Prabhupāda: Drug is meant for medicinal purpose, not for drinking or taking regularly. Every herb, every vegetable, is a herb, is a drug meant for curing particular disease. This is nature's gift. Just like if you cut your finger, you take little grass and take a little juice and apply it. It will act as tincturizing, immediately. They are meant for this purpose. These vegetable, drugs, are meant for when you are sick or disturbed, you can utilize. Not for intoxication. Just like opium. If you have severe type of dysentery, diarrhea, a little opium it will immediately cure. But opium is not meant for using as an intoxication. There is use of opium. Morphia, opium, they have got use at a certain time, not for using it for intoxication. That is foolishness.
Amogha: Śrīla Prabhupāda, can drugs sometimes be used to help us for spiritual realization?
Prabhupāda: No. That is nonsense. Spiritual realization means knowledge, not to become intoxicated. The spiritual . . . just like this is spiritual knowledge. So what the intoxicated person will understand? Even a sane man cannot understand. Then how he will understand in intoxication? That is foolishness. They are suffering material pangs. By taking drugs the suffering is forgotten, and he is thinking that is the solution. Spiritual means negation of material distress. So he is always suffering from material distress. By taking drug, temporarily he forgets it. Therefore he misunderstands, "This is spiritual." That's not spiritual. Then committing suicide is also spiritual? One man is suffering, and he commit, so suffering so big, great he cannot tolerate, therefore he sometimes commits suicide. Is that committing suicide is spiritual? Spiritual means negation of material distresses, that's a fact. But that is a different thing. When you come to the spiritual platform, not by artificially forgetting your material sufferings. That is not spiritual.