#117: Rethinking the war on drugs (with Christina Dent)
Christina Dent joins me on The Puddcast this week to talk about the war on drugs. Christina is the Founder and President of End It For Good, a nonprofit advocating a health-centred approach to drugs rather than a criminal justice one. Living in Mississippi, Christina changed her own mind about how best to approach drug laws after she became a foster parent and saw the negative effects of our current approach up close. She shared powerfully with me about the real choices before us as people who claim to care about humans made in the image of God. Get ready to be challenged!
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Transcription
Hey friends, welcome back to The Puddcast with me, Jonathan Puddle. This is Episode 117. My guest today is Christina Dent, Christina is the founder and president of End it for Good, a nonprofit advocating a health centered approach to drugs rather than a criminal justice approach. So Christina and I talked today all about the war on drugs, all about the real-world, negative effects of the current approach—in America and Canada and much of the world—to drugs, illicit drugs, regulation of street drugs and all manner of things to do with this. I've been wanting to talk to somebody about this for a while, and it was really helpful. Christina is a really compassionate person, she comes from the politically conservative side and what she saw up-close as a foster parent caused her to reevaluate her, you know, kind of her default position. So you'll hear her story in this and you'll hopefully learn some things. There's a bunch in here that was new to me, and I felt kind of informed on the subject. So really excited to share this with you today as we wrap up this season for The Puddcast, one more episode coming next week, and it is a doozy, trust me, but this one here is no less informative, compassionate and intense. So here we go! So Christina, I'm so glad that you are here that we are getting to connect, we've already had some fun, connection off-air, various different touch points in our lives. I watched your TEDx talk, and I really enjoyed it. I've been journeying with my, with all of these things with with, I mean, foster care with, with drug policy. I mean, Canada has legalized cannabis and so having to figure out what you know, what do I, how do I feel about that, and all these all these different things, and watching the opioid crisis unfold in my country. And so what you shared in your TEDx talk and the different threads that you brought together as someone from from a more politically conservative background, I thought, I would love to connect with you. So thank you very much for making time and joining me on the show today.
Christina Dent 02:24
Thanks so much, Jonathan. I'm really excited to be with you.
Jonathan Puddle 02:28
I wonder if you'd just sort of open up the topic a bit and help us understand a bit what what are the things that we're talking about in terms of drug control, criminal approach to drug use addiction, that, the harm with... what's... can you paint the overall picture? So we understand kind of where the boundaries of the conversation are?
Christina Dent 02:49
Yep, that's really helpful. So I'll start kind of with my own backstory, because it is part of how I understand and frame the kinds of things that we're talking about. So I'm born and raised in Mississippi, lived in Mississippi, my whole life, was homeschooled kindergarten through 12th grade, never had any interest in drugs, did not have friends using drugs in high school. I went to a Christian liberal arts university, got a degree in Bible, never used drugs there, either. My life has been devoid of all drug use, other than seeing, you know, recreational alcohol use. I don't drink personally, I just don't like the taste of alcohol. But I just was never interested in other types of drugs, certainly not umm.. illegal drugs. And it was not really part of my world. I just didn't, it wasn't on the even on the fringe of sort of my social groups, that just wasn't part of my experience. So I never really thought much about how we approached drugs until I became a foster mom. Husband and I became foster parents about seven years ago, and were foster parents for about four years. And through that experience, was really the first time that I came close to addiction for the first time. And that brought me close to the drug war for the first time. And people kind of have an immediate sort of what they think what comes to mind when they hear the term "drug war." So I tend to not use it as much because people sort of just go straight to it. But it is helpful, because somebody said to me recently, who's a doctor actually, he said, "If you see what we see, in our emergency rooms that I work in, you would have no problem calling it a war, because that is the kind of injuries, those are the kinds of things that we see coming into emergency rooms related to what's happening because of drug prohibition." And so really, my journey in foster care, started with me not knowing anything about addiction and thinking, you know, "Drugs are bad and drug use is bad and outlawing drugs is just the right thing for us to do" and that kind of goes along with my political background. I grew up in a conservative family. I would still say I'm conservative on most issues. And I didn't really think about it, it just seemed like this is sort of obvious. I guess we see all this harm related to drugs, let's just outlaw them—make it go away. So through foster care, I ended up meeting a woman named Joanne. And she had been using drugs while she was pregnant, and was not able to beat her addiction while she was pregnant, even though she was very much looking forward to the birth of her son. And so he was born, he was removed from her custody immediately because of her prenatal drug use. And so when he was released from the hospital, he came straight into foster care. And he arrived at our house that afternoon, straight from the hospital, and we became his foster family. So as a little tiny, five pound nine ounce, preemie and all...
Jonathan Puddle 05:51
With prenatal exposure, assumedly.
Christina Dent 05:53
Yes, prenatal exposure, although not to opioids, so there was no neonatal abstinence syndrome or anything like that that he was getting over. And so, you know, I knew enough to know the, that his mom had been using drugs while she was pregnant, and I had no category in my mind for that, other than she doesn't love him. And why would she use drugs while she was pregnant if she did love him? So I kept, you know, the, the social worker would say, you know, are you "Oh, she really wants to call you and just get updates." And I'm thinking, I don't really know that I feel comfortable with that. But it just felt like the Lord was saying, "You need to try to be supportive for a mom who is trying to make an effort to connect with her child." So I said, Okay, and so she would call and give her updates. And about a week later, she had her first visit with him at the local child welfare office. And I was very nervous about that, we had been fostering for a year and a half at this point, but had never had parental visits as part of our experience. So this is kind of my first experience with that. And we got there and I popped Beckham's car seat out of my car and turned around in the parking lot and here comes Joanne, sprinting across the parking lot. And she is crying, tears streaming down her face, and she just runs over and starts kissing Beckham, talking to him, telling him how much she has missed him. And I'm awkwardly standing there holding his car seat thinking, "What on earth? This, this doesn't match at all, what I thought that I was going to come and see." And I'm really suspicious, I don't, maybe she's just putting this on as a good show to try to make me think she's a good mom, and really, she doesn't really care. And I don't have a category for this. And so I left him for his one hour of allotted visitation time. And I came back and picked him up and he's sleeping on her shoulder. And she's just talking about how much she's just loved spending this one hour with him, how hard it is to let him go back home with me. And he does get back home with me, and she goes to inpatient drug treatment ahh, a couple hours away. And she would call me every day, and she'd say, "Can you put me on speakerphone?" And she would sing to him over the phone, awake or asleep, didn't matter. She just wanted him to hear her voice and to continue to try to connect with him while she was getting help for her addiction. And I, this was really troubling to me because I knew enough to know we're putting lots and lots of people like Joanne in prison every day. Mississippi where I live has the second highest incarceration rate in the country (of the United States). United States has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. So many people who are incarcerated are incarcerated on drug charges. And out of those drug charges, almost 85% of drug incarceration is for possession charges, not for you know, trafficking and that sort of thing. And so I could look at Joanne and say, "Oh, yikes, this is tough," because I can definitely see that if we put Joanne in prison, it's not going to fix her drug use—because drugs are readily available in prisons the world over. And it's going to traumatize this family, it's going to take away a mom who loves her son, from her son. And it's going to... I know from foster parent training, that the amount of trauma a child experiences has dramatic impacts on their own risk factors for their own drug use and addiction when they get older. Which is not to say at all that everyone who experiences trauma is going to use drugs or become addicted to them. But we just know scientifically that the more trauma you experience in childhood, the more, the higher risk you have for all sorts of health and social outcomes that are not what we want for people that's not towards their thriving.
Jonathan Puddle 09:41
Maladaptive coping strategies as my therapist would say.
Christina Dent 09:45
Yes. So that just started this war in my heart over... Yikes. What I what I see here in this little family is really troubling when I think about what's happening in millions of families just like them who are in the criminal justice system now and and that really got started this sort of war in my mind over, what are we doing? Is there research that we could be doing something different. I could see that what we do with drugs, if we're doing anything wrong, the amount of impact it has is like millions and millions of people. So even if our policies are just a little bit wrong, they're impacting millions of people, if they're a lot wrong, it's just catastrophic. And so that kind of sent me on this journey to learn what's causing the harm, what is the root causes of the harm that we see? And then what can we do that would would get us some better outcomes. And that was this this multi-year journey for me of trying to figure out and understand and ending up coming to a place that I never thought I was going to come to, as a conservative Christian.
Jonathan Puddle 10:53
Wow, come on. I, I've gone through many waves of emotion, listening to that, thank you for sharing that. We became licensed foster parents about, I guess, six or eight months ago, we have yet to recei... have our first placement. But we are probably training about once a week or every other week, the children's and family group that that we're part of in our municipality is very, very active in providing training materials and association groups and so on. So, feel like we're soaking up so much. And we... it's embarrassing, but I remember jokingly asking our, our foster worker, if if she would, you know if she was jaded or bitter or had, you know, kind of lost hope in humanity after being in this work for so long. And she took a moment. And she said, "No, the exact opposite. You know, in 20 years, I'm convinced that everyone is trying their best with what they've got with what they understand with what they know, with the resources they have access to." You know, she said, "Jonathan, you and I, with with the knowledge that we have, might look down on folks might might judge them, and classify them in some kind of groupings, because we know that some of those choices they're making are destructive." But she said, "The parents that are doing everything that they have been raised to do, that they know how to do within the bounds of their health and their socio economic options, and all these kinds of things. They're doing the best they can." And I felt very humbled and a bit corrected. You know.
Christina Dent 12:50
Yeah.
Jonathan Puddle 12:50
To hear that.
Christina Dent 12:52
Yeah. Yeah. And that's really challenging. As a foster parent, I would say, I think in our fostering community here in Mississippi, there's a lot of people who would look at the work that I'm doing now, and saying, I can't get there, because I've just seen the harm that substances can do in a family. And, you know, it feels like you're not acknowledging the amount of harm that substances can do. And I would say no, not at all. It is, it is because we can have such harmful responses, and because we want to see fewer families harmed by addiction, fewer and fewer children in homes where maybe there is neglect or abuse happening related to substance use, and that's why I'm so passionate about it. It's not because I want to say, "Guys, we've really over-thought this whole thing, drugs really aren't that bad." No, no, no. We need to look at actually what's causing the harm if we want to fix the harm that children are growing up in. And that can be hard to separate a personal experience from sort of what's causing that to actually happen. And that's where I think it's really helpful if we kind of dive into those, try to set aside our personal experiences. So Joanne is a personal experience for me. And yet, I would say no one should ever make policy based on a personal experience, they need to look at, okay, let's get up to that 30,000 foot view and look at the broad picture of what's happening. So I would say really, three things I learned on the journey to understand what's happening with drugs, where harm is coming from, and maybe what we could do differently. So if you think about any kind of commerce, anything that's bought and sold, you have kind of three aspects to it. You have the market it's sold in, which is kind of who's selling it; you have the substance that they're selling or the product they're selling; and then the consumer who is purchasing it. So if you look at that related to drugs, and you look at that market piece, we went from having legal regulated drugs including heroin and cocaine sold 100 years ago, to now having that suppressed from the legal economy. And it doesn't go away, anytime there's demand for something there's always going to be supply. So the choice is, is it going to be supplied in a legal market, or is it going to be supplied by the underground market? So we've chosen with these drugs to push them into that underground market. The problem is, number one, they don't go away. And number two, the only way that you can have a piece of the pie of the underground market is if you're willing to break the law. So instead of fighting crime, by criminalizing drugs, we're actually funding it by providing this massive revenue source: $500 billion a year, from people who can only get a piece of that $500 billion pie if they're willing to break the law. And the more pie you want, the more pie you can get. If you're willing to be more and more violent, you're willing to be feared by your potential, you know, other competitors on other street corners. So we are creating massive amounts of crime and violence by criminalizing the market.
Jonathan Puddle 16:06
It's like an, it it's like an audition call, you know, it's like, "Hey, we, we need a whole bunch of people to come and cause trouble because of our..." Yeah, like, I don't think even, I've even quite thought about it in those terms. It's like a request for proposals. We need, we need suppliers.
Christina Dent 16:25
Yes. And if you think about it as, you know, supply always follows demand. And so you can't sell something nobody wants, no matter how badly you want to sell it, or how much money you want to make from it. You can ask any inventor, if there's no demand for your product, you're not getting any money for it. So the demand side, there are customers the world over with $500 billion in their hands, saying we want to purchase drugs that are currently illegal and we are willing to pay $500 billion just this year for someone to supply those. So our approach right now is is saying we think we can just stop anyone from supplying something that they could make $500 billion off of, it's just impossible. It is funneling that amount of money to criminal activity. So the vast amount of money coming to gangs, cartels and terrorist organizations is coming from the illegal drug trade. They are making the money that they use to operate and function primarily from the underground drug trade. So we have a choice about that. Do we want drugs sold in legal economies with law abiding business people? Or do we want them sold in the underground, where it's ruled by crime and violence. The vast majority of all crime today is not caused by drugs, it's caused by drug prohibition: that underground market that you can only settle disputes with violence. And you can see that, you know, in the US, we saw that during alcohol prohibition where you, you know, suppress the legal market for alcohol, it doesn't go away but now you've got gangsters killing each other over the underground alcohol market. The same thing is playing out, and it's just played out for so long, that none of us were alive when it wasn't playing out for other drugs like heroin and cocaine. And now it's been almost 50 years on marijuana. So people in my generation have never known a world where there wasn't people killing each other over the underground drug trade. But that is the world that we had for human history prior to this new experiment that the US kind of began in earnest, about 100 years ago, and it it just does not have to be that way. So that's what happens to that market when you criminalize it. Then you have what happens to a substance when you criminalize it. So you lose all regulatory control over it. And now people have whatever is in a baggie they bought on a street corner. And they don't know what's in it. They don't know how potent it is. And they're taking what they think is an amount that's going to get them high, and we're seeing an increasing numbers, that it's so difficult to correctly dose drugs you byy that you don't know anything about, that more and more people are dying of overdoses—not from the drugs themselves specifically—but from the fact that they're unregulated, and they don't have any idea how to dose them appropriately.
Jonathan Puddle 19:17
Yes, in fact, I was just reading this week, I cut myself off news and social media recently kind of for my mental health, and but one of my pleasures is to read the local newspaper. And I feel very engaged with my community. And we, we're having a major opioid crisis here in my city, as are many other municipalities across North America and Canada in particular, which is where my focus is, but they were specifically saying the dosage quantities are unregulated and out of control. And what's, what's the word, the purity, there's all kinds of contaminants mixed into drugs that are under no control and so the I mean, I wrote it down: the stats for overdoses right now in my province of Ontario are up 75%, 2020 to 2019. So COVID-19 and lockdowns and... all of the suffering of this experience has just turned the dial up even higher on, as you said, a substance that, substances that are not being filtered, controlled in any way. And, and people are paying with their lives.
Christina Dent 20:35
Yeah. And it's so, it can be hard to separate sort of where that harm is coming from because when somebody dies of a drug overdose, we we think of that as specifically they died from the drug that they took. So right now we have a huge fentanyl crisis, where people are dying of drugs contaminated with fentanyl, or they knowingly bought fentanyl, which is increasingly done because it's really cheap. And so some people prefer it over something like heroin because it's a lot cheaper. So they they have purchased that, taken that and they're not dying from fentanyl per se, fentanyl's been used for decades as a strong pain reliever often by cancer patients. And they're dying from the the deregulation of that, from fentanyl on the street that they don't know what's you know how, how potent that is. And I was so surprised to kind of see this in action when my youngest son who will be seven on Sunday, he when he was four, he cut his finger really badly. And we had to go to the emergency room and have it, stitches put in it. And we get to the emergency room and you know, the nurses are there and figuring out what he needs to have. And one of the nurses comes in, and she just very cheerfully says, "Okay, I'm going to give him some fentanyl" and you know, that's gonna help him with the pain and now here I am working on a drug policy related things where fentanyl is like the worst word of our time related to overdoses. And I'm thinking, "That's crazy. You can give a four year old fentanyl?" and she comes in an hour later and says, "Hey, we're gonna give him some more fentanyl. You know, because that that first amount, you know, we want to want to boost it up before the stitches start getting put in." So here, you can give a four you can give a four year old fentanyl, very safely, when you know how much fentanyl you're giving. And the only way that you get to know that, is if you allow it to be legally regulated, rather than on the street corner. You can give it to a four year old, not just safely, but we proactively do it because we know that it's going to help them. And it's a useful pain management tool. And here we have 40 year olds on the street who are using it and dying from it not because it's fentanyl, but because they don't know what's in it.
Jonathan Puddle 22:48
You are literally blowing my mind.
Christina Dent 22:50
hahaha
Jonathan Puddle 22:52
Really, because that's that's exactly that's exactly it. Like grown adults who are not addicts coming into physical contact with the substance and dying. You know, police officers needing to carry Naloxone, right? In order to to shut down the drugs. So they don't die when they're coming into control with unregulated... like I had no idea.
Christina Dent 23:17
Yeah, it's all it's all about, you know, do you know how much you're you're taking or not? And any drug that you don't know how much you're taking, you know, think about Tylenol, if we didn't know how much Tylenol... that Tylenol is much lower potency. So there's a much broader range of amounts of Tylenol that you could take without dying from it. But you can die from Tylenol. You can die from all sorts of substances. And the reason that we don't see that happening is because when we buy Tylenol in the store, we know how much it is we know should we take, one capsule or two. We know all of those things. Whereas we don't know that when we buy drugs on the street. And so we are not decreasing overdose deaths by sort of cracking down on legal supplies of drugs, we're actually forcing more and more people to the street to get unregulated ones because the happiest people regarding crackdowns on illegal drugs are the suppliers of the underground market because we're just sending more and more consumers to them. Who let's say out of desperation, maybe they were on a legal supply of opioids, they get cut off of that. And they can't just stop, stop cold turkey. We just know that that's a very rare occurrence for people to be able to successfully do that. So many people out of desperation are going to the underground market. If you look at opioid overdoses in the US, in 2019, 83% of people who died of an opioid overdose had heroin or fentanyl in their systems when they died. We're just not in a prescription overdose crisis, we are in a street drug overdose crisis. Not because of those drugs specifically, but because when they're out on the street, you don't know what's in them and you don't know how potent that is. So you kind of have this simultaneously, you've got this really violent underground market that's operating, you have all of these additional overdoses and disease and all sorts of things when you have substances that you don't know what they're in. I mean, people put all sorts of crazy stuff cut into the substances on the street, you've got brick dust, you've got detergent, you've got just all sorts of stuff that is not meant to be put in the human body, it is not healthy for you. And then you have what happens to consumers when you criminalize them. So this is kind of the part that I was thinking about with Joanne was, hmm, okay, what are we going to do if we put Joanne in prison? This is really challenging. And I saw... so Joanne was able to go to treatment. But pretty soon after that experience with her, I ended up going to court one day, not related to my work, but I just had a friend that had a court hearing and asked me to come for it. Well, when you go and sit in at a court hearing, you hear all the cases before it like you... everyone gets there at nine o'clock in the morning, and then you just sit through the other cases that are heard before the one you're actually there for. So while I was waiting for my friend's hearing, there's all these different other hearings that are going on before that we're sitting through. And one of them was for... the the man was brought in, he was probably in his early 20s, and they read off his charge. It was for first time heroin possession, had had no criminal justice involvement at all. It was his first arrest, first time in trouble with the law. And it was just for possession, not for sale, as you know, selling it or anything like that. And he had been sitting in jail already for four months because he couldn't afford his bond or bail to get out and until his hearing. And so he was coming... he had asked for a rehearing with a judge to lower his bail amount. And the judge lowered it, he didn't take it away. Even though this was not somebody I think most of us would feel like it was a danger to society. He lowered it and said, "Okay, see if you can come up with that amount of money to get out." And I thought this is so interesting. Okay, this is a first time offender. No, no trouble with the law. And really all that we would think to know about his situation is that perhaps he has a drug addiction problem, but perhaps not—maybe he was recreationally using and there's no addiction there. And I wonder what like, I wonder what his life is like outside of this? And he had a really unique name, so I went home and I looked him up on Facebook, I thought maybe I can find this guy and like, figure out who he is and what's going on in his life outside of this. Very easy to find, found him immediately. He had a wife and a young daughter, toddler age daughter at home, had been employed in a trade industry prior to that. So just sit with that and think this was one courtroom on one morning, on one day, a couple of years ago, there are 1000s of courtrooms on 1000s of days all over the country and the world. And here is a man, now think about what that's done to his family. He's disconnected from his wife, he's disconnected from his daughter. What if he was the primary breadwinner in that home? Certainly, he's disconnected from his job. Most jobs, particularly in trade industries are not just going to hang around for four months when you just don't show up for work. So now we're disconnecting him from employment. We're disconnecting him from his family. And what is this serving? What what goal is this serving? Is it really helping? Is it really doing the things that we want as a culture? We want strong families, we want people employed and providing for themselves, we want... all of the things we want this is kind of actively working against. And the thing I think maybe we could come back to as well, maybe it's shaking him up, maybe it's making him rethink his choices about drugs. Well, if that was true, then it would be working, we would be seeing drug numbers go down, we would be seeing you know, drug use go down, we would be seeing addiction decrease—and we're not! We're seeing all those things skyrocket. They're getting more and more: one in 10 Americans uses illegal drugs. That's just mind blowing. After 50 years of cracking down hard on drugs, tougher and tougher laws, tougher and tougher sentencing, and one in 10 Americans is using illegal drugs. We're not talking about legal drugs, illegal drugs, and that number is coming from the Office of Drug Control in the US. So that's the, that's the office that sort of is it is their task to enforce the drug war. This isn't like a reform organization that really wants to paint this bad picture. What are that's... it has not worked to discourage us. It hasn't worked to address addiction. But It has worked to tear apart millions and millions of families like this man, and many, many more that are coming into potential contact like Joanne and we kind of have this choice of "What do we do?" Do we continue to try to use the criminal justice system to traumatize people out of their drug use? Or do we say, you know, what we know now that trauma is one of the biggest risk factors for drug use. So I would say we're actually using the single worst tool to address drug use, because we're using the the thing that we know increases people's risk of drug use and risk that that would turn into problematic drug use. And that's the kind of choices that we have to think about... is not just what we want to happen, like what our intent is. But what is the outcome, if I could kind of boil down what we're talking about, it really is this intent versus outcome. The intent is to encourage people to make healthy choices. The outcome is that we've got lots of crime, lots of people dying of overdoses and lots of people incarcerated. That's not the outcome that we want. And are we willing to kind of step back then and say, "Okay, this isn't working."? Are we willing to consider alternatives, even if those alternatives might be things that we at first feel pretty uncomfortable about?
Jonathan Puddle 31:10
Yes. Oh, that is so good, Christina. It's so true. Even just thinking in my own life about trauma. You know, in many ways, I feel like the the only toolset that I had growing up for changing things in my life was to white knuckle and try harder. And, and we know now, from trauma science, from psychology from this body work that actually white knuckling and trying harder, doesn't move us out of trauma, doesn't move us out of fight or flight response, all those kinds of things, right. There's actually, there's a gentleness, there's a compassion, there's a regulation and a co-regulation that's actually necessary to dial down our freakout and be able to move towards wholeness and towards safety. I mean, even just think about my kids, right? I mean, I grew up with... I think my parents were already moving but certainly the spare the rod, spoil the child was kind of the way a lot of us were raised. Again, now we're, we're hearing, "Actually like shame and trauma, or you can get like great short term results, but horrific long term results."
Christina Dent 32:29
Mhmmm.
Jonathan Puddle 32:29
So like is that what we want? And maybe, maybe there's a like, like you're saying, turning around to say, okay, other alternatives. This, this was what my mayor said, because he, he was on the show last year. And I had read a letter that he had written in the newspaper, to the, who was it, the City Council of a neighboring city, who were, who were debating a safe injection site for their city. And in the city of Guelph—Canada's had kind of like two really high visibility, safe injection programs, supervised injection programs, they were in Toronto, and Vancouver, the two massive urban cores that have all kinds of other related urban issues—so we're a city of like, 120,000. We're nothing like these, you know, megacities. And, but but a city with a lot of great programs and great supports and great interest in health for its citizens. And so they had begun a supervised injection site. And the mayor initially had been very opposed to it he, like you've kind of said, the only way, the only lens he had of seeing this was like, people making bad choices, and we're now, we're just kind of tacitly approving of it. How does that work? But over the course of time, he saw that it was actually providing the most vulnerable citizens of the city that he cares for, with supports, with access to health care, with access to information, with access to safer drugs, and dignity and relationship. And he said here on the show, you know, maybe it's not the first interaction or the 50th interaction, maybe it's the 100th interaction. But that 100th interaction is the one where somebody decided, "Enough is enough. I want to make a change in my life. And for the first time, I know who I can talk to make that change." And so he, he did 180 degrees and is now a major supporter of the concept and had written to this other city saying you should consider, "What are your goals for the city? What is it that you're wanting to see happen in your communities? This is one of many potential tools in your belt that may move you in the right direction." And I thought that that's yeah, like that's what you're talking that's helpful language. Can you talk more, maybe to some of the, I guess, addiction and the alternate tools.
Christina Dent 35:02
Yeah. So I love what you just said about what are your goals? I think that is something we are not asking ourselves enough on this issue is, what are our real... what is the real goal? If we can we can drill down to our fundamental primary goal with how we approached drugs, what would that be? And I think for a lot of people, there's a knee jerk reaction of, "It's to... it's to prohibit them, it's to get rid of them!" And then we get to ask why do you want to get rid of them? Right? Well, because they can hel... they can harm people. Okay, now we're now we're at that fundamental level, we want people to experience less harm, don't we. And I think all of us do. So if that's what we're going for that's a different goal than prohibition. Prohibition really is just a means to an end. I don't, we don't really think about what our goal is, I don't think a lot with that. But it's just a tool, any law is just a tool to try to get a different outcome that we, that we want or to try to. And we would say, you know, for a lot of people, they think about this as a law that sends a message. So some of our laws are pragmatically used, and some of them are sort of ideologically used. And for a lot of people, I think they think about drug policy ideologically, they think, "I think drugs are bad, therefore they need to be illegal." And I would say, it's okay if you still land at that place, but you, we need to understand the pragmatic outcome of that law, to understand the cost of it. And if you come to the conclusion that the cost is something that you can live with, to make the ideological point that you think, you know, people should just think of drugs as criminal, then then that is where your conscience leads you. For me, I did not understand the pragmatic cost, the human life cost of using the law to make a point about drugs. And when I began to when I began to see that big picture of all of this crime and violence, all of these people dying from violent crime, something... the kinds of violent crime that we can't even really understand in North America, that they understand very much in Central and South America because they have seen it, they live it, it is in their communities where you have extreme sorts of violence in order to create a culture of fear where people don't challenge cartel, you know, leadership or ownership in certain areas. So I would say, you know, for people thinking about what kind of message does it send I would bring them back to that goals, and say, I would ask the same question, "What kind of message does this send, like you said, like the like the mayor said, what kind of message does it send to people using drugs, that you are a criminal, we believe you should be incarcerated? We believe you should be saddled with a criminal record. We believe that you need to be separated from your community and family. What kind of message does that send, what kind of message does it send, when we have policies that are creating crime, when we have policies that are creating preventable overdoses, for somebody that is very much interested in how people who are made in the image of God are cared for? I can't, my conscience will not allow me to support a policy that is causing 10s of 1000s of deaths every year, preventable deaths, people that would not die if they knew the potency and purity of the kind of substances that they were taking. So I think we have to ask the broader question. We can't just ask the one question about what kind of message does it send if we were allowed to be drugs to be sold legally, or if we allowed a safe injection site to be open, we're sending messages ourselves on the kind of policy that we have right now, we're sending a message that it is more important to us to hold an ideological line than it is to save lives. That really is the choice that we have, we can punish, or we can save lives. They are mutually exclusive. And I can't, I could not stay in the place that I was when I began to understand that because my my political leanings on the conservative side, leading me to the same conclusion that we should be doing everything we can to save lives and preserve the sanctity of life. My leanings, as a as a Christian, tell me people are made in the image of God, and there is fundamental value and worth to every person. So we have a saying here that we say, you know, when we think about the kinds of drug policies that we have, particularly on things like safe injection sites or syringe services, there's a knee jerk reaction to "We are encouraging people to keep using drugs, like what on earth?" And I would say, no, we're not we're looking at what are the outcomes. And we would say it should first life, then health. That's the order that we need to focus on. You cannot help people who are dead, the opportunity is over.
Jonathan Puddle 40:12
We will take a quick pause, so I can thank my patrons. Thank you to Lisa who is my latest supporter on patreon.com. Friends, if you'd like to chip in to the show, you can do so for as little as $3 a month or $30 a year, you can do those recurring through patreon.com/JonathanPuddle. Or if you'd rather give a one time gift you can go to JonathanPuddle.com/support and there's an easy donation form right there. Thank you to everybody who chips in, who shares an episode, who tells their friends. This one especially is one I really hope you will share with your friends, this subject is literally life or death, and we are taking the wrong approach. And I hope that you will consider sharing this with folks. Thank you so much. Back to the show.
Christina Dent 40:56
And so we can look at syringe services, we can look at overdose prevention sites or safe injection sites, they're called different things. And we can say, do they help people stay alive? That's the number one goal, can they keep them alive long enough to maybe make other choices? And like you said, sometimes that can be the first or second time, it can also be the 100th time. And if we want to care for the lives of other people, I think we have to challenge ourselves to are we willing to look at what could keep them alive until that 100th time? And can we support that? Not because it feels good to us but because it offers people life saving medical and health interventions that allow them to stay alive. And maybe that's 10 years, 15 years, 20 years down the road. But let's say it's never, let's say somebody continues to struggle for the rest of their life, I would I would challenge us to say is their life worth saving? Even if they never make all the decisions that we might think are best for them? Yes, absolutely it is. Because their life is valuable to God. And we ought to be pursuing the kinds of things that allow people to have the most opportunity to thrive and to to experience and express all the giftedness that God has given them. And I don't think we're losing moral ground at all by supporting those kinds of things. I think we're gaining it. I think we're saying what, how can we, how can we uphold the value of every life? How can we help people to realize their true potential and to see themselves as a person made in the image of God who is of inestimable value and worth? Our policies right now don't communicate that to people who are using substances, they communicate the opposite. So when I think about why do I care so much about this? Why did I start an organization that works on this? Why do I do this full time? Why are we growing a team? It's not because I care about drugs, it's because I care about people. And it's because I see it as, our current drug policies, they mar the two fundamental relationships that God has given to people. One, to have a relationship with Him and to see ourselves as he sees us, and two, those horizontal relationships with our community. And the way that we are handling drugs right now is tearing both of those apart, it is making it harder for people to see themselves as valuable and loved by God because of the stigmatization that we've put on to this particular issue. And it's making it harder for them to have relationships and community with the people around them by by proactively separating them from those people in relationships through criminalization. So whether it's vertically between themselves and God, or horizontally between themselves and their community, I think we're actually tearing apart the things that help us to grow and to express the people that we were meant to be, the gifts that God has given us. I think we're gaining back moral ground that we have lost by rethinking the way that we're approaching drugs.
Jonathan Puddle 44:21
Come on! That's a soundbite. Before, you know, before we got on the call, and I was just kind of getting into the mental space and making my notes, I was really overcome by emotion and I had a little cry. And I was like, "Okay, Spirit, what... do you want to give me any, any hints about what this is about?" You know, sometimes we know what God's doing and sometimes we don't. And I just, that was my sense, that God's heart breaks for his children, for the suffering, for the hopeless. For the ones that we've deemed as outcasts, I mean, the very people that Jesus spent all of his time with. But I just, I was like, This is the work of the gospel and so first up, I just, I just had this, this sense of just God's heartbreak. And then the second one, the second sense that I had, I think, was just like, I think for you personally, that, like, God is so blessed by the work that you are doing, and the need to continue educating and informing. So I mean, that's just for you. But...
Christina Dent 45:40
Thank you.
Jonathan Puddle 45:41
Do you... do you get... Okay, this is this is my guilty question. Do you get more pushback on this from church people or non church people? Or is there not a correlation?
Christina Dent 45:55
That's a good question. Um, I think... so what we have overwhelmingly found... So, little context for where I would get this information from. So the organization that I founded two years ago, it's End it for Good, we are, we do a lot of events across Mississippi, where we are inviting people into this conversation, they're coming in seeing a presentation, that's kind of what we've been talking about. And then we spent a lot of time and dialogue afterwards, people sharing their thoughts. And some people come and say, "I completely disagree, I don't think we need to do anything like what you're talking about." And we're kind of presenting them with the ideas of either decriminalizing possession, and—which Portugal has done, which would be great to get into, because there are some people on who are listening who are going to be thinking, this is all well and good to have compassion for the person who maybe is using drugs but what about us? What about the families who are hurting? And getting into what Portugal found through decriminalization is really helpful because it's helping families as well as the people who are using substances—but so there's, there's that piece of lots of people kind of coming, who are from all different places, and some people say, "No, we don't need to decriminalize." We're also inviting people to consider legal regulation, which is the only way that you can get back the underground market, you can get drugs out of the underground market back into a legal market where they're not contaminated and they're not controlled by criminal organizations. And so we would look at that and say, "How do you get the most positive outcomes? How do you reduce harm the most?" It would be reducing it to consumers through decriminalizing possession, but also legally regulating substances again, and reducing all of that consumer market harm and substance harm that comes from criminalizing. So those are kind of the two ideas that we're asking people to consider. Some people find it easier to get on board with decriminalizing possession, it feels like I can at least see, yes, jail is not helping people who use. It tends to be more difficult for people to really think through legal regulation of drugs, that just feels really scary, even though that's how we handled drugs for all of human history... but none of us have experienced that. So it's, you know, it's even if they can say, things are terrible right now, you know, the, the devil, you know, is better than the devil you don't. And so it's, it's harder to kind of, for people to engage with that. But I would say... so we have had 850 people who have come to these events that we have done, all over the place: elected officials, judges, pastors, doctors, university presidents, sheriffs, parents who've lost children to overdose, just all over the spectrum. And we do get people who say, "We don't need to do anything, like what you're talking about, this is the wrong path." And we get people who say, "This is absolutely the right path." And I would say there's not, it maybe tends to be more difficult for people who are... inside, it really depends, I guess, on the the churches that they're part of and sort of, maybe their own life experiences. I would say that that has more of a an impact on how people approach it rather than really whether or not they're in church. So I'm always speaking, I'm always very open about my faith, and I think that helps for people who are in churches or who are people of faith to engage with it on that level. But it tends to be that people's own personal experiences, what I have seen is far more of an indicator of sort of their openness. If they've experienced a lot of harm in their family from addiction, it can be really difficult not to have this knee jerk reaction to, uh, you know, "What?! It feels like you're saying our pain is not real!" or that sort of thing. And I would, I would say, "No, no, no, that's not at all what what I want to say. That's absolutely just as valid as the person who is sitting in jail, their pain from being incarcerated, you know, the family members on the outside." So, a caveat to that would be just that I would say, no one is talking about that if somebody steals stuff or commits, you know, an assault against someone like, nowhere talking about drug policy change is anybody saying, you know what, if you're using drugs, you can do whatever you want, you can steal stuff, you can assault people, and we're just gonna, we're just gonna say it doesn't matter because you were using drugs. That's not true. That's not true. If you're high, or you're drunk, or you're sober, if you if you steal something, you get arrested for theft, not drug use, we're not talking about that. So there's accountability for hurting other people. We're talking really about the crimes that we currently consider crimes related to possession, or, you know, should the market be underground or not. So, but we've just found that, that so many people are open to this conversation when it's presented to them in a way that is respectful, and kind and open and willing to listen and let people kind of be wherever they are on the journey. And that's hard to do when you're passionate about something. You want to go, you know, light your torch and go, yes, you just want to kinda bang into people. "Yes, you've got to hear this, people are dying!" And and that's the, that's the passion that I wake up with every day is, people are dying! People are... their lives are being irrevocably harmed by this, and I want it to end today. But that's not the reality. And my own journey tells me this tends to be a journey of time for people, people need time to think about new ideas. And so they also need to be able to consider ideas apart from feeling like they're being asked to switch political parties. We would say, no one is asking anyone to switch political parties. If you're on the if you're on the left, we're not asking you to move to the right. If you're on the right, we're not asking you to move to the left, we're asking people wherever they are the political spectrum, to consider that everyone gets more of what they really want, by changing our drug policies, by ending this war on drugs. Whether or not you want to use our fiscal taxpayer dollars in a way that actually does helpful things. Whether you want, whether you're looking at it kind of from a pro-life perspective, whether you're looking at it from a justice perspective, wherever you are in the political spectrum, you get more of the world you really want by ending the criminalization of drugs, I'm convinced of that. And so allowing people to be wherever they are, and coming to the conversation, respecting their, their other opinions about all sorts of other things is really helpful if you want to help people to have this conversation. Because it really is not, we're not looking for a world that's perfect. But that that doesn't exist this side of heaven. We're looking for, what are the policies that can get us more realistic... what are the kinds of things we can do to reduce harm? It's not a perfect solution. It's a realistic solution. And if you look at what Portugal has found...
Jonathan Puddle 51:06
"You fools!" Yeah...
Christina Dent 51:32
So they decriminalized possession 20 years ago, this year is their 20th anniversary of decriminalizing possession. So if you're caught with heroin in Portugal, you are not arrested. If you're caught with cocaine, if you're caught with cannabis, whatever the drug is, you are not arrested for it. Instead, they said, "We are losing so many people to overdoses, we have to do something differently." And so they said, "We got to stop arresting people for possession. And instead, we're going to launch this kind of big public health initiative. We're going to help people get jobs, we're going to help them get housing, we're going to give tax breaks to businesses that will hire people coming out of drug treatment or incarceration." And they instead of saying how can we traumatize people out of their drug use, which is what we continue to do mostly, they said, "How can we help people build a life that they want to be fully present for, so that they don't want to use drugs so much." And what they found is that by taking that approach, by shifting their, the way that they use their drug intervention money, they use almost all of it now on prevention and treatment, very little of it on enforcement. US does exactly the opposite, we use most of ours on enforcement, very little on prevention and treatment comparatively. What they found is that their injection drug use rate has dropped in half, their drug addiction rate has dropped by a third. Now that's really important for the people who are family members of someone who is addicted, and have experienced that harm. So Portugal has found one out of three families who was experiencing that before is not now. Like imagine what that would be like, whether it's in Canada or here in the US, imagine if one out of every three families that you knew did not have that experience of addiction in their family. That would be just mind blowingly amazing and hopeful and helpful for these families. And that's what they found. So it isn't just the right approach for people using drugs, not to traumatize them, it decreases the amount of harm to their family members, which is really, really important as well, because those are whole family systems that are caught up either in kind of the addiction alongside them or the incarceration alongside of them. And it is good for everyone. It's not just good for one group of people, it's good for people who are using substances, it's the right approach to approach it from a public health perspective, rather than a criminal justice one, it's the best thing for their families, it's the best thing for the broader community. Everybody benefits when we look at drug use as a health issue, not as a criminal justice issue.
Jonathan Puddle 55:44
That's so good. So okay, if people obviously are in Mississippi, they should get in touch with your organization. But let's just say someone, kind of generally is listening what and, and is like, okay, yeah, I'm kind of on board, maybe, maybe for the first time or maybe in a new way. Are there, are there things that we can kind of do as individuals to help our cities or communities or move in that direction?
Christina Dent 56:10
Yeah. A lot of times people don't realize the power of their own voice. And I would say, if you are listening, you have a voice, you have the ability to influence people, all of us are influenced by the people in our lives at all times, whether we realize it or not. And so people on this issue, want to hear a different perspective from someone that they trust. So that means that my story is not necessarily compelling to somebody that just happens to run across it. But if somebody that they trust shares it with them, now, okay, it you know, so I'm friends with Jonathan, Jonathan sends me a link to a podcast episode and says, Hey, this was really interesting, really challenged me and made me think, can you listen to it, and then I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Well, now I'm much more likely to listen to it. Because Jonathan said it was something he found interesting, and I like and trust Jonathan, so now I'm gonna listen to it and might be something for me. All of us are looking for these signals that this is something people like me care about, or people like me are interested in. So yes, if you want to see change happen, the best way for that to go forward, we would say is that we need to help more people engage in the conversation, because that's the first step towards changing their mind. So I would say you had mentioned my TEDx talk, so that is just a resource that is out there. People can Google Christina Dent TEDx, it will come up. It's a 20 minute short presentation of kind of all the things that we've been talking about today. Send that to somebody, just do it right now, I challenge you in the next two days, all of your listeners to go and find that, watch it, and then send it to just one person or post it on their social media, depends on how comfortable they feel with with the issue and putting it out there. And just say, what do you think about this? This is interesting. I've thought about it like this before, whatever it might be. You don't... people have the wrong idea that if they're going to speak about something, they need to like, get their sword out, and just like go slay the giants. No, no, no, you don't need to go slay people over this. You need to invite them into dialogue. That's how people begin a journey of considering something they haven't before. With kindness, with respect, I would say the same attitude that I hope to see a revolution of towards people who are struggling with substance use or using recreationally or whatever. I want them to be treated with respect, with humanity, with dignity. And that's the same way that we then need to be treating the people that we want to rethink drug policies. It does no good to use shame and blame and anger and fear. When we're trying to help people see that we don't need to use shame and blame and anger and fear to address our drug problems. So let's use the kinds of tools that we want to encourage other people to use on other issues. So yes, they can share the TEDx talk, sign up for our newsletter on our website. We also have an advocacy letter called Two Minutes for Good, you can find that also on our websites EnditforGood.com/getstarted. If you're somebody that's interested and just feels like I need to understand this, like deeper I need to kind of marinate in this, I would highly recommend reading Johann Hari's book, Chasing the Scream. It is gripping, really well researched. It's the last 100 years of drug policy worldwide. He's out of the UK, it is fantastic, and we have found so many people—we've given out about 2500 copies of that in Mississippi—by people who are just interested in learning a different way that we could approach drugs. He talks about Portugal. He also talks about Vancouver, what has been done there. Switzerland, just all different kind of models and it's really a great way to learn and get engaged. And I, for the people who are still thinking, "My voice just doesn't matter." Like I can't change policies, that just is too big... policies follow culture, and we create culture. All of our voices matter. They're all part of that culture creation. And it is you and me and people like us, that led us into policies like this, and it's you and me and people like us that can lead us back out of that. It is our voices that will help change the trajectory of this ship and take it in a direction that prioritizes saving lives, helps more people have an opportunity to thrive. We can help more people consider alternatives. And we can be safe places for people who are on that journey to ask, to wrestle and to journey together towards a better solution. We want to see more outcomes like Joanne who I was telling you about at the beginning. So today she's five years sober, Beckham just celebrated his fifth birthday. She's doing great. She works full time with other women who are struggling with addiction, helping them enter long term sobriety. That's not always the outcome. That's a great story. But it doesn't always happen that way. There are a lot of people just like Joanne who are still struggling with substance use. Her, her humanity and what was best for her and Beckham though, in my mind, does not change. She didn't need jail if she was still struggling, she still needs to be approached in a public health way to help her overcome that. So Nikki is a mom very much like Joanne, this happened all about the same time. Nikki's son was put in foster care because of her prenatal drug use and was fostered by some friends of ours. And Nikki was criminalized for that substance use during her pregnancy. She is about three years now into a 15 year prison sentence in North Mississippi. We have two moms, both who love their children, both struggling with an addiction in parts of their pregnancies. One of them was addressed in a public health way, the other one was addressed through the criminal justice system. Nikki's kids are growing up without her, most of them of 15 years she has four children, the majority of their childhoods will be spent without their mom at home with them. Joanne is home with Beckham raising him, is an awesome single mom doing just fantastic things in the world. Those are, those are pictures of the kinds of things that are happening. Not everyone has an exact experience like that. That's the choice that we have. Do we want policies that get us more situations like Joanne? Or are we going to continue down the path that get us more situations like Nikki, hoping that somehow we're going to get some sort of different outcomes than we've been getting? We know what we have been getting. We know what we'll get if we continue down this road like we've been getting it for 100 years: high rates of addiction, high rates of overdose, high rates of incarceration, high rates of broken families, we know what this path leads us to because we've been living with it. Can we consider another path? And if it would lead us to a much better place that is much more valuing of human life and is much more stable for vulnerable families, and provides us, whether or not we're someone touched by addiction, with a world where people's lives and families are preserved, rather than just shattered and then trying to pick up those broken pieces again. I think that really is what is before us, and we have the opportunity to change that, we have an opportunity to be part of the kinds of changes that will get us more of that world that we really want to live in.
Jonathan Puddle 1:03:44
Come on, Lord, let it be so, let it be so. Christina, would you pray for us?
Christina Dent 1:03:51
Absolutely. Father, we thank you, that you loved us, you loved us individually. You came for us, you love us now, wherever we are, with whatever it is that we are struggling with. For some that's going to be substance use, for some that's going to be any number of other things. For all of us we have things that we go to, that don't help us but they are the things that in our brokenness we go to to cope with the challenges and struggles and traumas and hurts and pains in our lives. And Father, would you bring us to you, instead of to those things. Would you help us to have hearts that are open to receiving the love that you have for us whether or not we have understood that well before. And would you help us to know the path that you would have us to take. Father, I don't want to bind anyone's conscience over this. I want to honor you by inviting people to consider the kinds of things that would help us reduce harm to people. I think that is your heart for us and even as we, part of this is, is part of what we do with government and laws. And yet I hope that as Christians, you would impress upon our hearts, to, to allow ourselves to be formed by your word and by the ways that we can reduce harm to people. We're not all going to agree on what those ways are, give us grace with one another, give us kindness give us a listening ear, to be able to hear from each other. And to be able to to journey together, whether or not we end up at the same place. Give us hearts that are able and willing to be on a journey together and to be humble enough to to listen and humble enough to hear and humble enough to follow wherever it is that you lead us. And I pray that you would bring life in whatever ways that is, and give us the courage to be part of bringing life and hope and health where there has been so much death and sadness and despair. Help us to see you and help us to see people with the eyes that you see them with. In Jesus' name, amen.
Jonathan Puddle 1:06:16
Amen. Thank you, Christina. Friends, my heart was stirred and just listening back through it today, as I was editing this, I was again really, really moved. I am powerfully convinced that this is a deep issue on God's heart that we need to take seriously. And that we need to do our part within our cities and legislation and so on, to see a different approach to this health crisis. So that lives will be saved and families will be saved, like the generational impact of making a policy shift here, you know, we can't even I think, imagine the long term repercussions of, in the best way. And what Christina said about really, that we have the option of punishing or saving lives. Honestly, my brain is going very deep theological places with that, because I think it is absolutely a parallel to the way that God loves us, the way he redeems us, the way he restores us. So if you want to hear my thoughts on that stuff, you'll need to jump on the B-Side because Mrs. Puddle and I are going to be recording a B-Side very shortly where we dig into all this. I have thoughts you guys! So, excited to do that with my wife. And you can listen to that on Patreon if you join up. As always, head to JonathanPuddle.com/podcast for the show notes for this episode, you'll find a text transcription of this episode as well, for the hearing impaired or those for whom English isn't your thing or you just don't like listening—go have a read instead. And you'll find links to the book that she recommended as well as to Christina's website, social media, and so on. Thanks, friends for being here. Grace and peace to you. We will talk again next week.