According to Osho, yes—there is profound hope: addiction is a misdirected search for the ecstasy and silence of meditation. Offer a greater, lasting 'intoxication'—meditation that simultaneously awakens and blissfully dissolves the ego—and lesser highs fall away by themselves. He invites seekers to sannyas and deep meditation, a total dive into inner awareness that restores meaning, color, and joy permanently.
Yes: swap drugs for meditation—the bigger, real high that makes you joyful and clear without a crash, so other cravings fade.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, I know that some Italians are coming to you to get rid of their drug habits. Is there any hope for them? Can you cure them?
Certainly—because I give them an even bigger intoxication. What intoxication can they manage in Italy! Marijuana, hashish, ganja, opium, LSD... I am giving them meditation. Once the intoxication of meditation takes hold, all other intoxications drop. And the beauty of the intoxication of meditation is this: it is, and it is not. Meditation is a profoundly paradoxical high. It awakens you and it drowns you. It intoxicates too. It fills you with ecstasy and it also ignites supreme awareness. It sharpens your inner consciousness, breaks your stupor, puts dance in your feet and humming in your throat. It gives you song—such songs, such colors, that rainbows spread through your very life-breath, that lotuses bloom within you! One who has tasted this intoxication—every other intoxication falls away. In my view, those who take drugs are actually searching for meditation. They have not yet found meditation; so they grope in the dark…
And love is the only sweetness; everything else is bitter. We can even tolerate bitter things if there is a little mixture of love in them; otherwise life becomes unbearable. Life is unbearable; it is only love that makes it bearable. Life in itself is meaningless -- it is love that brings meaning to it. So the more love, the more meaning, the more love, the more sweetness, the more love, the more joy. And love exists ordinarily in a very very small quantity. Ninety-nine percent is poison and one percent is love. The percentage of love has to be developed, and one has to work consciously. It will not grow on its own; it has grown as much as it can on its own. Man has come to a point from where he has to take his fate into his own hands.
[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only. The interviewer's remarks have been omitted where not relevant to Osho's words] INTERVIEW WITH MA MAHA, ADDICTS MAGAZINE, AUSTRALIA. QUESTION: BELOVED BHAGWAN, WHY DO PEOPLE STILL TAKE DRUGS, AND ALSO SANNYASINS, WHEN THERE'S YOU AND YOUR COMMUNE ON THIS PLANET? Answer: The drugs are as old as humanity itself, and they certainly fulfill something of immense value. I am against drugs, but my being against drugs is for the same reason as for thousands of years people have been addicted to the drugs. It may look very strange. The drugs are capable to give you a hallucinatory experience beyond the mundane world. That is the experience that is being searched through meditation.
That's very good. Bring some meditations to your drug addicts! It will be very helpful, because anybody who goes to drugs is really in search of meditation. He is searching in a wrong direction, but his search is right. The direction is wrong, certainly wrong, but his desire is right his desire has to be respected. [She answers: Yes. I love these junkies very much!] Mm, because they are the people who are in search of some other kind of experience which is not available in ordinary life. They are fed up with ordinary life; it is too routine and too dull. They stumble upon drugs because that seems more available; meditation is not so easily available. Drugs are very cheap and easy; meditation is very hard, difficult. One has to grow into it. It takes months, years, sometimes lives.
Osho, prostrations no longer quench my thirst; let me dissolve at your threshold, Rajneesh.
Buddha said: sammasati. Mahavira said: vivek. Krishnamurti calls it awareness. Gurdjieff called it self-remembering. Kabir and Nanak called it surati—self-remembrance. Let the awareness of “Who am I?” become so profound, as if a lamp is lit within you—steady, unmoving—then no sorrow will remain in your life. And if there is no sorrow, there will be nothing to forget. If there is no reed, there will be no flute. This life is a rare opportunity—to recognize the futile and to live the meaningful; to see the insubstantial as insubstantial, so that the substantial can be known as substantial. “Bearing the curse of light, I burn like a lamp. This life has come to me like a festival of burning; On a blazing ember the bud of life has bloomed; In Rudra’s fiery eyes I live like a dream. Bearing the curse of light, I burn like a lamp. I would have…