Religion Class (REL 270) Prompt/Answer

Why is it important to study religion and drugs? What scholarly approach would you take if you were doing research on the intersections on religion and drugs (e.g., study from a medical point of view, or ethnographic, or legal, or historical)?

Religion itself has a limiting connotation, but in actuality anything can be religious depending on the context. A few of the key ideas of a religious culture include ritual activities, transcendence, cosmic revelation, and transformation, and in the practice of religion, the use of drugs can lead to a sacred experience for the adherents. Sacredness is one of the factors that differentiates religious groups because the idea of a sacred experience is always contested.

It is important to study the use of drugs in achieving a sacred religious experience in order to see the effect of the drugs on the mental and emotional state of the adherents and how that shapes human behavior. From a medical point of view, drugs and religious cultures are heavily intertwined, even as far as to say some religious cultures stem from drug therapy and medicine obsession. For instance, the idea of good health is sacred for western society, and the way we handle illness and pain has become religious in a way. We perform rituals to heal our body when inflicted with pain such as taking pills or other psychedelic drugs. However, when taken in excessive amounts, some people are able to feel gratification and restoration and refer to this process as a sacred experience.

The primitive purpose of medicine is to heal, but it also has the capabilities to bring spiritual revelation to people without the need of a deity or God. The altering the body chemistry as an alternative healing approach in modern America will become increasingly more important in the medical field as more people practice it and relay their thoughts and spiritual experiences. As nursing student, I am intrigued by this method of treatment because excessive use of drugs to reach an altered state is not something students are taught. Potential changes could arise from this alternative method and could affect my lifestyle and the conditions I work in in the future. Thus, the study of medicine and knowledge from the the religious revelations it can give rise to is a field that should be intensively analyzed because it has the potential to change the pharmaceutical field, how we consider doctors, and our perception on drug therapy.