Could you say something about your own experiences with drugs?

Lama Ole’s answer:

In the sixties, drugs had a different function than they have now. The spiritual horizon lay two centimeters above the highest tower in Copenhagen—not more than that. We had completely square heads. We would have become even more materialistic than our parents. We drank a lot and had three or four fistfights every week because the pressure was so high. There was no vision for our lives—no view.

The drugs made us more human. But perhaps eighty or ninety percent of Hannah’s and my friends from that time are dead today. We paid a high price. But it is like that for those fighting on the front: they get blown away. Then the next people come and take over the land that the first people conquered. There is no doubt that our entire spiritual environment and our openness is much greater today because the brave people in the sixties broke through the widespread concepts of those times—because they had enough trust in space to break through.

But today drugs are an old hat. They are completely ridiculous. When we took drugs, we were the avant-garde, the best of the society, who took them to make new worlds accessible. Today, deadbeat kids take them to commit suicide slowly. Drugs are out.

It seems like every drug has a period in which it activates many karmas. For example, if we look at old sources about the conquest of the Americas, tobacco was a hallucinogenic when it first came to the West. The people who used tobacco were often depicted vomiting. Over their heads there were little thought bubbles with all sorts of strange things happening. Those people completely hallucinated. And now tobacco is just bad for the lungs.

That means: stay away from drugs. They are no good anymore. My generation killed themselves with drugs. That is also the reason why today the Japanese assemble semi-conductors and not the Europeans or Americans. An entire generation here and in America, who should have done that, is gone. That is why East Asia got ahead. They suppressed drug use; they did not allow their young people that freedom.