While man lusts for new experiences to relieve his frustrations and quiet desperation, civilization tends to limit his pleasure. It condones pleasure obtained through such channels as work, intellectual pursuits, the arts, innocuous play, and genital sexuality. Its efforts to control drug use, however, have never been completely successful for man desires to achieve greater pleasure than that which is available through the legitimate channels. Thus some drug use, most drug abuse, and all drug addiction result from the gratification of primitive instincts. Promiscuous use of pleasure-giving drugs has destructive consequences for it becomes an end in itself, aborts the necessary development of acceptable channels of obtaining pleasure, and undercuts character development. Society could strengthen its approaches to controls through greater emphasis on education, encouragement of instinctual pleasure intense and reliable enough to offer competition to drug use, and assumption of control of the supplies of drugs, with subsequent usage designed to re-enforce socially desirable behavior.