Drug Abuse In Dante's Inferno

The use of drugs is becoming increasingly popularized in today’s culture, which is leading to a rise in drug abusers. Drug abuse is the regular, and oftentimes aggressive, use of illegal substances. This is highly immoral, mainly since it is illegal, but also because of the harm it can inflict on one’s body. The paradigm of Hell in Dante’s Inferno categorizes offenses as incontinent, violent, or fraudulent. If drug abuse were to be a ring in Inferno, it would be placed in the ring of incontinence for its crime against orthopraxy.
Drug abuse encompasses anything from habitual intakes to a lethal consumption of drugs. These substances cause a lot of damage to the body, both physically and mentally. Usually, drugs are used as a way to relieve oneself

from the distress and problems in life. Some have the mentality that taking drugs will make them feel better by escaping from their issues. In trying to help themselves reach a better emotional state, these people are merely following orthodoxy. Yet they are going against orthopraxy because they are using incorrect action – relying on harmful, illegal substances – to achieve this. This is similar to the sins of incontinence: lust, gluttony, avariciousness, prodigality, wrathfulness, and sullenness. In most cases, those who commit these sins are trying to materialize a proper belief, but they do so in an erroneous fashion.
Within Dante’s ranks of offenses, drug abuse would fall under incontinence. Using drugs uncontrollably shows lack of self-restraint, since the abuser will keep using drugs until reaching a desired state of euphoria, or until they feel happy with their lives. This is precisely what classifies the incontinent sins. For example, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (of the circle of lust) have committed their sins in the name of what they believed to be honest love. They did not understand how powerful love was: “love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart,/took hold of him because of the fair body/taken from me–how that was done still wounds me” (5.100-2). They both held deep passions for each other, but Francesca was married, so their actions (which were lustful, for they seemed to have no control over their love) went against orthopraxy. This confusion between what is believed to be happening and what is actually happening is prevalent in the first ring of Hell, and common among drug users as well.
According to Dante, the Lustful “sinned within the flesh,/subjecting reason to the rule of lust” (5.38-9). Gluttony is also a sin of the flesh, and so is drug abuse, as someone who uses drugs is physically putting dangerous substances in their body. The second line of the passage also implies that lust, along with the other crimes of incontinence, results from an overwhelming and uncontrollable amount of emotion, which justifies committing the sin and going against logic. Lust stems from intense desire, which goes untamed and leads to overtly sexual actions. The Wrathful cannot contain their emotions, so they unleash their anguish in violent outbursts. Similarly, drug users are often addicted and cannot stop themselves from taking any more drugs. It goes beyond their control and their mindset becomes altered to accept drug use as an appropriate process.
Drug users covet experiencing euphoria or getting high. It makes them lose their senses and transcend the normal levels of emotion, and they feel something they cannot feel without drugs. This serves as the basis for the penalty drug abusers would face in Dante’s Inferno. When in Hell, drug abusers confront a punishment where they have actually lost most of their senses: touch, taste, hearing, and smell. This makes “living” very uncomfortable for them, since they are aware of their physical presence but cannot physically feel it. This is an appropriate punishment since it not only gives the abusers a twisted taste of what they experienced on Earth, but also because they realize that they should not have tried to lose what they were born with (in this case, their physical and mental awareness). This is also shown with the punishment of the Suicides, who like the drug abusers, have committed violence against themselves. The Suicides,
like other souls, … shall seek out the flesh
that [they] have left, but none of [them] shall wear it;
it is not right for any man to have
what he himself has cast aside.

(13.103-6)

This passage reveals that the Suicides do not deserve to keep their physical bodies in the afterlife if they purposely got rid of it as they were living. Likewise, if the drug users wanted to get rid of their sensibility, they do not deserve to keep it in Hell. A modern-day counter-punishment for the offense of drug abuse would be serving jail time. This is apt because they obtained and used unlawful substances.
Dante creates a fascinating hierarchy of sins in Inferno, ranging from incontinence to violence to fraud and to treachery. If drug abuse was inserted as a new ring, it would be placed among other incontinent evils because of their commonly shared qualities of minimal self-control and anti-orthopraxy used to legitimize orthodoxy. Irony is a strong factor in determining punishments for the crimes found in Hell, and in the case of the drug abusers, a loss of physical senses is fitting as it distorts the original goals of these sinners. Drug abuse is most certainly not a delicate issue, and it would not be treated as such in the

Inferno.

A note about works consulted: the author has used Allen Mandelbaum's translation of Dante's Inferno and his endnotes.