Should we decriminalize drug possession? It s not just far-left activists who think so. Christian conservative mom and author Christina Dent is an advocate for decriminalizing drugs in the hopes that it will help those who are affected by drug addiction and ultimately be better for the country as a whole.
00:00:00.000Should we decriminalize drug possession? It's not just far-left activists who think so. Christian conservative mom and author Christina Dent is an advocate for decriminalizing drugs in the hopes that it will help those who are affected by drug addiction and ultimately be better for the country as a whole.
00:00:25.600I, though, have many questions and concerns about this. This was a very educational conversation. I learned a lot. I think that you're going to learn a lot, too. We have two very different perspectives on this issue. I'll be interested to hear what you think about this, what you walk away with at the end of this conversation, but I'm excited for you to listen to it.
00:00:51.100This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.
00:00:58.600All right, guys. Before we get into that conversation, I just want to remind you that today is the day for our big announcement. Our big announcement is headed your way on social media tonight.
00:01:22.360I don't know exactly what time, but we are going to post it here on YouTube. We are also going to post it on Instagram, and we'll probably post it on all the social media channels, and I'm super excited. This is a long time in the making, and it's been a dream of mine for a while, and I cannot reveal it to you here because I don't want to steal the thunder of the social media announcement.
00:01:47.060But please tune in. We will talk about it tomorrow on the show, but if you want to be one of the first to know what's going on, then you need to make sure that you tune in to my Instagram account sometime this evening.
00:02:02.940All right. I just wanted to kick off the show saying that, super excited about it, but now we have to get into this fascinating conversation with our guest today, Christina.
00:02:17.060Christina, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do?
00:02:24.560Yeah, I'm Christina Dent. I'm the founder and president of End It For Good. It's a Mississippi-based nonprofit that works on health-centered approaches to drugs and addiction.
00:02:33.720And you've given a TED Talk on this subject, right?
00:02:38.180It was an amazing experience. And really, it helped me to kind of solidify and condense all the things that I had been learning over the last couple of years and then be able to present those in a way that I felt like captured my heart for this issue.
00:02:51.680Right. It's not really a subject that we've spent a whole lot of time on on this podcast, but I know that I speak for my audience and, of course, for myself when I say that all of us want an end to drug addiction and the harms caused by drug addiction.
00:03:09.460There are disagreements on how best to do that. And I'll be honest, whenever I hear someone say decriminalize drugs, my first thought as a conservative is no, no, no, no.
00:03:25.200That's scary to me. I'm afraid that's going to make things worse.
00:03:28.440But acknowledging that we have the same goal to try to reduce as much of that harm and reduce as much addiction as possible, I'm open to the conversations about it.
00:03:39.580So I'm excited to get your perspective. But first, I just want to back up. Tell me why you're even talking about this. How did you start thinking about this subject?
00:03:47.800Yeah. So a little background. I'm born and raised in Mississippi. I've lived there my whole life, was homeschooled kindergarten through high school, grew up in a wonderful Christian home, conservative home, still have those values today, had a very happy childhood.
00:04:02.940I think I'm probably in like the top one percent of the world and like just amazing childhood, amazing family, parents.
00:04:08.500And so I went to college at a Christian liberal arts university. I have a degree in Bible, did not use drugs at all in high school, college, none of that, not not of interest to me at all.
00:04:22.620And so I really didn't come close to this issue until I was in my early 30s and my husband and I decided to become foster parents.
00:04:30.460And it was through that experience that I met a woman named Joanne.
00:04:34.680She was a mom who was struggling with an addiction for many years. By the time I met her, she had been using for about 20 years.
00:04:44.120She was pregnant with her first child and gave birth to him, was not able to beat her addiction during her pregnancy.
00:04:53.060And so her son was born and was immediately removed from her custody and went into foster care when he left the hospital.
00:04:59.060And he came to our house and we became his foster family.
00:05:03.440And I didn't know anything about addiction at that point.
00:05:06.260I had kind of grown up with this idea that using drugs is bad.
00:05:10.980And so I kind of took that to mean people who use drugs are bad.
00:05:15.120If you struggle with addiction, that was extra bad.
00:05:18.520And so I didn't have any way to understand her behavior other than this is a mom who doesn't love her child and he's better off with me.
00:05:28.460But I went to go bring him to his first visit with her at the local child welfare office.
00:05:33.820And I popped his car seat out of my van and turned around in the parking lot.
00:05:38.400And here comes this woman sprinting across the parking lot towards me, weeping.
00:05:44.940She runs over and just starts kissing this tiny little preemie baby.
00:05:50.620And I'm awkwardly standing there wondering what on earth is happening.
00:18:05.800We might lose our marriage, our family relationships.
00:18:08.860There are all different kinds of consequences that might happen that are natural consequences to that behavior and how that is going to play out in a person's life.
00:18:18.280And that's true of other kinds of addictions that a person might struggle with.
00:18:24.200Let's say to something that's legal, like alcohol.
00:18:26.920If you struggle with an alcohol addiction, you might lose all of those things.
00:18:31.100We're not going to arrest you for drinking alcohol.
00:18:34.580You're not going to be drinking contaminated alcohol because we sell it illegally.
00:18:37.760But there are definitely consequences to that.
00:18:40.320And I would say that that would be the way I would hope that we can shift our thinking about the use of other substances is that, yes, people are responsible for their actions and their choices.
00:18:51.360But we as the community are also responsible for our actions and choices and our response to what they do.
00:18:59.740And so there are correct ways or helpful ways that we can hold people accountable, such as if you are driving under the influence, well, now you're putting other people at risk.
00:19:13.160That's true of legal substances like alcohol as well, where we say you're allowed to drink that, but you're not allowed to go get on the road if you can't operate a vehicle with a blood alcohol limit that's below the legal limit.
00:19:26.380So we have ways already built in that we hold people accountable for their choices, and yet we don't proactively add extra harm and extra difficulty to their lives, such as through an arrest or something like that.
00:19:42.900Because when you think about the cycle that an arrest tends to kick off in a person's life, so let's say they were using substances, whatever it might be, and they're arrested.
00:19:54.420Well, they're immediately disconnected from their employment or housing, whatever it is.
00:20:00.240Their family connections are very difficult to stay healthy during incarceration.
00:20:05.460If a person comes out of incarceration, which most people do at some point, they have a really difficult time regaining employment because they now have a criminal record.
00:20:15.540And all of that makes regaining a stable life for themselves and for their family very difficult.
00:20:21.920And that whole cycle is really traumatic.
00:20:26.280And so it is that kind of accountability, criminal justice accountability for a person's choice to use a substance creates more pain, difficulty, and trauma in their life for an issue that we know is made worse by pain, difficulty, and trauma.
00:20:44.740So it's not that the criminal justice system is not an appropriate tool for lots of things in our world.
00:20:50.460It is when we have someone who needs to be separated from the community because they have committed a crime that is violent, where they cannot be part of the community for the community's safety.
00:21:02.180That's an appropriate use of the community's safety, but when we use it for issues that it's not the best tool for, it can create a lot of harm.
00:21:11.700And I think that's what's happening here is that we do need accountability and we do need the criminal justice system.
00:21:17.020I just don't think that that's the right kind of accountability for the issue of drug use.
00:21:21.760I think of someone that I know who got kicked out of college.
00:21:28.480He was using cocaine and it was found on him when he was, well, it's a whole dramatic situation, but basically the police on campus found that he was carrying cocaine and he got arrested.
00:21:44.060He went to jail and he was made to go to drug court for several months.
00:21:50.320And so he was pulled out of his social sphere from the familiarity of home and he had to go to a different part of the state and complete this.
00:22:00.720And I know that he would say if he had not been arrested, if he had not gone to jail, if it had just been, well, you know, that's just the choice that you're going to make.
00:22:11.980And you're just going to have to bear the consequences of that.
00:22:30.200It was the consequence of the law that actually not only held him accountable, but woke him up to this is not the kind of person I want to be.
00:22:39.460These are not the kind of consequences that I want to bear.
00:22:41.740I don't want to go to prison for 20 years.
00:22:44.620And so I know that there are probably there are many stories like what you just described of maybe someone's addiction actually becoming worse or being compounded by the social isolation that the criminal justice accountability caused in their life.
00:23:02.240But I also wonder how many people are like my friend who would say, thank the Lord for criminal justice because God used that justice to wake me up and to stop my addiction.
00:23:16.660I guess if we rely on the anecdotes, you could probably see both sides of it.
00:23:20.880Yeah, so I think that's a great point.
00:23:22.820And I would say there's definitely more people like him who would say jail is the thing that saved my life.
00:23:28.320It is the thing that turned my life around for me.
00:23:31.140Trying to step back from that and saying how many people have that experience versus how many people have an experience where it creates far more difficulty and is sort of a spiral into more criminal justice involvement for them.
00:23:44.580I think just statistically speaking, even law enforcement.
00:23:50.220So we host a lot of events with the organization that I work for, End It for Good.
00:23:53.640We host a lot of events across Mississippi and we've had a lot of law enforcement that have come.
00:23:58.080I was just at a sheriff's office about two weeks ago.
00:24:00.340They invited me to come and give a presentation and lead a discussion with all their deputies and support staff.
00:24:05.400And one of the number one things that law enforcement says is we are so tired of arresting the same people over and over again.
00:24:13.560It just doesn't, for most people, it doesn't solve the problem.
00:24:19.700So I think drug courts are a great way for us to handle when we have a crime like theft or something like that.
00:24:27.780Like property crimes, the vast majority of property crimes are committed by people who are trying to get enough money to feed their addiction.
00:24:34.040So the underlying cause of that theft, let's say, is actually I'm trying to get enough money to feed this addiction.
00:24:40.280And so for drug courts to be able to come in and say, hey, we need to hold you accountable for that theft.
00:24:48.340You have taken someone else's freedom and stuff away from them.
00:24:51.960And so we're going to hold you accountable for that.
00:24:54.360But we're going to do it in a way that actually addresses the root cause of the problem.
00:24:58.320And we recognize the reason that you committed that theft is because of this addiction that you're struggling with.
00:25:03.880So we're going to give you the opportunity to be held accountable by the law, but also address the root cause of why you are here in the first place.
00:25:12.680I think that is such a great way to give people an opportunity to get healthy while also holding them accountable.
00:25:39.200But they're a great they're a great way to hold people accountable when the root cause is an addiction.
00:25:45.980And maybe the reason that they're in the criminal justice system is something something else that is does need to be held accountable.
00:26:04.300So for a property crime, for example, someone who broke into a car, stole something to try to sell it and to get the drugs that would then feed their addiction.
00:26:14.780You're talking about that person going to drug court rather than going to jail for the property crime.
00:26:21.920Yeah, a lot of drug courts operate that way.
00:26:24.020OK, I don't know very much about that.
00:26:27.960How do they say, OK, you're not going to go to jail for this property crime that you committed.
00:26:31.460Instead, you're going to go to drug court for something that you weren't arrested for.
00:26:35.620So drug courts operate in different ways.
00:26:37.680So some of them will have people who are arrested for possession.
00:26:41.780Some of them you could they can divert you to drug court for lots of different crimes if they determine that what they think is actually going to help solve the situation is this type of accountability.
00:26:54.300So it's just a different type of accountability that the criminal justice system uses.
00:26:57.580They say instead of just letting you go sit in jail where drugs are readily available in jails and prisons, they are all throughout our prison system.
00:27:06.020And so I don't know that. Can you talk about that a little bit?
00:27:09.500Yeah. So if you think about how markets work, we haven't gotten into this yet.
00:27:14.340But one of the things that I learned is if you think about how a market works when it's legal, businesses sell a product because consumers want to buy that product.
00:27:26.200And if you have a popular product that is criminalized or pushed underground that is not able to be gotten legally, it doesn't go away.
00:27:37.180So it goes from a legal regulated market to an underground market where it's just owned.
00:27:43.840The business is owned by criminal gangs, cartels, terrorist organizations, whatever that might be.
00:27:50.400So jails and prisons are a small kind of microcosm of what's happening globally with the underground drug market where there's still demand for a drug.
00:28:00.440People in jails and prisons want to use drugs.
00:28:07.020Whoever is willing to bring those drugs in can make a lot of money in the same way that out in the free world, whoever is willing to provide drugs for people who want them, even if they're illegal drugs, there's a lot of money to be made.
00:28:18.520But how would prisoners be paying for them?
00:28:21.880There is a whole system of ways that they can get family members to go buy these types of cards that you can buy in any store like a Walgreens.
00:28:32.800They give the number to the incarcerated person over the phone.
00:28:36.380That person gives the number to the person that they're paying for their drugs.
00:28:39.660It's a very sophisticated way of transferring money in and out.
00:28:43.800Sounds like that could be a whole episode in itself.
00:28:47.540And it sounds like there could possibly be some corrupt involvement there.
00:28:52.000Yeah. So there's a lot of a lot of corrections officers are anecdotally.
00:28:58.160That's what law enforcement says is how the drugs get into prisons is that there's an and it's we don't want that to happen.
00:29:06.260But it is a response to a market force, which is customers on the inside are willing to pay money to whoever will provide them the drugs.
00:29:15.120And we know that humans like to make money.
00:29:18.840And so there's a significant financial incentive for anyone who's willing to bring drugs in.
00:29:24.240And so when we think about even incarceration as a way to help someone get sober, they have access to drugs in jail and prison.
00:29:31.980So it's not keeping them from drug use, but it is creating a lot of potential other harm in their life, including what they experience in prison.
00:29:41.980Our prisons are full of physical, emotional, mental, sexual abuse at all levels.
00:29:52.160And so we have to think long and hard about who is it that needs to be in that environment?
00:29:57.900And is that environment the place that they're going to get what they need to change their behavior when they come back out, which is what we ultimately want?
00:30:07.160And if you could clarify for me how criminalizing drugs or keeping drugs illegal enables and exacerbates that system that you just described of drugs being able to infiltrate prisons and someone profiting from that.
00:30:27.820So any time that you still have demand for a product, and that's true in prisons, maybe more so than in the free world because it is a very stressful environment.
00:30:38.440Any time that you have that, there's going to be somebody that's willing to provide that substance or that drug or whatever it is.
00:30:46.980And so in the free world, we have that with this underground drug market that operates.
00:30:52.840So we have chosen some drugs and said we're not going to allow them to be sold legally.
00:30:57.020We're going to push them into this underground market by banning them.
00:31:01.340And what happens is that criminal organizations then pick up those markets and they say, well, we will provide the drugs to whoever wants to buy them.
00:31:12.200And they make the vast majority of their money off of this prohibited underground drug market.
00:31:18.160Think about the global underground drug market is worth about $500 billion a year.
00:31:23.000So that is consumer cash that they are willing to pay to whoever is going to supply those drugs.
00:31:28.420And so every time we prohibit a new substance, it creates more cash incentive and more cash going to organized crime, criminal organizations, which creates a lot of crime in our community, south of our border, all over the world.
00:31:45.360We feel the effects of that underground drug market.
00:31:48.360If you could create the ideal accountability apparatus for a person who is, say, caught doing cocaine, smoking crack, whatever it is, what would that look like?
00:32:03.460I think it would be a non-criminal justice response unless they are breaking some other laws or hurting someone else.
00:32:13.340Certainly there's accountability even in the criminal justice system that's needed for that.
00:32:16.900But for somebody who is consuming, I would say think of it very similarly to how we think about alcohol consumption, where we allow people to consume if they choose to do so.
00:32:29.240We don't arrest them for their choice to use it, but they might experience a lot of other accountability and consequences for their use if it becomes chaotic or if they become addicted to it.
00:32:41.460And I think that's the appropriate way to think about it is when when their use begins harming other people in terms of breaking other laws, the criminal justice system should be involved when their use is harming other people.
00:32:55.740Maybe it doesn't step over the line of criminal where they're drinking and driving or driving under the influence of some other substance, but where it's harming their family.
00:33:05.800And then those same kinds of accountability that would fall on somebody who's struggling with an alcohol addiction, I think, is the same way that we respond.
00:33:16.500And I think what you're getting at is this tension of we want people to stop using and we want families not to be harmed by substance use.
00:33:28.400And we want children not to have parents who are struggling with an addiction.
00:33:31.920And so there is a tension there between right now we have the force of the law to try to force someone to stop using.
00:33:42.480But for most people, that doesn't have that effect.
00:33:45.940And in some cases, it makes their addiction worse or maybe they were casually using and they become addicted as part of the fallout from that.
00:33:53.280So I think that holding that tension is important of not swinging from one side to the other, not swinging from arrest to there's no accountability.
00:34:04.060We should just let people go do whatever they want to and not tell them that it could be harmful to them and not encourage them to make healthier choices.
00:34:14.400What I think changed for me is I learned how much harm is coming from using this particular tool, not just for consumers,
00:34:34.900but also for that drug market of creating so much crime in our communities and around the world from prohibition and what it does to a market.
00:34:45.400But what that also does is contribute significantly to the overdose crisis that we have right now.
00:34:51.680So the vast majority of people who are dying from a drug overdose right now are dying from contamination.
00:34:57.880They are using substances they bought on the street and they're laced with fentanyl and they're dying as a result of that.
00:35:06.220So if our drug, if our approach to drugs was working over the last couple of decades,
00:35:12.380we would not be seeing all of the increasing harm that we're seeing.
00:35:17.600Illegal drug use has doubled in the United States in the last 20 years.
00:35:21.160Almost 20% of U.S. adults have used an illegal drug recently.
00:35:28.580And this is mostly, is it true that it's mostly opioids, pharmaceuticals?
00:35:34.140Isn't that the increase in the past 20 or so years?
00:35:47.580Which sometimes might be Xanax or something like that.
00:35:49.720We actually had a local teenager recently, so sad, who was taking Xanax and it was laced with fentanyl.
00:35:56.240So those are legal substances too that somehow, I guess, make their way underground are laced with these toxic drugs that can kill you very quickly.
00:36:10.200And so I don't know exactly how that happens, but it seems like even for drugs that are illegal, there's a possibility of them then going underground and then killing a person because they're laced with something like fentanyl, right?
00:36:23.760So a lot of drugs have a legal version of them and then they are manufactured by the underground drug market to be sold for their purposes.
00:36:35.740And so now the technology behind producing pills is so sophisticated that you cannot tell the difference between a pharmaceutical pill and a pill that was created by a cartel somewhere.
00:36:48.740And so what we have is so many consumers who can't get the drug that they want to use in any sort of legal regulated way.
00:36:58.980And so they're accessing it on this underground market and they have no idea what's in it.
00:37:45.060And that same process that regular citizens are going through if they want to drink on the inside is happening in the rest of the global drug market, where when you have to smuggle something, you need the biggest punch in the smallest package.
00:38:00.820And that's why we have fentanyl in our underground drug supply.
00:38:03.980Fentanyl is now, but it is not the last.
00:38:08.200So we already have xylazine that's hitting big cities.
00:38:11.380It creates horrible flesh wounds for people who are using it.
00:38:16.960We now have nidazines that are showing up in cities.
00:38:20.600Nidazines are far more potent than fentanyl.
00:38:23.440And so we think about the root cause of why these challenges are happening.
00:38:30.740The root cause underneath the overdose crisis is contamination.
00:38:35.120The root cause of the contamination crisis is that consumers can't buy the substances that they want to use in a legal, regulated way.
00:38:44.920Now, it makes me uncomfortable to think of people having access, now adults, adults having access to a broader range of substances legally.
00:38:54.620But when we look at that other side, which I think is looking at intent versus outcome, and I think for me, that's kind of one of the big ideas that changed my mind was looking not at the intent of our drug laws.
00:39:11.780I think my intent in supporting them, and I think for most of us, is we don't want people harmed by drugs, and we recognize that drugs can be really harmful.
00:39:19.500And so it seems like the right thing to do to prohibit them, to do everything we can to discourage people from using them.
00:39:27.060But what happens on the outcome side is that we get loads of crime from an underground market.
00:39:34.560We get contaminated substances that are killing 100,000 people a year.
00:39:39.480About 90% of people who die from an opioid overdose have fentanyl in their systems when they die.
00:39:44.580So this is not a pharmaceutical crisis.
00:39:47.000It is a underground drug supply crisis.
00:39:49.760And then we have so many families, families like Joanne's, like many others, who are torn apart through criminal justice involvement.
00:40:00.800If you just look at women who are arrested just for drug possession, this is not like trafficking or anything like that.
00:40:07.100There's about 178,000 women who are arrested every year.
00:40:11.560About 50,000 of those are for marijuana possession.
00:40:14.420So if we just take even a small step, maybe it's not taking all the steps that I think could really help us reverse the trend on these incredibly detrimental outcomes.
00:40:28.440But even a small step could make a big impact on families, on women, on children.
00:40:34.660That's not to say all of those women were in a place where they could be a good parent.
00:40:39.900But the best way to help them is to address the root cause of their addiction instead of using the criminal justice system, which is not effective at changing behavior, statistically true, not effective at changing behavior in the future, but does have a lot of downside to it.
00:41:00.560So I think on that outcome front and looking at root causes, that's what moved me to this place of believing that shifting away from the criminal justice system and towards health-centered approaches to drug use and addiction and markets that are legally regulated for adults.
00:41:19.300And I would say wisely regulated, this is not drugs in the candy aisle or anything like that, but just trying to find that middle ground where we don't swing the pendulum too far one way, but we also don't swing it too far the other way.
00:41:33.620And we find the way that truly does reduce the most amount of harm that we can, because it's not just us who feels that pain.
00:41:44.260The way that the U.S. handles drugs and drug policy influences the rest of the world and the amount of money that flows into criminal organizations, the amount of people who die from overdose, the amount of families who might be able to have a more stable future.
00:41:59.560And I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to respond in a way that's more consistent with helping reduce harm.
00:42:18.800On the one hand, I understand the argument for keeping something below ground.
00:42:24.740One, you said that it encourages producing drugs with a higher potency, so lacing something with fentanyl because they don't want to take the risk of producing something that people don't get addicted to and don't want to buy.
00:42:42.520And I guess the argument is bringing the market above ground will take some of the power, the monopoly away from these drug cartels, these traffickers.
00:42:52.040I am uncomfortable with the idea also, though, of anyone making a profit from selling meth or selling fentanyl or selling crack cocaine or any of these things.
00:43:04.340So say we have a reputable store that sells the best quality crack on the corner.
00:43:10.740I have a hard time seeing how that will benefit society because I already see with decriminalizing marijuana, which the vast majority of people who are in jail for marijuana, it was a plea deal that's typically not actually what they were placed in jail for.
00:43:28.540But I already see a destigmatization of marijuana and culture that has really followed legalizing it that I don't like because marijuana is bad for you.
00:44:30.120We believe that it should be criminalized and we arrest people not just for producing it, but also using it and consuming it, which I think is right, even though they're addicted to it.
00:45:01.220How many people now are like, well, it's cool to use to smoke weed in Colorado or it's cool to gamble when you go to Las Vegas because it's just what everyone does.
00:45:14.520If we bring it above ground, yes, there may be people who's maybe their lives are improved because they don't go to prison anymore.
00:45:23.740But how many other people who would be responsible because they don't want to break the law now are willing to do it because it's no longer breaking the law?
00:45:33.340That would be my fear in decriminalizing it and essentially removing a lot of the stigma from it.
00:45:40.300Yeah, I think you made two great points there.
00:45:43.580So I would say, first, totally agree with you on things like child pornography, anything like that.
00:45:51.700And I would say that the difference for me in something like that versus something like substance use is that there's a very clear harm to another person that is happening with child pornography.
00:46:05.080It is morally wrong in and of itself, and it is hurting a child in a way that our culture agrees is criminally liable.
00:46:56.900I would say there's a continuum and there certainly can be moral implications, but just the use of something that changes the way you feel.
00:47:05.480Think about if you take Tylenol for a headache, you're intentionally trying to change the way that you feel.
00:47:59.500But it seems that we criminalize drugs that we understand very quickly go from ingesting and just affecting you to affecting everyone else.
00:48:12.020And we are trying to preempt that by saying, no, we're not even going to get started there.
00:48:15.820We're not even going to allow you to get started because, okay, it's really hard to regulate how many glasses of wine someone can drink.
00:48:22.300Someone might be able to drink four glasses of wine and be totally fine.
00:48:24.980But if you take fentanyl, if you take cocaine, if you take these drugs, you are going to be very quickly and deeply affected and probably very quickly addicted.
00:48:37.120There's just no time in between someone starting to take cocaine and someone starting to negatively affect all of the people around them.
00:48:45.680It's just different in substance than alcohol.
00:48:48.320And so that's why I think it's like, why, why do we wait until that person on math is then giving math to their child?
00:49:07.680I think I totally get where you're coming from.
00:49:10.840So I think we devalue or maybe don't realize just how much harm actually comes from alcohol, which is we tried alcohol prohibition and we rolled that back.
00:49:23.840It created that underground market, created lots of contamination.
00:49:26.520Alcohol on a harm scale in terms of the harm it does to your own body over time from using lots of it and the harm that it contributes to the community, whether that's through people getting drunk and assaulting someone or whatever it is.
00:49:43.660Because alcohol on a harm scale is the most harmful drug on the planet in terms of just the community level of harm and what it does to your body over time.
00:49:53.960But the combined effect of those two is the most harmful drug on the planet.
00:50:01.880You could argue because it's so pervasive and so available and so accessible because it's because it's legal.
00:50:07.260We probably just have better statistics on that because more people use alcohol because they can versus someone who's willing to go on the street corner and get true.
00:50:37.900How much is this going to harm kind of the community around you?
00:50:41.580But I think it's a it's a good point that we don't want to we don't want to.
00:50:49.440Have this sort of open door of, hey, let's just sort of let people do whatever they want to do.
00:50:56.660And because I think you're right that the law can discourage people from use.
00:51:02.240And I think what has changed for me is not is not that I think that's not true, but that the cost of using the law on this particular issue to try to discourage use is so great.
00:51:14.620What we're giving up to have that messaging tool, I think what we're losing on the other side in terms of just loss of life from overdose, loss of life from crime, loss of quality of life for people who live in high crime areas.
00:51:30.160Even whole countries who are destabilized because of the effects of the cartels and all of that, that the cost versus the benefit of that signaling for me is is the cost is far greater than the benefit.
00:51:48.800Although I absolutely recognize the benefit as with all policies, there's pros and cons.
00:51:53.440We don't know. There's no policy where it's only an upside.
00:51:58.760And so I think what shifted for me is that the more I learn, the more I I in my mind, the weight changed from that.
00:52:07.920That the the pros outweigh the cons to the cons far outweigh the pros of criminalizing.
00:52:15.160And we've seen with tobacco that we can signal really effectively without criminalizing it.
00:52:23.640So when we realized how detrimental to your health, smoking cigarettes was, we didn't outlaw cigarettes that would have created a huge underground market.
00:52:32.920Instead, we really. Effectively and honestly messaged how detrimental they can be to your health and we discouraged people from using them.
00:52:45.160We used proactive incentives like better health insurance rates for people who are not smoking.
00:52:51.540So we have done this before where we have we have a substance that is really harmful to you.
00:52:57.360We have allowed people, allowed adults to make a choice to use it.
00:53:01.860But there's consequences to them for their own health.
00:53:04.660There's consequences to other things in their life.
00:53:06.800It has become more and more difficult to find places where you can smoke, which is great for public health.
00:53:11.880That's a really positive thing. And it's also a way that we encourage people not to smoke.
00:53:17.640And so we have done that before. I think it's possible to do again.
00:53:21.000I am right there with you that there is even though this is what I do is I invite people to rethink these policies.
00:53:27.920There's still a lot of it that I'm uncomfortable with.
00:53:30.320I hate smelling marijuana. I don't want people around me smoking marijuana.
00:53:34.520I've never been around that. I don't like it. I don't want people using it.
00:53:39.960And yet I can find that middle path that says the cost to continue criminalizing it in terms of not just for consumers, but for whole communities and and the world at large.
00:53:58.900And I think it is better overall for us to be able to to find that middle ground of discouraging use while allowing that market to operate in a regulated way and allowing adults to make that choice if they want to.
00:54:15.220Well, being very effective at communicating risk to them.
00:54:21.800But I think it also, you know, people aren't dying from marijuana overdose from marijuana that they're buying on the underground market, but they are dying from from opioids that they're buying or other things that they're buying on the underground market.
00:54:34.160So for something like fentanyl, I think it's helpful to to realize, which is not something that I knew prior to this learning journey, that fentanyl has been used in every hospital in this country for decades.
00:56:05.440You have your cocaine shop on the you know, the corner of Main Street, which sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me.
00:56:12.480But somehow you still have these drug traffickers saying, OK, well, we're going to make stronger cocaine because we're still not going to allow.
00:56:19.360Even if we say let's decriminalize cocaine, if there's some regulation in place, you're still probably going to say, OK, I don't even know how exactly it works, but you can't lace it with you can't lace it with fentanyl or you can't lace it with some of the other things that you talk about.
00:56:33.320And the drug traffickers are going to say, OK, but we will.
00:56:36.480And it's going to be a little bit stronger.
00:56:38.620And so unless you completely deregulate, which I don't hear you arguing for, but completely deregulate and say, go for it, do whatever you want to.
00:56:48.280There are always going to be criminals who say, well, we have something stronger available.
00:56:53.940So I don't know if I see the argument of a legal market really competing with an illegal market when in the legal market there's always going to be parameters, right?
00:57:05.820I mean, again, unless you completely legalize everything.
00:57:09.300And I think you and I both agree that doesn't sound good.
00:57:47.660But it came as a result of how can we get a higher potency in a smaller package?
00:57:54.400And fentanyl has been used in hospitals for decades.
00:57:57.560But now that it can be created in this underground market, you can smuggle a suitcase of fentanyl instead of having to smuggle a boatload of heroin.
00:58:07.380So it didn't used to be that there was any market among consumers for fentanyl.
00:58:16.100But cartels started cutting heroin with fentanyl because it allowed them to smuggle it in a smaller package.
00:58:23.440What that's created now is a market for fentanyl among consumers who have now been using it and now developed a preference for it in some cases.
00:58:58.540They wanted something lower potency, which for most people is still true if you think about during alcohol prohibition.
00:59:05.580The most popular type of alcohol prior to prohibition was beer.
00:59:10.880And the most popular alcohol today are beers and wines, low potency alcohol.
00:59:16.720But during prohibition, all of those went away.
00:59:19.480And you could only get this high potency, you know, moonshine liquor.
00:59:23.900And for most consumers now, we it's hard for us to see this because all that we see is use of high potency substances on the underground market.
00:59:33.740But for most consumers, they would prefer not to have those high potency options.
00:59:42.940Most people aren't looking for fentanyl.
00:59:45.400They're maybe even using fentanyl testing strips to know whether the drug they're about to use contains it so that they either won't use it or use a lot less of it.
00:59:55.640So we don't want people using contaminated substances.
00:59:59.440But you're right that as long as consumers, consumers, we know this economically, consumers kind of hold the cards on if they can't buy something legally and they want and someone else is offering it illegally, they're going to go there to buy it.
01:00:14.460So we want to try to encourage people to make wise choices.
01:00:18.060But we know with close to 20 percent of American adults buying illegal drugs, which is what's happening today, that we have a whole lot of people who are going to be accessing those unregulated drugs that they're buying.
01:00:45.360And so what what I hope for us is that we can simultaneously discourage drug use and help people stay alive long enough.
01:00:57.220If they're struggling with an addiction, they're able to get the help that they need and be able to bring these markets back into regulation so that they're not in this free for all of the underground market.
01:01:08.080Where they can sell whatever they want to, to whoever they want to, your your child's age means nothing on the underground market.
01:01:15.960You can buy methamphetamine when you're 14.
01:01:20.660And so we regain some important things in regulated markets.
01:01:24.360We regain the ability to have age restrictions, to have potency and purity, to have proper labeling, to have who is going to be selling that.
01:01:31.760Is that is that going to be at a pharmacy?
01:01:33.120Is it going to be through a prescription?
01:01:35.640Do you need to be under the care of a doctor?
01:01:37.860We we get all of those options when we allow something to be sold in a regulated way.
01:01:44.940We lose all of those options on an underground market that is just pervasive.
01:01:49.800And now kids can tap a phone screen and they can have drugs delivered to them.
01:01:57.120That's that's the world that we live in now.
01:01:59.480It's super scary for us as parents to realize that that's what that's where we are.
01:02:04.800And I think we're we're not going to be able to find that best path forward, maybe with the first go round of kind of changing these approaches.
01:02:16.600But I hope that we can look at those root causes and try to find solutions that address those so that we can get more of, I think, what we all want,
01:02:27.380which is healthy families, healthy adults, healthy children, people not dying, crime to be significantly decreased.
01:02:46.560When we look at a place like Oregon, I'm sure that you've seen this.
01:02:50.780They tried to decriminalize drugs and of course they had the same kind of the same arguments and the same beliefs.
01:02:59.260And then they actually recently passed a bill to recriminalize drug possession, because according to the CDC, the overdose death rate actually increased by 43 percent when they decriminalized drugs.
01:03:15.340And so I don't know what you make of that.
01:03:18.580And, you know, places like San Francisco, where you see this open drug use, when they're basically encouraging it, they're saying we want to reduce harm.
01:03:27.540And so we are going to provide them with clean pipes and clean drug paraphernalia so they're not getting other diseases when they're, you know, using the needles and everything that they use to take drugs.
01:03:40.920And I mean, the cities that have done that, when I think about these liberal cities that typically are slower to enforce the law, especially when it comes to like poor populations, I mean, those cities have just gone downhill.
01:03:56.820I don't know if there's any city that I know of that has become more lax on drugs and it's gotten better and people and fewer people are in poverty and the school systems are better and everyone's healthier.
01:04:19.880You can't walk on the sidewalk without public defecation.
01:04:24.360And I mean, I see videos just that break my heart of these strips of streets, whether it's L.A. or San Francisco or Philadelphia or D.C. or Denver, these tent cities where these people are just doubled over, addicted to drugs.
01:04:41.940And I don't think it's a coincidence that they live in cities where they are not legally held accountable for the most part when it comes to taking drugs.
01:04:56.040That it seems that like being lax in the enforcement of the law when it comes to taking drugs is not reducing harm or reducing addiction in a lot of the cities across the country.
01:05:06.600Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that's a lot of what people are talking about when we're hosting events.
01:05:12.800People are saying, well, what about Oregon and what about these other cities?
01:05:16.060And I think as I've looked at what has happened in those places, I think part of what's happening is that the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction where instead of saying, hey, maybe we don't arrest people for drug possession,
01:05:30.340but we are still going to enforce all the laws around theft, around public drug use, around all the things that impact the broader community.
01:05:39.600That's really important that those laws stand.
01:05:42.660It's really important that we don't take one person's behavior and just say, well, everybody else just has to live with it, no matter how it impacts the broader community.
01:05:54.360And so when you think about a place like Oregon, so they decriminalized possession of drugs there and they just rolled that back recently.
01:06:03.060When you look at their overdose death rate, fentanyl started on the East Coast and made its way towards the West Coast.
01:06:09.320And it got to Oregon right about the same time that their decriminalization measure passed.
01:06:15.300And so the rate of fentanyl overdose death did not increase more than it increased in surrounding states and more than was expected prior to that passing.
01:06:28.580So the decriminalization didn't cause their rates to increase, but fentanyl just happened to get there at the same time.
01:06:36.400And decriminalizing possession doesn't change this contaminated nature of the drugs people are using.
01:06:42.600They're still buying drugs that are contaminated with fentanyl, even if we're not arresting them for possession.
01:06:49.140Importantly, too, in Oregon, they do not have a law against public drug use.
01:06:54.180And so when there was no law against possession and there was no law against public drug use, it created, you know, there's lots of people who have different perspectives on that.
01:07:06.060I would say, you know, public drug use in public places is not OK.
01:07:10.720That that that's stepping across the line of other people's rights to be able to use public places in a way that is safe and healthy.
01:07:19.140And so there are ways that we could have addressed that without going back to criminalizing possession and instead saying, what's the real problem here?
01:07:30.280It's not so much that people were reacting to people possessing drugs.
01:07:34.260It's that they they were reacting to what was happening out on the street, which is lots of public drug use that was happening.
01:07:40.700That's not good. That's not healthy. It's not it's not what we want in communities.
01:07:46.000And so for me as a conservative, I think I would love to see conservative states taking the lead on this because I think we could do it really well where we have where we're able to find that middle ground where we we don't continue policies that haven't been effective and have produced a lot of additional harm.
01:08:09.400They've been effective in some ways in terms of certainly some people have been discouraged from drug use, but we've had a lot of this extra harm and finding that middle ground where we say we're going to allow you like with alcohol to to make a personal choice.
01:08:21.660But we're going to really educate you about the potential harm from this and we're going to protect the community.
01:08:27.000We're going to enforce all of our laws that are going to protect the broader community from any behavior that you might have that is detrimental to the broader community.
01:08:36.020And I think that's where the pendulum swings too far sometimes and why I think it's really important to have not just a respect for the humanity of somebody who's struggling with an addiction, but also respect for the broader community and that everyone's rights are important.
01:08:52.900And we we can't elevate some rights over other rights.
01:08:57.320Wouldn't you say that most people who are charged, they end up being charged with possession, they probably weren't initially arrested just for taking drugs like in their apartment?
01:09:11.620I mean, like, how often is that really happening?
01:09:14.180Wouldn't you say that most arrests are already because of public drug use or DUI or breaking some kind of other law and maybe through the plea deal, they say, OK, you're just going to jail for the marijuana use.
01:09:28.760But really, it's because we found you doing something else.
01:09:32.760So like if we just because it sounds to me like what you're saying is that the only thing that you really want to be legal is someone in the privacy of their own home taking drugs.
01:09:44.740But like, for example, was that was was was that Joanna's case?
01:09:49.780Like, was she only taking drugs inside her home or was she being held accountable for being in public, as you said, infringing on other people's right to a safe space?
01:10:00.020Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. And it's true that people certainly can get arrested for whatever, lots of different things.
01:10:08.660And that the plea bargaining system, which the vast majority of all people who are arrested for anything, end up taking a plea deal is something like 95 percent.
01:10:17.700Yeah. Very few people actually go to trial. It's almost always pled down to something.
01:10:23.440And so, yes, some of those people are. So I think for me, then the arrest.
01:10:30.020Arrested data is even more helpful sometimes than the incarceration data.
01:10:34.480You know what what somebody is serving time for might have been pled down from something else versus what they have been arrested for.
01:10:40.740So going back to women again, that's arrest data of one hundred and seventy eight thousand women being arrested for drug possession.
01:10:49.320So that's not a pled down. That's just like what they were originally arrested for.
01:10:55.360So it might be that they're being arrested in their own home for that.
01:11:01.700A lot of arrests happen through traffic stops for lots of different reasons.
01:11:08.440And so I think that's a it is a it's a helpful point that it can be pled down.
01:11:15.280And yet we still see high rates of arrest for drug possession.
01:11:21.780And if it was for other things, they could have been arrested for that.
01:11:25.780And yet they're not being arrested for those things.
01:11:28.180They're just being arrested for possession.
01:11:29.780And so to me, that is significant because if they were, let's say they were publicly using, why weren't they arrested for that public use?
01:11:45.020Why wasn't that the charge that they were given?
01:11:47.300But for a lot of these people, that's not the charge that they were given.
01:11:50.340And so and Joanne wasn't arrested for, you know, she was able to go to treatment instead of being arrested.
01:11:56.140So it's kind of like, OK, so she had been caught for that prior to being able to go to treatment.
01:12:05.140You know, what she was engaging in was illegal activity.
01:12:12.860I think that's just good for us to sit with, because it's almost like, you know, on a on a Tuesday, if she had gotten caught, she could have been like this other mom that we knew spending 15 years in prison on a Wednesday.
01:13:23.400And then I think about everyone on the other side of drug use and how quickly you go from just using cocaine once to harming everyone around you, heroin, fentanyl, all of these things.
01:13:34.360And I think of these coming above ground and raising my kids in a city or community where that has grown to be largely destigmatized and readily available.
01:13:48.420And in some ways, it might be better for them that it's not underground, but it's not good for me.
01:13:54.060It's not good for the rest of us who would have never taken drugs either way, whether they're legal or not.
01:13:59.480And now you have all these people who may have been prevented by the law from doing drugs.
01:14:04.720That was their last barrier to doing it.
01:14:07.500And I think that could be a lot of people, especially in this secular age, that people don't just like hold these pervasive cultural Christian values the way that we maybe did 50 years ago.
01:14:20.120And so it really is only the desire not to go to prison that is stopping someone from doing all kinds of illegal things, including taking drugs.
01:14:29.640So when I think about on the other side of that, I'm like, that does not sound like a good society to me.
01:14:35.880That doesn't sound like a city I want to be in.
01:14:37.580That doesn't sound like a community that I want my kids to be raised in.
01:14:41.220The pot shop or the cocaine shop or the fentanyl shop on the corner sounds really bad.
01:14:46.200And thinking about people legally profiting from that, oh, that sounds awful too.
01:14:52.880I mean, it's a good conversation to have, but it does worry me going in the direction of legalization, just the kind of world that that creates, especially for children.
01:15:06.360Another, the last thing, because we've got a long time because it's such an interesting, interesting conversation.
01:15:13.960You wrote in your book, religious conviction and even virtuous ideals shouldn't be enforced through the law.
01:15:21.360If they are, they lose their meaning and transformational power, becoming not much more than coerced behavior modification.
01:15:29.400Now, I disagree with that, but I just want you to kind of explain and clarify that, because I think a lot of people might agree with you and your stance on that.
01:15:39.660So, yeah, so that's where that is in the book as part of this kind of broader context of me wrestling through kind of what are my values and what do I want people to do?
01:15:50.480What do I what do I what are the behaviors I think are going to be best for them, whether that's because of my Christian values or conservative values or whatever it is?
01:16:01.000What kind of world do I think is best?
01:16:03.320And then thinking about should that always be enforced through the law?
01:16:10.340And so even thinking about, you know, the Ten Commandments, well, we don't want all of the Ten Commandments to be criminalized.
01:16:17.420You know, we don't even though we know that creates the best world, we know that's God's goodness for us is giving us these parameters of how life works best.
01:16:27.320And yet we don't want everyone who commits adultery to go to prison, everyone who covets or uses the Lord's name in vain.
01:16:35.080We recognize that the law has limits of where it is helpful for us, even in our Christian life, that we were not trying to criminalize all sin, you know, and make us all criminals, certainly.
01:16:53.160I think Christians would all agree with that, that there is a there's a line somewhere between what we want, what is best and what we should actually use the law to try to enforce.
01:17:05.520And so for me, that's where this wrestling has happened of where does that line where is that line?
01:17:12.960And yes, the law can be helpful for signaling what is a good and virtuous life.
01:17:21.440But I think we also always have to weigh the pros and cons of that signal and what we're losing on on the other side.
01:17:30.380And so I think I still wrestle with that.
01:17:35.960I think most of us probably do if we've kind of thought about this.
01:17:38.940I remember actually thinking about, oh, wait a second, we it's not our goal really to make all sin illegal.
01:17:46.080So where where is that line between kind of what we use the law for to enforce and what we use other things for other types of teaching, other types of incentivizing to try to modify behavior and not using the criminal justice system?
01:18:19.820Not stealing property laws are based on if you look in the Old Testament law giving, not only were there laws against theft, but also laws against covetousness.
01:18:29.940So we see the honoring of private personal property all the way back in the Old Testament.
01:19:02.380We agree on the bigger picture of wanting to reduce as much harm as possible, protect children, protect people who struggle with addiction, keep families together as much as possible.
01:19:11.980We want people to be whole and healthy and to have a beautiful redemption story like Joanne.
01:19:18.060So thank you for this conversation and your heart and your compassion.
01:19:24.240I just really appreciate your perspective.
01:19:42.920I don't think any one of us does, but I think we can begin pursuing life-saving, life-affirming approaches and find where we can find those commonalities and where we can get the best outcomes and be willing to work towards those things so that we can have more people living out who God made them to be in all of its fullness, which I think is what we all want.
01:20:05.700And your book, where can they get that?
01:20:07.700Yes, my book is called Curious, A Foster Mom's Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction.