otwithstanding this century’s array of technological wonders—in medicine, transportation, nuclear energy, and electronic communications—we live in a seriously troubled society. Under the triple onslaught of drug abuse, criminality and declining morals much of this world has truly become a wasteland. By some estimates, marijuana, for example, has become the largest cash crop in America, while illegal drugs gross estimated international revenues of between $500 billion and $1 trillion. Added to these figures are another $54 billion spent on medical and psychiatric drugs—until, at last, we are faced with a crisis of truly planetary proportions wherein the people of earth spend more money on drugs than on food, clothing and shelter combined.

     Yet ill-gotten revenues is only one measure of today’s drug abuse toll. The link with crime is another. According to United States Justice Department studies, three out of four suspects arrested for violent crimes test positive for illegal drugs. All told, that roughly translates into 1.4 million acts of violence a year... and the cost of that in terms of human misery is incalculable.

     At the arguable bottom of both drug abuse and criminality, lies what has been termed “the twentieth century moral crisis.” Here, too, the facts are disturbing: Nearly one-half of all marriages end in divorce; some 67 percent of all Americans readily admit they would lie for financial gain; while another 47 percent confess they would cheat to pass a critical exam. It is not surprising then, that as rates of burglary, embezzlement and all other forms of larceny have finally reached epidemic proportions, some 76 percent of all Americans have come to describe this era as “The Age of Moral and Spiritual Decline.”

     Sensing where this world was headed as early as 1950, L. Ron Hubbard began to search out a means by which, as he wrote, “man can recover to himself some of the happiness, some of the sincerity, some of the love and kindness with which he was created.”