Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1003 | What If We Decriminalized Drugs? | Guest: Christina Dent

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Today, we sit down with author Christina Dent. Christina's nonprofit End It for Good advocates for the decriminalization of drugs and a shift away from a criminal-justice approach and toward a health-centered approach to address America's drug and overdose epidemic. But does decriminalization actually work? What would this look like in America? And where's the line between a compassionate, health-driven approach and complete lawlessness that creates unsafe cities? You can get Christina's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Curious-Discovery-Unexpected-Solution-Addiction/dp/B0CMCDV8VP --- Timecodes: (01:15) BIG ANNOUNCEMENT COMING TONIGHT (03:45) Christina’s entry into this conversation (13:02) Accountability (22:10) Consequences for drug use (28:55) Drugs in prison (34:26) Hard drugs vs. alcohol & smoking (01:07:44) Oregon & San Francisco examples (01:13:55) Drug charges --- Today's Sponsors: We Heart Nutrition — nourish your body with research-backed ingredients in your vitamins at WeHeartNutrition.com and use promo code ALLIE for 20% off. Jase Medical — get up to a year’s worth of many of your prescription medications delivered in advance. Go to JaseMedical.com today and use promo code “ALLIE". Covenant Eyes — protect you and your family from the things you shouldn't be looking at online. Go to coveyes.com/ALLIE to try it FREE for 30 days! Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code ALLIE50 for $50 off your order of $100+ at carlyjeanlosangeles.com. --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 561 | Free Crack Pipes & the Cruelty of Progressive Compassion https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relatable-with-allie-beth-stuckey/id1359249098?i=1000550600026 Ep 938 | Border Standoff: Texas vs. Biden | Guest: Jason Buttrill https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relatable-with-allie-beth-stuckey/id1359249098?i=1000642688945 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

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. I, though, have many questions and concerns about this. This was a very educational conversation. I learned a lot. I think that you were 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. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's good ranchers.com code alley. All 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. I 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. But 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. All 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.

So without further ado, here she is. Christina, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Yeah, 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. And you've given a TED talk on this subject, right? I have. That was probably a cool experience. It was an amazing experience. And really, it helps 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.

Right. It's not really a subject that we've spent a whole lot of time 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. There 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, no. That's scary to me. I'm afraid that's going to make things worse. But acknowledging that we have the same goal to try to reduce as much of that harm and reduce as much addiction is possible. I'm open to the conversations about it. So 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? Yeah. So a little background. I'm born and raised in Mississippi.

I've lived there my whole life. Was homeschooled kindergarten through high school. Grip in a wonderful Christian home, conservative homes, still have those values today. Had a very happy childhood. I think I'm probably in like the top 1% of the world and like just amazing childhood, amazing family, parents. And 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 of interest to me at all. And 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.

And it was through that experience that I met a woman named Joanne. She 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. She was pregnant with her first child and gave birth to him, was not able to beat her addiction during her pregnancy. And so her son was born and was immediately removed from her custody and went into foster care when he left the hospital. and he came to our house and we became his foster family.

And I didn't know anything about addiction at that point. I had kind of grown up with this idea that using drugs is bad. And so I kind of took that to mean people who use drugs are bad. If you struggle with addiction, that was extra bad. And 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. But I went to go bring him to his first visit with her at the local child welfare office. And I popped his car seat out of my van and turned around in the parking lot.

And here comes this woman sprinting across the parking lot towards me, weeping. She runs over and just starts kissing this tiny little preemie baby. And I'm awkwardly standing there wondering what on earth is happening. This doesn't make any sense to me. It's not what you expected. Not what I expected at all. And so I just kind of stood there and smiled while I'm experiencing such an intimate moment of mothering, of desire to be with her child.

So we walk in and I leave him with her. She gets one hour of visitation with him. And I come back and pick him up. And I walk into that little visitation room. It was tiny, only the length of a couch on one wall. And she's sitting in the corner of the couch. and he's up on her shoulder. She's sitting there with her eyes closed.

She's not sleeping. She's not on her phone. She is drinking in every minute that she has with her son. She has to give him back to me. I take him back to my house. And she goes to inpatient drug treatment in another part of the state. So she had asked if she could call me. And I was hesitant about that at first.

You know, who is this woman? I'm not really sure. Do I want her to have my phone number? but we had decided we wanted to try to do what we could to be supportive of her ability to regain custody for her to be able to parent him. And so she had my phone number and she would call me once a day from the treatment center and asked me to give her any update that I could on him. What is he doing? What is he anything? Even though he's not doing much of anything, babies just sleep and eat and that's about it.

And so I would give her the update and then she would say, Christina, can you put me on? speakerphone. And she would sing to him over the phone. I can be standing in my kitchen, listening to her saying, Jesus loves me, to her son. And it just created this turmoil in my heart. Because the more that I got to know her, the more I realized she is simultaneously a mom just like me who loves her son just as much as I love my three sons. And she's struggling at that time with a methamphetamine addiction. How can those things go together? I didn't think they could. But here I'm seeing them go together in this woman. And that started for me, this learning journey of, wait a second, I know that we're arresting thousands and thousands of women just like her and men too. But at this point, I'm concerned on kind of a mother-child family front.

I know we're arresting lots and lots of people who use drugs every year who are doing exactly the same thing that she's doing. She's getting help in treatment, but many, many others are ending up in incarceration, very similar situation. We had with some friends of ours at the same time. The mother in that situation was sentenced to 15 years in prison. And so it started for me this learning journey of what's really going on with drug use, with addiction. And that opened up a whole broader conversation to me around drug market. how we handle contamination and crime and all of that and really began a process for me that ended up with me changing my mind not about my values but about the best way to get outcomes

that are consistent with my values. Wow. And at what moment did you realize that you had built up all of these presuppositions and expectations about what a drug user looks like, what a drug using and a drug addicted, mom would look like, like what was the aha moment that you realized? Wow, I have gotten this all wrong, at least when it comes to this mom. Yeah, I think it was a process because it's really painful to confront that in myself, that judgment, that belief that I'm better than because I haven't made that decision. And so I'm a better mom or I'm a better person. I'm a better Christian, whatever it might be.

And instead realize I have painted upon her a picture that's not true. And I have removed from her some of my ability to see her as made in the image of God and valuable and worth so much in his eyes. And I don't think I would have ever said that. I wouldn't have said I don't believe that people who use drugs aren't made. in the image of God at all. But the way that I thought about it, the level of judgment that I had for people who made those choices,

was deeply ingrained. And I was simultaneously able to feel deep empathy for people in lots of different kinds of situations. I've lost both of my parents to cancer, went through a really traumatic train accident when I was a teenager. A number of people died and I survived. So I had been through experiences

that had helped me develop lots of empathy and grew up in a home where that was valued. But I was able to turn that off for particular groups of people where I was able. Now, I couldn't see that at the time, but the more that I got to know, Joanne, the more I realized I have had a way of viewing people that can be turned on and off in terms of how much I value them or how much I'm able to really see the image of God in them. And tell me what you learned about. why and how people stay addicted, even when they love their child. Because you would think, and this is my own naivete, I'm sure talking, is someone who like you has not been around drugs. I just haven't been around people who use or have used drugs very much in my life. And there is a part of us that's like, why not just stop? Not even pregnancy stop, like not even loving your son.

we know that loving your child is such a powerful force and can change all kinds of things about you. And so there is part of us that's like, okay, yeah, I get that it's hard, but can you not just stop for this? So tell me what you learned if you had that assumption too. Yeah. One of the most helpful stories that I came across, which I think is helpful because I had no context. And a lot of us don't have any context. If we haven't been close to addiction, and even if we have, sometimes that can give us an incorrect perception of what's really going on because what we tend to see is the harmful behavior. And we don't see what's behind that harmful behavior, what's driving that. And so as I was reading and learning, my mom instilled this lifelong love of learning in me.

And so as I got curious about this after meeting Joanne, I started reading, I started talking with people like, how can I understand this issue and what's really going on? And one of the experiments that I came across was, it's called Rat Park. So there was a psychologist in the 1970s who decided that he was going to redo some experiments that had been done. Now, I remember as a child seeing these experiments about rats that you put in these little cages, you give them access to drug-laced water, and they will use it and use it and use it until they overdose and die. And that was done to show, look at the power of these drugs. If you're given an opportunity to use them, you will eventually just become addicted and die. And so this psychologist, Dr. Bruce Alexander, he looked at that experiment and said, but wait a second, the rat is alone in the cage, and we know that rats are very social creatures. I wonder what would happen if we built an environment that is what a rat would want to be in. And we also give them access to the drug-laced water.

So they built what they called rat park. And they put rats in it. They built it on the floor of their laboratory. They included sawdust and tin cans for them to play in. They put lots of rats in there so that they would have social interaction. And they also gave them access to drug-laced water and plain clean water. And what they found is the rats almost never chose to use the drug-laced water in that environment. when they were happy and in a place where all of their rat needs were met, they didn't want to change the way that they felt.

But when they were taken away from all of that and put in an isolated cage with nothing to do and no one else, they did use that drug-laced water over and over and over. And so what they took away from that experiment is that it's not that drugs don't have some addictive qualities to them, but whether or not a person becomes addicted is far more dependent on their environment, their experiences, the things internally that are going on with them, whether they are suffering from childhood trauma, whether they have loneliness, grief, all kinds of the brokenness that comes into the world. That's part of our experience as humans in a world that has gone terribly wrong. And no matter how painful and how harmful an addiction is on the outside, the only way that we're going to be able to address that is by looking on the inside of what's actually going on with a person. It's much less about a drug or whatever that thing is that they grab onto and much more about what's driving that addiction. What is it that is so painful that they would need to know. numb that so consistently, even if it takes away so many other things in their life, that they want

like their children or like good relationships with family can be incredibly powerful. But to solve that, we have to look on the inside. Yeah. And how do you balance what you just said, which I believe is absolutely true, probably in most cases where someone is just perpetually addicted to drugs and numbing? And how do you balance that with the Christian knowledge that we are sinful and we have agency and we are responsible for our choices and that bad things happen to all kinds of people. And there are all kinds of responses and reactions that some people may have to childhood trauma. For example, someone who is sexually abused as a child is more likely to sexually abuse as an adult. Yet we don't say, well, you know, you

Yeah, that sexual abuse that they perpetrated was wrong, but before we look at that, we really just need to look at their background and what they experienced in the past, too. We understand that at some point, no matter what has happened to someone or what they've experienced, that they are making a decision that carries some responsibility, at least when I see biblical definitions of justice throughout Scripture, of course, God is gracious and merciful, but particularly like in the law giving to Israel, we see accountability for actions that are done. And so how do you wrap your mind around that as a Christian? Yeah, I think it's been helpful for me to think about accountability as lots of different types of accountability.

So Joanne would say it was right that her son was removed from her custody. That was the right kind of accountability for where she was at that time. And she's doing great today. She's been sober since you was a baby. I was going to ask. Oh, praise God. Amazing. She has an eight-year-old son now who's doing amazing as well.

So there's lots of different kinds of accountability. That's one kind of accountability. Arresting her would be a different kind of accountability. And so there are natural consequences. You know, if we struggle with an addiction, we might lose our job. We might lose our housing. We might lose our marriage. our family relationships, there 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. That's true of other kinds of addictions that a person might struggle with. Let's say to something that's legal like alcohol. If you struggle with an alcohol addiction, you might lose all of those things. We're not going to arrest you for drinking alcohol. You're not going to be drinking contaminated alcohol because, we sell it legally, but there are definitely consequences to that. And 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, but we as the community are also responsible for our actions and choices and our response to what they do. And so there are correct ways, there are 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. So there's accountability for that. That'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. So 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. Because for, 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. Well, they're immediately disconnected from their employment or housing, whatever it is, their family. family connections are very difficult to stay healthy during incarceration. If 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. And all of that makes regaining a stable life for themselves and for their family very difficult.

And that whole cycle is really traumatic. And 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. So it's not that the criminal justice system is not an appropriate tool for lots of things in our world. It 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 of the community for the community safety, that's inappropriate use of the criminal justice system.

But when we use it for issues that it's not the best tool for, it can create a lot of harm. And I think that's what's happening here is that we do need accountability and we do need the criminal justice system. I just don't think that that's the right kind of accountability for the issue of drug use. I think of someone that I know who got kicked out of college. He 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 he went to jail and he was made to go to drug court for several months and 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. And 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 and you're just going to have to bear the consequences of that. He may have never stopped. It was actually the accountability of the law that shook him and made him realize, oh my gosh, what am I doing? This is not the life that I want to lead. I want to get married. I want to have kids. I want to have a job. And all of that, it 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. These are not the kind of consequences that I want to bear. I don't want to go to prison for 20 years. And 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. But 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. So I don't know. I guess if we rely on the anecdotes, you could probably see both sides of it. Yeah. So I think that's a great point. And I would say there's a there's definitely more people like him who would say jail is the thing that saved my life. It is the thing that turned my life around.

For me, trying 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. I think just statistically speaking, even law enforcement, so we host a lot of events with the organization that I work for, end it for good. We have a lot of events across Mississippi, and we've had a lot of law enforcement that have come. I was just at a sheriff's office about two weeks ago. They invited me to come and give a presentation and lead a discussion with all their deputies and support staff. And one of the

number one things that law enforcement says is we are so tired of arresting the same people over and over again. It just doesn't, for most people, it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't stop their addiction. So I think drug courts are a great way for us to handle when we have a crime like theft or something like that. Like property crimes, the vast majority of property crimes are committed by people who are trying to get enough money to feed their addiction. So the underlying cause of that theft, let's say, is actually I'm trying to get enough money to feed this addiction. And so for drug courts to be able to come in and say, hey, we need to hold you accountable for that theft. You have crossed the line. you have taken someone else's freedom and stuff away from them.

And so we're going to hold you accountable for that. But we're going to do it in a way that actually addresses the root cause of the problem. And we recognize the reason that you committed that theft is because of this addiction that you're struggling with. So 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. I think that is such a great way to give people an opportunity to get healthy. while also holding them accountable. So I agree. I think drug courts are a great thing.

A lot of people don't have access or don't get the opportunity to go to one. And they're also very long. They can be three to five years of, and you have to pay to be part of it. And so it can be challenging. Not everybody is able to do that. But they're a great way

to hold people accountable when the root cause is an addiction and maybe the reason that they're in the criminal justice system is something else that does need to be held accountable. So 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. You're talking about that person going to drug court rather than going to jail for the property crime. Yeah, a lot of drug courts operate that way. Okay, I don't know very much about that.

Like, how do they assess that? How do they say, okay, you're not going to, to go to jail for this property crime that you committed instead, you're going to go to drug court for something that you weren't arrested for. So drug courts operate in different ways. So some of them will have people who are arrested for possession. Some of them, 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. So it's just a different type of accountability that the criminal justice system uses. They 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. And so send them someone... Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So if you think about how markets work, we haven't gotten into this yet, but 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. 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. It just shifts markets. So it goes from a legal regulated market to an underground market where it's just owned, the business is owned by criminal gangs, cartels, terrorist organizations, whatever that might be. So 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. People in jails and prisons want to use drugs. And so it creates a market for it. Whoever 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. How are they, but how would prisoners be paying for them? There is a whole system of ways that they can get family members to go by these types of cards that you can buy in any store like a Walgreens. They give the number to the incarcerated person over the phone. That person gives the number to the person that they're paying for their drugs. It's a very sophisticated way of transferring money in and out.

Sounds like that could be a whole episode in itself. Wow. And it sounds like there could possibly be some corrupt involvement. there. Yeah, so there's a lot of, a lot of corrections officers are, anecdotally,

that's what law enforcement says is how the drugs get into prisons, is that there's, and it's, we don't want that to happen, but 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. And we know that humans like to make money. And so there's a significant financial incentive. for anyone who's willing to bring drugs in.

And so when we think about even incarceration is a way to help someone get sober, they have access to drugs in jails in prison. So 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. Our prisons are full of physical, emotional, mental, sexual abuse at all levels.

And so no one is immune from that. And so we have to think long and hard about who is it that needs to be in that environment and 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. And 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 illegal. enables and exacerbates that system that you just described of drugs being able to infiltrate prisons and someone profiting from that. What's the connection? Yeah. So anytime 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. Anytime that you have that, there's going to be somebody that's willing to provide that substance or that drug or whatever it is. And so in the free world, we have that

with this underground drug market that operate. So we have chosen some drugs and said, we're not going to allow them to be sold legally. We're going to push them into this underground market by banning them. And 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. And so that's what's happening. And they make the vast majority of their money off of this prohibited underground drug market. Think about the global underground drug market is worth about $500 billion a year. So that is consumer cash that they are willing to pay to whoever is going to supply those drugs. And 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, we feel the effects of that underground drug market. If 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? I think it would be a non-criminal justice response unless they are breaking some other laws or hurting someone else. Certainly there's accountability even in the criminal justice system that's needed for that. But 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. We 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. And I think that's the appropriate way to think about it is 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, maybe 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, 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. And 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. And we want children not to have parents who are struggling with an addiction. And so there is a tension there between right now we have the force of the law to try to force someone to stop using. But for most people that doesn't have that effect, and 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. So 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. We 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. that is not what we want. That's not what I want. I am uncomfortable with people using drugs that can be incredibly detrimental to their health, to their families, to their life. What I think changed from me

is I learned how much harm is coming from using this particular tool, not just for consumers, but also for that drug market of creating so much crime in our communities. around the world from prohibition and what it does to a market. But what that also does is contribute significantly to the overdose crisis that we have right now. So the vast majority of people who are dying from a drug overdose right now are dying from contamination. They are using substances they bought on the street and they're laced with fentanyl and they're dying as a result of that. So if our drug, if our approach to drugs was working over the last couple of decades, we would not be seeing all of the increasing harm that we're seeing.

Illegal drug use has doubled in the United States in the last 20 years. Almost 20% of U.S. adults have used an illegal drug recently. And this is mostly, is it true that it's mostly opioids, pharmaceuticals? Isn't that the increase in the past 20 or so years? It is. These are all illegal drugs. And we're not talking about pharmaceutical drugs. drugs. This is the number of people who were accessing a drug that they bought on the underground market. So it might be an opioid. Which sometimes might be Xanax or something like that. We actually

had a local teenager recently so sad who was taking Xanax and it was laced with fentanyl. So those are legal substances too that somehow, I guess, make their way underground or leased with these toxic drugs that can kill you very quickly. And so I don't know exactly how that happens, but it seems like even for drugs that are legal, there's a possibility of them then going underground and then killing a person because they're laced with something like fentanyl, right?

Yeah, so 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. And 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. And 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. And so they're accessing it on this underground market. And they have no idea what's in it. They don't know how potent it is.

They don't know what's in the substance. And any time that you have a prohibited substance, it immediately gets more potent. So if you think about like a sports stadium where you can't drink alcohol on the inside, people tailgate outside and they drink beer. But if they can't legally drink on the inside, they start drinking hard liquor. That's what they smuggle in. It's because they don't want to take the risk of drinking. transporting something that's lower potency, the beer that they really want to drink. And so when prohibition starts at the gate, they start drinking hard liquor.

They smuggle the hard liquor in. And 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. And that's why we have fentanyl in our underground drug supply. Fentanyl is now, but it is not the last. So we already have xylazine that's hitting big cities. It creates horrible flesh wounds for people who are using it. It's a large animal tranquilizer. We now have nidazines that are showing up in cities.

Nidazines are far more potent than fentanyl. And so we think about the root cause of why these challenges are happening. the root cause underneath the overdose crisis is contamination. The root cause of the contamination crisis is that consumers can't buy the substances that they want to use in a legal, regulated way. Now, it makes me uncomfortable to think of people having access. Now, adults, adults having access to a broader range of substances legally. But 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. I 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. And so it seems like the right thing to do, to prohibit them, to do everything we can to discourage people from using them. But what happens on the outcome side, is that we get loads of crime from an underground market. We get contaminated substances that are killing 100,000 people a year. About 90% of people who die from an opioid overdose have fentanyl in their systems when they die. So it's not a pharmaceutical crisis. It is a underground drug supply crisis.

And then we have so many families, families like Joanne's, like many others, who are torn apart through criminal justice. involvement. If you just look at women who are arrested just for drug possession, this is not like trafficking or anything like that, there's about 178,000 women who are arrested every year. About 50,000 of those are for marijuana possession. So 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, but even a small step could make a big impact on families, on women, on children. That's not to say all of those women were in a place where they could be a good parent, but 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. So 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. And 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. And 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.

The way that the U.S. handles drugs and drug policy influences the rest of the world and the amount of money that floges. 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. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to respond in a way that's more consistent with helping reduce harm. On the one hand, I understand the argument for keeping something below ground. One, you said that it encourages producing drugs with a higher potency. So lacing something with, fit and all 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. They're trying to make a profit. And 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. I 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.

So say we have a reputable store that sells the best quality crack on the corner. Like I 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. 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. It can make you dumb. It can make you lazy. I don't like smelling it when I'm walking around.

I don't like my kids smelling it. I think it makes culture worse. I think it makes really smart, sharp, driven people worse. And when I think about, of course, not. everything should be illegal, but there is a value in stigma to a degree. And the law can be a teacher that when something is illegal, think about child pornography, for example, child sex abuse material. It is technically underground. And you could say that it exacerbates trafficking, but we can't imagine a world in which it would be legal. Well, let's just do aboveboard child

sex abuse material. That's just not possible. We 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. And to me, that's good. It creates a stigma around it. And we have no idea how many people don't access child sex abuse material or don't access drugs because they don't want to go to jail. Like there's just no statistics on that because you would have to be able to read people's mind. Right, right. And so I think about that too. How 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. It's not stigmatized anymore. So that's what I fear.

If 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, but 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? That would be my fear into criminalizing it and essentially removing a lot of the stigma from it. Yeah. I think you made two great points there. So I would say first, totally agree with you on things like child pornography, anything like that. And 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. It is morally wrong in and of itself,

and it is hurting a child in a way that our culture agrees. Is, you know, it is, you know, is criminally liable. We are going to protect children. Whereas we think about just the choice to ingest a substance is not morally right or wrong in and of itself. Certainly it can have some moral implications depending on how it affects you, what you do while you're on it. But all of us ingest, you know, when you take an opioid from your doctor, that's not morally wrong. And so there is the use of a substance itself is not a moral right or right. wrong in and of itself, whereas the use of... I don't know if I agree with that.

Okay. So, yeah, let's talk about that. So there is a continuum. I 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. Think about if you take Tylenol for a headache, you are, you're intentionally trying to change the way that you feel.

It's not a psychoactive substance. And maybe that's where the line crosses. although most Christians would drink alcohol, which is a poison that slows your brain function. No matter how much you drink of it, that is what it's doing. But it is possible to have a glass of wine and not feel anything or to be a casual drinker once a month to get a margarita. I just don't know. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't know if there's such thing as casual, you know, math users, or casual cocaine users.

And to me, I think the difference between like prohibition and criminalizing drugs is, and maybe this is not, maybe it's not perfect. You would know better than me. But it seems that we criminalize drugs that we understand very quickly go from ingesting and just affecting you to affecting everyone else. And we are trying to preempt that by saying, no, we're not even going to get started there. We'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.

Someone might be able to drink four glasses of wine and be totally fine. But 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. There's just no time in between someone starting to take cocaine and someone starting to negatively affect all of the people around them. it's just different in substance than alcohol. And so that's why I think it's like, why do we wait until that person on math is then giving math to their child?

Why are we waiting? Oh, let's just see if they start abusing their kids. Like, let's just see about that. Probably. I don't know. That just doesn't seem like the right approach to me. Yes. I think I totally get where you're coming from.

So I think we miss it. 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. It created that underground market, created lots of contamination. Alcohol 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. 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. But the combined effect of those two is the most harmful drug on the planet. Now, we have come up with lots of... You could argue because it's so pervasive and it's so available and so accessible because it's because it's legal. We 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 cocaine. True, although this is not collective. It's not the sort of collective harm of alcohol. It's just the substance itself, as it affects people around it,

the amount of harm that tends to come out of a person's life related to alcohol. Now, that's not talking about just casual drinking. It's talking about, you know, just addiction to alcohol. Yes. How much is this going to harm kind of the community around you? But I think it's a good point that we don't want to, we don't want to have this sort of open door of, hey, let's just sort of let people do whatever they want to do. And because I think you're right that the law can discourage people from use. And 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. What 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, even 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 the cost is far greater than the benefit, although I absolutely recognize the benefit. With all policies, there's pros and cons. We don't, you know, there's no policies where it's only an upside.

Yeah. And that's true here too. And so I think what shifted for me is that the more I learn, the more I, in my mind, the weight changed from that the pros outweigh the cons to the cons far outweigh the pros of criminalizing. And we've seen with tobacco that we can signal really effectively without criminalizing it. So when we realized how detrimental to your health smoking cigarettes was, we didn't outlaw cigarettes that would have created a huge underground market. Instead, we really effectively and honestly messaged how detrimental they can be to your health.

And we discouraged people from using them. We used proactive incentives like better health insurance rates for people who are not smoking. So we have done this before where we have a substance that is really harmful to you. We have allowed people, allowed adults to make a choice to use it. there's consequences to them for their own health. There's consequences to other things in their life. It has become more and more difficult to find places where you can smoke, which is great for public health.

That's a really positive thing. And it's also a way that we encourage people not to smoke. And so we have done that before. I think it's possible to do again. I am right there with you that there is, even though this is what I do is I invite people to rethink these policies, there's still a lot of it that I'm uncomfortable with. I hate smelling marijuana.

I don't want people around me smoking marijuana. I've never been around that. I don't like it. I don't want people using it. And 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 the world at large. That cost is too great for me. and 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 while being very effective at communicating risk to them. And that's true for that.

But I think it also, you know, people aren't dying from marijuana overdose from marijuana that they're buying on the underground market. they are dying from, from opioids that they're buying or other things that they're buying on the underground market. So 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. It's an epidurals. Yeah. Yes. Yes, exactly. So my youngest son, when he was four, he cut his finger really badly, had to go to the hospital. The nurse comes in and she says, you know, hey, I'm just going to give him some fentanyl before we do these stitches.

And at the time, and still today, we've got tens of thousands of people every year that are dying from fentanyl overdose. But in a regulated environment like that, you could give it to a four-year-old and it is a helpful medicine. And so I think that's part of what we have to grapple with is. But I guess like, so that is a good point. But I don't know. I would probably put that in my camp of like, fentanyl is already available and regulated in some ways. And yet we are still seeing it kill people in the underground market. And so I fear that even a lot, because I, you said a few times like we still have to regulate these drugs. And so fentanyl is already legal and regulated. And yet it still exists underground. These drugs. cartels and traffickers are still making money from it. So my fear would be say we do that to all drugs. It's regulated. You have your cocaine shop on the, you know, the corner of Main Street, which sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. But somehow you still have these drug traffickers saying,

okay, well, we're going to make stronger cocaine because we're still not going to allow. Even if we say, let's decriminalize cocaine, if there's some regulation in place, you're still probably going to say, okay, 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. And the drug traffickers are going to say, okay, but we will, and it's going to be a little bit stronger. And 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, they're always going to be criminals who say, well, we have something stronger available. So 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? I mean, again, unless you completely legalize everything. And I think you and I both agree that doesn't sound good. Yeah. So what do we do with that? Yeah. So the reason that fentanyl is in the underground drug market is because of that potency. They needed a higher potency. They're always, these are very sophisticated business operations. They're making loads of money every year. And so they figured out a way to formulate fentanyl outside of a traditional regulated pharmaceutical

system. And so that is, that's, that's available now. They have that technology now. They have those recipes. They know how to formulate it. But it came as a result of how can we get a higher potent. in a smaller package. And fentanyl's been used in hospitals for decades, but 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. So it didn't used to be that there was any market among consumers for fentanyl. People weren't looking for fentanyl. It was not a thing. They were looking for heroin. But cartels started cutting heroin with fentanyl because it allowed them to smuggle it in a smaller package. What 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. And so that's not what we want. We don't want people developing a preference for higher and higher and higher potency substances, but that underground market pressure is what created that environment where fentanyl is everywhere now. For most consumers at the beginning of this, before enough of them had been using it, that there are now people who specifically want it, that was not what they wanted.

They wanted something lower potency, which for most people is still true. If you think about during alcohol prohibition, the most popular type of alcohol prior to prohibition was beer. And the most popular alcohol today are beers and wines, low potency alcohol. But during Prohibition, all of those went away. And you could only get this high potency, you know, moonshine liquor. For most consumers, now it's hard for us to see this because all that we see is use of high potency substances on the underground market. But for most consumers, they would prefer not to have those high potency options. Most people aren't looking for fentanyl. They'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.

So we don't want people using contaminated substances, but you're right that as long as consumers, consumers, and 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. So we want to try to encourage people to make wise choices, but we know with close to 20% 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. They have no idea what's in them. They don't know how to dose it appropriately. And yes, we wish that they just wouldn't be buying the drugs. We wish that they just wouldn't be using them. And yet they still are. And so what I hope for us is that we can simultaneously discourage drug use and help people stay alive long enough if 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 where they can sell whatever they want to to, to whoever they want to. Your child's age means nothing on the underground market. You can buy methamphetamine when you're 14.

There's no age restrictions. And so we regain some important things in regulated markets. We 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? Is that going to be at a pharmacy? Is it going to be through a prescription? Do you need to be under the care of a doctor? We get all of those options when we, we're going to be at a pharmacy. when we allow something to be sold in a regulated way,

we lose all of those options on an underground market that is just pervasive. And now kids can tap a phone screen and they can have drugs delivered to them. That's the world that we live in now. It's super scary for us as parents to realize that that's where we are. And I think 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. But 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, which is healthy families, healthy adults, healthy children, people not dying, crime to be significantly decreased. When we look at a place like Oregon, I'm sure that you've seen this, They tried to decriminalize drugs. And of course, they had the same, kind of the same arguments and the same beliefs.

And 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. And so I don't know what you make of that. And, you know, places like San Francisco where you see this open. and drug use when they're basically encouraging it. They're saying we want to reduce harm. And 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. And 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. I 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. Everyone's happy. I mean, everyone talks about how in San Francisco you can't even, you can hardly live there safely unless you are the richest of the rich. You can't go to the parks. You can't walk on the sidewalk without public defecation. And 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. And 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. And so what do we do with that? That 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. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because that's a lot of what people are talking about when we're hosting events. People are saying, well, what about Oregon and what about these other cities? And 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, but we are still going to enforce all the laws around theft, around public drug use, around all the things that impact the broader community, that's really important that those laws stand. It'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. And so when you think about a place like Oregon, so they decriminalized possession of drugs there, and they just rolled that back recently. When you look at their overdose death rate, fentanyl started on the east coast and made its way towards the west coast. And it got to Oregon right about the same time that their decriminalization measure passed. And 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. So the decriminalization didn't cause their rates to increase, but fentanyl just happened to get there at the same time. And decriminalizing possession doesn't change this contaminated nature of the drugs people are using.

They're still buying drugs that are contaminated with fentanyl, even if we're not arresting them for possession. Importantly, too, in Oregon, they do not have a law against public drug use. And 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. I would say, you know, public drug use in public places is not okay. 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. And 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? It's not so much that people were reacting to people possessing drugs. It's that they, they were reacting to what? what was happening out on the street, which is lots of public drug use that was happening. That's not good. That's not healthy. It's not what we want in communities. And 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 don't continue policies that haven't been effective. and have produced a lot of additional harm.

They'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 make a personal choice, but we're going to really educate you about the potential harm from this. And we're going to protect the community. We'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.

And 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 and we can't elevate some rights over other rights. Wouldn'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. I mean, like, how often is that really happening? Wouldn't you say that most arrests are already because of public drug use or a DUI or breaking some kind of other law? And maybe through the plea deal, they say, okay, you're just going to jail for the marijuana use. But really, it's because we found you doing something else. So 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.

But like, for example, was that was was was was that Joanna's case? Like 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? Yeah, that's a good point. And it's true that people certainly can get arrested for whatever, lots of different things, and that the plea bargaining system, which the vast majority of all people who are arrested for anything, end up taking a plea deal as something like 95%. Very few people actually go to trial. It's almost always pled down to something. And so, yes, some of those people are.

So I think for me, the arrest data is even more helpful sometimes. than the incarceration data, you know, what somebody is serving time for might have been pled down from something else versus what they have been arrested for. So going back to women again, that's arrest data of 178,000 women being arrested for drug possession. So that's not a pled down. That's just like what they were originally arrested for. So it might be that they're being arrested in their own home for that. lot of arrests happen through traffic stops for lots of different reasons. And so I think that's a, it's a helpful point that it can be pled down. And yet we still see high rates of arrest for drug

possession. And if it was for other things, they could have been arrested for that. And yet they're not being arrested for those things. They're just being arrested for possession. And 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? Why wasn't that the charge that they were given? But for a lot of these people, that's not the charge that they were given. So, and Joanne wasn't arrested for, you know, she was able to go to treatment instead of being arrested. So it was kind of like, okay, so she had been, if she had been caught for that prior, to being able to go to treatment, you know, what she was engaging in was illegal activity.

So that's that tension. I think that's just good for us to sit with because it's almost like, you know, on a Tuesday, if she had gotten caught, she could have been like this other mom that we knew of spending 15 years in prison. On a Wednesday, she doesn't get caught. She's able to go to treatment and get a completely different response that has helped her. to be able to be this incredible mom. And now she helps other people find sobriety. And she leads, celebrate recovery.

And she's opening a sober home for moms with kids that can help them stay bonded to their children even while they're getting help. Praise God. And, you know, I want a system. And, you know, like you said, policies are all about tradeoffs. And a lot of people don't understand that. But they all have tradeoffs. And I can see both sides of it. Because when I hear her story, I'm like, I'm so glad.

that she didn't go to prison. I'm so glad that she has the redemption story that she has and just like, it touched me so much hearing you describe how she was running across the parking lot to her baby and like, oh, it just makes me want to cry all over again thinking about it. So I'm so thankful for her. And I think about more people like her who because they didn't go to prison, they were able to get the help that they need. Praise God for that. And 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. And 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. And in some ways, it might be better for them that it's not underground, but it's not good for me. It's not good for the rest of us who would have never taken drugs either way, whether they're legal or not. And now you have all these people. And now you have all these people who may have been prevented by the law from doing drugs, that was their last barrier to doing it. And 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. And 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. So when I think about

on the other side of that. I'm like, that does not sound like a good society to me. That doesn't sound like a city I want to be in. That doesn't sound like a community that I want my kids to be raised in. The pot shop or the cocaine shop or the fentanyl shop on the corner sounds really bad. And thinking about people legally profiting from that. Oh, that sounds awful too. So I get it.

I 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. Another, the last thing, because we've got a long time because it's such an interesting, interesting conversation. You wrote in your book, religious conviction and even virtuous ideals shouldn't be enforced through the law. If they are, they lose their meaning and transformational power, becoming not much more than coerced behavior modification. Now, 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. Yeah, so that's where that is in the book is 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? What 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. What kind of world do I think is best? And then thinking about should that always be enforced through the law. And so even thinking about, you know, the Ten Commandments, well, we don't want all of the Ten Commandments to be criminalized. You know, 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.

And yet we don't want everyone who commits adultery to go to prison, everyone who covets or uses the Lord's name in vain. We 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. It would make us all criminals, certainly. So there's a line there. I think Christians would all agree with that, that there is a line somewhere between, what we want, what is best, and what we should actually use the law to try to enforce. And so for me, that's where this wrestling has happened of where does that line, where is that line? And yes, the law can be helpful for signaling what is a good and virtuous life. But I think we also always

have to weigh the pros and cons of that signal and what we're losing on the other side. And so I think I still wrestle with that. Where is that line exactly? I think most of us probably do if we've kind of thought about this. I remember actually thinking about, oh, wait a second. It's not our goal really to make all sin illegal. So 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. And I think, oh, sorry.

No, go ahead. I was going to say, I think we actually do agree on that. All law is moral. All law speaks to a virtue. All law is based on a particular worldview. Thou shall not murder is obviously part of the Ten Commandments that we do believe that should be enforced through law. not stealing property laws are based on if you look in the Old Testament law giving,

not only were there laws against death, but also laws against covetousness. So we see the honoring of private personal property all the way back in the Old Testament. And so anyway, I think we do agree. Maybe we don't always agree on where to draw that line. But yes, virtue and morality is enforced through law every day. Every single law speaks to a morality. The question is, what is it? Which sins need to be regulated, restricted, enforced, and which just need to be discouraged?

So we agree on that. We 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. We want people to be whole and healthy and to have a beautiful redemption story like Joanne. So thank you for this conversation and your heart and your compassion. I just really appreciate your perspective. And I learned a lot today.

I hope everyone else did too. Thanks so much, Allie Beth. It's been so great to be here and just have the conversation. So much of what I want is just for us to start thinking and considering alternatives. I don't have all the answers. I 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. In your book, where can they get that? Yes, my book is called Curious, a foster mom's discovery of an unexpected solution to drugs and addiction. You can get it on Amazon. And we've got some free copies. for your related gals and related bros. Good, good.

You can email Curious at Enditforgood.com, and we will send out 25 copies to the first 25 people who email us. And you don't have to agree with everything in it. I hope it's just a good opportunity for people to learn. So Curious at Endipforgood.com, shoot us an email. We'll send you a free copy. No strings attached.

We just want people to be having the conversation. Thank you so much, Christina. I really appreciate it. Thanks.