Recent tragic events in the United States have changed the way most of us view the priorities and values in our lives. Future security for our children and ourselves has especially taken on a new dimension. The terrorist attacks demonstrated the destruction a small minority of persons can wreak, and let it be known, no matter what forceful retaliation is exacted against the culprits, it will not make a world at peace or without war. Countless wars have proven that. The solution lies in social reform. However, the planet today has come up against a barrier that prevents any widespread social progress - drugs and other biochemical substances. This barrier underlies the problems of violence and hate and the breakdown in ethical fibre.

Research has demonstrated that the single most destructive element present in our current culture is drugs. The use of street drugs - LSD, heroin, cocaine, angel dust, marijuana and others - has proliferated at all levels of society. College students atrophy their brains on marijuana; schoolchildren are shoved daily into pill popping by both peer and pharmaceutical pressures; and the seemingly everyday Smith down the street and Jones at the job harbour a habit they neither admit nor deal with. In researching the mental barriers caused by drugs, L. Ron Hubbard uncovered the existence of a drug personality, an artificial personality created by drugs.

"Drugs can apparently change the attitude of a person from his original personality to one secretly harbouring hostilities and hatreds he does not permit to show on the surface," wrote Mr. Hubbard. "While this may not hold true in all cases, it does establish a link between drugs and increasing difficulties with crime, production and the modern breakdown of social and industrial culture."

The decline in mental alertness and moral standards in society is as glaring as the headlines trumpeting the devastating physiological effects of drugs. "The drug scene is planetwide," concluded Mr. Hubbard.

L. Ron Hubbard's research found, "The human body is made up of certain exact chemicals and chemical compounds, and complex chemical processes go on continuously within it. Some substances, such as nutrients, air and water, are vital to the continuation of these processes and for maintaining the body's health. Some substances are relatively neutral when entered into the body, causing neither benefit nor damage. Toxic substances are those which upset the body's normal chemical balance or interfere with its chemical processes."

The way a being perceives much of existence is via the sensory channels of the body. The body actually is a communications centre for the being, with the brain acting as a switchboard for translating thought into action. The biochemical actions of drugs and toxins alter the normal operations of this pattern, often with harmful or even disastrous consequences.

Who does this affect? Well, the past century's technological advances have produced many an insidious byproduct, each of them threatening the general individual's well-being. Smog, for instance, was unknown before the rise of manufacturing centres in Britain. Every major city on Earth now advises its inhabitants daily about the quality of air they are breathing. A hundred years ago, the main food preservatives were salt or ice. Today, nearly any packaged food has a list of the artificial ingredients it contains that is longer than the list of natural ingredients. Environmental disasters such as the 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the former USSR - to say nothing of radiation exposure from widespread nuclear bomb testing - did not exist fifty years ago.

We live in a chemical-oriented society. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average American consumes four pounds of pesticides each year and has residues from over 400 toxic substances in his body. More than 3,000 chemical additives are found in the food we eat. There is no escaping our contaminated civilisation and, as explained above, it has been found that these substances interfere with the regular chemical reactions in the body and thus can put an individual in a "wooden" sort of state: unfeeling, insensitive, unable, untrustworthy, a menace to his fellows.

Add to this the fact that in late 1979, Mr. Hubbard discovered the tendency of LSD to reactivate long after ingestion and the utterly minute dosages necessary for such reactivation. Upon his discovery L. Ron Hubbard declared, "I finally deduced that it must stay in the system." This statement is far more momentous than one might immediately imagine, particularly with the correlative discovery that all toxic substances - preservatives, pesticides and the full array of both street and medicinal drugs - may likewise lodge in fatty tissues where they cause lessened perception, tiredness, confused thinking, and a host of other symptoms years after their original ingestion.

By way of example come results from Australian and United States Vietnam War veterans previously exposed to the herbicide-defoliant Agent Orange who have reported a truly dramatic relief from persistent skin ailments, headaches, fatigue, insomnia, abdominal difficulties, and interestingly enough, much of what characterizes the Vietnam syndrome in the way of behavioural problems.

Among other regularly reported Purification Programme benefits from those exposed to "acceptable" levels of environmental toxins which is to say, pollutant levels in any modern urban setting - one finds demonstrably improved vitality, memory, concentration and, apparently a consequence of food additives, relief from long-term abdominal/intestinal pain. Less measurable, but no less significant, are the similarly dramatic reports of improved emotional stability and improved mental outlook - all suggesting, of course, that even relatively low levels of toxic residues from atmospheric pollutants and additives may affect behavior. Or to put it more simply, more pointedly:

The pollution within our bodies blocks clear thinking.