say it? Somehow, those moments were illusion as much as insight Try as I might I cannot
go back to them in my heart, even though they existed.

In my heart and in my mind I can still stand on the tundra above the Brooks Range in Alaska and
weep for the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. But I cannot find the moment of truth and
insight of the night on peyote when the springs sang to me from beneath the ground. The truth
without drugs endures; the truth induced by drugs disappears.

The world contains enough to fill us a thousand times. I would not trade five minutes of being
with you for all the brilliance and beauty of all the drugs I ever took. I would not trade a moment
of your mother's love for every blissful second spent in the thrall of alcohol, marijuana cocaine
peyote or LSD. They have their seductions and their truths, but they do not have the strength of
spirit.

 And this is where I think truth lies. It takes courage
to step across the line into drugs, but it is a courage based
on weakness. The hunger for new experience, the desire
to reach new heights and depths, is really an admission

74 LETTERS TO MY SON

that the world is not enough. And that admission is ignorant and false.
To see a solar eclipse when the earth goes dark and
the birds tuck their heads under their wings to sleep, to
see a child born into the world from the body of a woman
you love, to hear the silence of eternity as you stand on a
windswept mountain pass -these are enough. And the
drugs and the alcohol do not increase them; they merely move them further from life and closer to
dream. They give them to you in the moment but they take them from you in your memory. They
cannot take root and enlarge
your spirit. 
 Do not be seduced by the tricksters. Do not be deceived by their promises. Health has been given
to you. Fineness of mind and fitness of body are yours. If you choose to play with drugs and
alcohol, you reach behind a door where darkness has no name.

Better men than you or I have been destroyed by the hand that will not let go.