This is the address which Mrs. Salwa Mahmasani Moumina submitted to the International Anti-Narcotics Association, in
compliance with the wish of its delegate.
Everything that exhausts the individual's bodily or mental powers is an agent of evil for humanity as a whole, working toward its degradation, its torment, and the demolition of its morale.
And humanity's morale is the loftiness, nobility, and sanctity it possesses, which point toward the divine, and the virtues bestowed upon it, by which it has been ennobled and raised above the haunts of vice.
Every individual who does not consider each thing he undertakes with care and reflection, weighing its consequences, which may bring harm upon him, is remiss in the duty imposed on every rational being; for every doer is answerable for himself and his body before God and before the human conscience.
Man is distinguished from the other creatures only by the measure of good his soul contains, and by the measure of the rational, discerning powers he possesses — powers able to grasp the essence of things and weigh their consequences, and able to impel their owner to work for the spread of good and to struggle for the preservation of the universal human welfare.
And if this man cannot employ a certain measure of those thinking powers, and if he does not make an ample effort to combat evils and to reform himself and mankind,
then he and any other animal stand equal in rank in this existence.
He is then a denier of those virtues that elevate his spirit and bring him nearer to God.
And whoever does not think of the danger of the moral inheritance he leaves to his child's mental and spiritual constitution is a criminal against his child and against humanity.
For it is well known that heredity carries the germs of sin from parents to their offspring, in most cases. And there is in existence no sin greater than the mental or bodily disease of innocents made to answer for the crimes of their fathers.
So then, we ask here: are intoxicants of all kinds harmful to the individual and to society, or not?
The answer is clear and beyond doubt. They are harmful to body, mind, and character. Some of the heavenly religions have forbidden them, and the constitutions of the world have forbidden some of them.
Why, then, does a rational person take to using them, rejoicing in the immediate pleasure steeped in defects, shutting his eyes to their evils, which lie in wait to harm the drunkard, attacking him with the weapon of disease in his soul, his mind, and his body, and carrying the germs of injury to his children and his descendants?
Every step a man takes in the field of life has its effective mark on his direction and on the destiny of his circumstances — and on the habits he acquires.
And habit is an overpowering fetter, very hard to be rid of, especially if its owner is weak of will.
Therefore the individual must beware of the first step, lest it drag him to the abyss, and be wary of the first draught, in which may lurk the corruption of character and the bitterness of harm.
The individual must also select sound and honorable habits, choosing among them those that befit his humanity. Otherwise he will find himself bound by an abject shackle of habits that may drag him into humiliation and weakness.
The use of intoxicants makes the drunkard lose his reason, his dignity, and his will; it weakens his intelligence and his thinking, disfigures his character, and soils his reputation. It is as if he had sentenced himself to death, for a man's life as an abject slave to that foolish, harmful habit is uglier than death.
And moral death is the basest kind of nothingness and extinction. Submission to an ugly habit that captures one's powers and binds them with a tight bond from which no deliverance is possible is the most abject kind of slavery in the world of the mind.
And the mind does not rise and create unless it is freed and soars unfettered in the space of light, nobility, and hope.
How many homes have been ruined, families shattered, children deprived of their livelihood and of contented living; how many crimes have been committed and scandals exposed, because of the use of those intoxicating substances — for they squander money, manliness, and resolve. They are as deadly poisons at the very core of social life, which must be kept pure of every vice.
Therefore man must keep away, from the very outset, from the use of intoxicants and from all that mars health, mind, and morals, that he may be worthy of carrying the message of goodness, light, and love in the world.