Theology in the Raw - 853: Rethinking the War on Drugs: Christina Dent

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

It makes sense. Illegal drugs should be criminalized. Period. The harsher a society is on drug use and drug dealing, the fewer problems it will have. Right? Not necessarily. As long as there are buyers, there will be producers. And as long as people experience pain and trauma, they will seek ways to numb it.  Christina Dent is a politically conservative Christian who supported criminalizing drugs until she became a foster parent and saw the negative effects up close. She researched why drug-related harm isn’t decreasing and became convinced it’s because the criminal justice system is the wrong tool for addressing drugs.  Check out more about Christina’s work at https://www.enditforgood.com/about Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I have on the show today a special guest, somebody who I have not yet talked to in my entire life. Her name is Christina Dent. Christina is the founder and president of End It For Good. It's an organization that, for lack of better terms, is rethinking drugs and criminalization and the justice system and all that fun stuff. We had a fascinating conversation about drug use and how to combat or address, maybe it'd be a better term, address the problem of illegal drugs. And Christina is going to share her story and how she had a kind of change in view. But Christina is a politically conservative Christian. And yet she takes some views on this topic that might not be your typical politically conservative Christian approach.

We had a fascinating conversation. I so appreciated her thoughtfulness, her willingness to rethink different previously held beliefs, and just a sharp, sharp thinker. We had a great conversation. We also, at the end of the show, talked about Christians and the use of marijuana. Yes, folks, that is a topic that, I don't know, between you and I, I would love to dive into. that, I don't know, between you and I, I would love to dive into. I'm not sure too many people that are addressing this question well. If someone were to ask you, is it okay for a Christian to smoke marijuana, what would you say? And why? No, no, don't give me an answer. Don't just jump in. Yes, no. Why? Why? What verse would you go to? What kind of use are we talking about? And why would it be okay or not okay to smoke pot and be okay or not okay to drink or take morphine or prescription drugs? I think it's honestly a complicated conversation and Christina and I get

into it a little bit at the end. But primarily, we talk about the criminalization of drugs and whether or not that is helping reduce the damage that illegal drugs can and do cause. If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash Theology in Raw. Support the show for as little as five bucks a month and become part of the Patreon community, the Patreon Theology in Raw community. If you can't or don't want to support the show, consider leaving a review. That really helps too. So thank you to those of you who have reviewed the podcast. That really does help get more awareness to Theology in Raw, if that's something that you would like to become part of, if you would like to help others find this podcast, then leaving a review does help with that or sharing this on social media. Also, lastly, for those of you who don't know, I record both a video version and an audio

version of the show. So if you want to watch Christina and I dialogue, you can go to my YouTube channel, Preston Sprinkle. And if you are watching and you just want the audio, you can go to Theology in the Raw through iTunes, Spotify, or wherever podcasts are sold or downloaded, whatever that means. Anyway, welcome to the show, the one and only Christina Dent. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I am here with a new friend. I'm going to call you friend, even though we've known each other for about two and a half minutes. Christina Dent, thanks for coming on Theology in the Raw.

Thanks for having me. So this topic, as we were talking just briefly offline, I mean, I know hardly anything about it. I've heard stuff from a distance. Here's the extent of my knowledge. As a Christian, I'm supposed to be against drugs. And I say supposed to be because I'm like, well, wait a minute. Is morphine a drug when you're getting a surgery is is caffeine a drug is alcohol a drug is marijuana you know even the whole concept of we're christians we don't do drugs is a little bit vague sometimes um i'm i'm against uh taking cocaine how about that that? I mean, get shootied up with heroin. I think that's not going to be good for your life. Unless maybe your tree falls on your leg and you need to cut off your femur with those scenarios in the woods. Why don't we begin by me stop babbling and you give us just a little bit of background of who are you and what you do, specifically with this conversation

about the war on drugs and criminalization and all this fun stuff. Yeah. So I'm Christina. I'm born and raised in Mississippi. I've lived here my whole life. And I grew up in a wonderful Christian home, conservative home, happy childhood, homeschooled kindergarten through 12th grade. I went to a Christian liberal arts college. I have a degree in biblical studies and have spent a majority of my adult life in kind of lay ministry leadership at the

PCA church that we're a part of here in Jackson. So, yeah, I didn't know anything about drugs. I've never used illegal drugs. I don't have any interest in using illegal drugs. So this issue for me was like not on my radar at all. I just thought, you know, drugs are bad. Drug use is bad. Outlaw drugs. This is A plus B equals C. And I never really thought about that until we became foster parents a couple of years ago. And that was kind of a collision between the world I thought was pretty simple about drugs and drug laws in particular, and then the world in reality and what I actually began to learn about what's really happening. what I actually began to learn about what's really happening. Wow. So how would you summarize your perspective on the so-called war on drugs? How do we, you know, illegal drugs, let's just

assume for the sake of the discussion, is not good for people, not good for society. So there's, how do we reduce that? How do we address it? How would you summarize maybe what people have tried to do and where we've gone wrong? Because I think that's kind of a big kind of turning point in your journey. Yeah. So I think part of what we need to do is zoom out. So kind of with a lot of issues, but drugs is the same thing. We kind of are all like stuck in our cars on the freeway and we're in traffic and it's not going anywhere and we're all angry. We can only kind of see really closely around us.

We only can see our own personal experiences. And it's really difficult to get that 30,000 foot view and say, what's really happening here? Why is there so much harm? Why are so many people dying of overdoses right now? Why are so many people incarcerated? Why is there so much crime related to this underground market? Like where, what is causing all of these things? And the, and if you understand that, then you can start to figure out how do you fix those things. But I think most of us aren't taking that 30,000 foot view. So what got me there was meeting Joanne, who was the mom of one of our foster sons. And she had been using drugs while she was pregnant, not healthy, should not be doing that.

But her son was removed from her custody just because of her predatal drug use. She was not able to beat her addiction. She had been using for 18 years at that point. So he was removed from her custody and he was brought to our house. And my husband and I and our two sons became his foster family. And so we, I didn't know anything about drugs. I didn't know anything about drug use, knew nothing about addiction. I couldn't fathom how a mom who loved her son could possibly use drugs while she was pregnant. I had no concept of how this could possibly go together. And so I thought, well, that means that she doesn't really

love him. And so he's better off in our family, not with her. But I took her, I took Beckham to his first visit with Joanne at the local child welfare office, popped his little car seat out of my van, had my other kids with me, turned around in the parking lot. And there is Joanne sprinting across the parking lot towards us with tears streaming down her face. And I'm kind of awkwardly holding his car seat. And Joanne is just covering her son with kisses, talking to him, telling him how much she's missed him. Now he's this little, you know, five pound, nine ounce preemie straight out of the NICU. And I find myself really suspicious. This doesn't fit with what I think about people who use drugs, certainly mothers who would use drugs while they were pregnant. And I just felt

suspicion. I don't have anywhere in my kind of worldview on drugs to understand this. So Joanne spent one hour of visitation time with him, and then she left for inpatient drug treatment a couple hours away. And she would call me from treatment and say, can you put me on speakerphone? And she would sing to him over the phone while I was just holding the phone up to his little ear while he's sleeping or whatever he was doing. And I just felt this war in my heart start over what is happening. This isn't what I thought. And we're putting people like Joanne in prison every day in Mississippi and across the country. And I can clearly begin to see here, the more that I got to know Joanne, the more I realized this is not, this isn't really about bad people doing bad things.

This is about a hurting mother struggling with a really complex health crisis. It's not a criminal justice crisis. It's really a health crisis. It's not a criminal justice crisis. It's really a health crisis. And I knew from being trained as a foster parent that the amount of trauma that we experience in our childhoods has deep impacts on our lives as adults, including your risk for drug use, either just recreational or experimental drug use, but especially for addiction. And so I could see in Beckham's life, just thinking about him, what is this going to do to him if we take away his mom and put her in prison, if he grows up without a mom who clearly loves him?

And so all of these things kind of collided for me. And I began to question what is happening. And that led me on a journey to learn because I thought if we're doing anything wrong with how we handle drugs, it's wrong on such a massive scale that it's impacting millions and millions of people. And so I want to know. You know, we got into foster care because we wanted to help vulnerable children and families. to know. You know, we got into foster care because we wanted to help vulnerable children and families. So I feel like that same heart is what has led me into this new thing of trying to learn what's causing the harm. And it'd be good for us to get into that because what I learned is that I had categorically misunderstood where all of this harm was coming from. Well, let's just keep going. What did you find out when you had this kind of crisis moment, this turning point, and

you want to dig in deep what's causing the harm? What's causing the harm? Yeah. So first, I kind of took a step back and thought, why have I always supported this kind of tough on drugs, tough on crime? Like, what was my real goal there? And I, you know, first the quick and easy thing would be to say, why don't want people using drugs? Well,

why don't I want them using drugs? Well, because drugs can be really harmful. Okay. So, so now we're, we're zoned in on really that North star, which is reducing harm to people. So as a Christian who believes every person is made in the image of God and of inestimable value and worth. I want the least amount of harm to be done to people as possible. So that's still my North Star today is how is there a better way to reduce harm to people than maybe what we've been doing, just criminalizing, using the criminal justice system to handle drugs and addiction. So what I learned on that journey is that when you begin to dig into what's causing harm from drugs, there's actually two categories. One is the harm that comes from the substances themselves. And one is the harm that comes from

criminalizing those substances. So when you criminalize a substance, it actually leads to three new kinds of harm. So with any product, whether you're talking about, you know, tomatoes or Tylenol or heroin, you have a producer, you have a product, and you have a consumer. So you kind of have this, you know, buyer, seller, and what's changing hands. So when you criminalize a market, when you criminalize that seller, it transfers. It doesn't go away because anytime you have demand for a product, you're going to have somebody that's willing to supply it. So we went – a good example of this is kind of what happened during alcohol prohibition. So we went from having legal regulated businesses selling alcohol to now we've got underground Al Capone gangsters selling alcohol.

So we have this market transfer that happens. So even if you just look at Mexican cartels, they're making $20 billion a year off of U.S. drug sales of illegal drugs. So the sales haven't gone away, but they've transferred from a legally regulated market that's not dominated by crime to an underground unregulated market that is only dominated by crime. You can only be part of that if you're willing to break the law. So by forcing that drug market underground, we're not fighting crime. We're really funding it by pushing all of this money into this underground criminal market. And I actually talked to a guy recently who his mom grew up in Columbia in the kind of 70s and 80s at the height of Colombian drug cartel

violence. And I was talking to him over Zoom and he leaned forward so I could see on his camera and he was wearing a necklace of his mom's that she had worn growing up as a child. And he said, do you see this necklace? It was a little cutout, little golden cutout of the shape of the country of Columbia. He said on the back of it, he flipped it over, is her blood type because there was so much violence from this underground drug trade that they were encouraged to have their blood type either tattooed on their bodies or on their bodies somewhere because so many just regular civilians were getting caught up in all of the violence that surrounded that underground drug trade. So his mom's experience as a child was shaped by the violence of this underground market in a way that we can't even imagine for alcohol today.

Like nobody's worried about, you know, the head of Heineken taken out the head of Coors or, you know, shooting everybody up on the streets like that. Just we don't even have a we we can chuckle about it. It just sounds so ludicrous. But that's exactly what's happening today with the underground market for all of these other illegal drugs. We've kind of had this so far market transfer so far. Can I summarize just so I make sure I'm tracking? So you're saying are you saying that like when it comes to well both i guess

alcohol and illegal drugs um people who want them will get them and will use them that's just whether it's legal or not people are going to get them when it's deemed illegal that creates so so on an individual level people are going to use them and they probably will harm themselves when it's deemed illegal, that creates... So on an individual level, people are going to use them and they probably will harm themselves if it's not good for them, okay? But when we make them illegal, then that's going to create opportunities for all this underground stuff

that actually could have more, not less, but more societal harm and damage. Is that what you're saying so far? Mm-hmm. So that's just the market. The logic seems pretty sound. As someone who knows basically nothing about this, seems sound. Is that debated, like that kind of scenario?

Or what would be the counterargument? Are there studies that say, no, actually, when it's deemed illegal, use goes down? Or I don't know, what would be the pushback to that? Yeah, so I don't think anybody debates that when you criminalize a popular substance, it's going to be sold by an underground market. And that underground market is going to make the money off of it. And you can only, you know, you can only get your piece of the pie if you're willing to be violent. I mean, that's why, you know, when you take out the head of one cartel in Mexico, there is an explosion of violence because you've created this kind of power vacuum.

Well, the only way you can, you can fill that is by trying to take that by force. So we have just incredible violence. The vast majority of all crime today isn't caused just by people who are thinking to themselves, I want to do something criminal. It's actually the underground drug market that's playing out on our streets, in our cities, across our border. Even when you think about what's happening with our border crisis in the South, why are people, if you listen to their stories, why are so many of them fleeing their countries? Well, it's from violence, from cartels, and from government corruption. That's also caused by the buying off of government officials by cartels who are selling drugs and want to keep their underground drug trade going. So, of course,

there's other things in there. It's not only drugs, but, but the underground drug market provides the vast majority of all funding for gangs, cartels, and terrorist organizations. Like it is, it is just funding crime around the world. So yes, that's a great summary of kind of what happens. I don't think anyone, I haven't heard people say, no, you're, you're wrong. I think people agree. Yes, this is what's happening where we would disagree is, is it worth it? Um, is it worth it to criminalize, to make the point that we don't want people using or to keep them out of visible access, um, in order, you know, yes, we're going to have all of this crime and violence. Now, for me, I never understood that. I just thought, you know, the crime is there. I never made the connection

that this is actually a cause and effect that is economically predictable, that if you don't allow a market to operate legally, it's going to operate illegally, and that's going to cause lots and lots of crime. So I think for a lot of people, they've just never thought about it before. And they've never really thought about, oh, there's a lot of this crime that's caused by laws. It's not just like bad people wanting to be, you know, do terrible things. So that's kind of that market piece of what happens when you criminalize a market. Then you have what happens when you criminalize a substance. So you go from having a legal regulated substance to an illegal, unregulated, contaminated substance.

So in the same way that during alcohol prohibition, people are cooking up whatever they want to in their bathtub or the woods behind their house, whereas you used to have alcohol sold on shelves where it was labeled and you knew what proof it was and you knew it was in it. And we have that today. So we understand that. Yes, when you have legal alcohol, you can go to a liquor store and you can see all sorts of different alcohol. You need, you know, an ID to buy it. But that same transfer that's happened into this deregulation is what's happened with other kinds of drugs. So you have two things that happen there. One is the potency immediately

increases because if you're going to smuggle something, you've got to have a big punch in a small package. So the same thing plays out if you go to a sports stadium where alcohol is prohibited on the inside. So outside where people are tailgating, they're drinking beer, like 5% alcohol by volume. And then when they go inside, they're drinking 45% alcohol by volume, not because their taste changed between the tailgating and the game, it's because they have to smuggle it now. So you need this, this big punch in a small package, you're going to smuggle a flask of liquor, you're not going to try to smuggle a six pack of beer into the stadium. So that same principle is what is playing out in all of illegal drugs now that it's, you want it always to be more and more potent because

you're taking a risk of smuggling it. So you don't have low potency options anymore. You only have really high potency options. And when you combine that potency increase with the deregulation of an underground market, you get a tragedy, which is what is happening right now. So if you look at why so many people are dying of opioid overdoses right now, which is all over the news and has been for years, we lost about 50,000 people in 2019 to opioid overdoses. If you look into the CDC's numbers of what did those people actually have in their bodies when they died, 83% of them had heroin or fentanyl in their system. So fentanyl is a really, really powerful synthetic opioid and is being added to drugs on the street because of this potency, this sort of iron law of prohibition, as it's called, where, okay, now if we can add fentanyl to the heroin, we can get that package even smaller because fentanyl is really, really,

really potent. And so now you have this razor thin margin between getting high and death. And the more that we crack down, attempt to crack down, the more and more that underground market is getting more and more potent substances out onto the street. So we're not decreasing overdose deaths by prohibiting these substances. We're actually increasing them because people don't know what they're buying on the street. They're getting contaminated drugs. They don't know, you know, is this going to get me higher? Is it going to kill me? There's no way for them to know because there's no, you know, labeling and packaging and quality controls and regulation. All of that is completely missing. Making a drug illegal is not the ultimate regulation. It's the absence of any form of regulation. So when a drug is deemed illegal and pushed underground,

you're saying it becomes more dangerous in a sense because human nature, I mean, obviously you could say, well, that's not right. They shouldn't do, okay, whatever. But you're just making an observation of when that happens. The drugs become more dangerous, higher dose or whatever, more potent. Fentanyl, I didn't know what that was until I guess, well, the whole George Floyd, apparently he had fentanyl. I didn't know what that was.

So it's a form of opioid, you said? Yeah, it's an opioid, but it's a synthetic opioid. So it's not a naturally occurring one it's a man-made version but it's incredibly potent okay um and very easy to overdose on i've got so many questions right now i mean i got like some not even completely related to each other let me um i'm curious having everything you're saying can you just tell it like whoa if you if if you were in charge, I don't know what the position is in America, but like you're in charge of determining what's legal, what's illegal. Would you make all drugs just legal?

Like, are you like hyper libertarian in that? Like, what would you say is your perceived solution? And I imagine that there's probably many others that hold whatever view you have. But what's the solution? There's no solution, I guess. Jesus is the solution, but what's the best way to minimize maybe harm? I'm not even sure how to frame the question. Yeah, I think you said it beautifully. There's no perfect solution. There's only better and worse solutions to a broken world with broken people with potentially harmful substances in it. And I think what I backed into on this journey to try

to figure out how do you decrease harm to people is that if you legally regulate substances, that's the best way to do it. You can set age restrictions. You can set potency and purity restrictions. You're not incarcerating consumers anymore for a health issue that they're struggling with. So I would say legal, regulated, and discouraged. Those would kind of be the three points of what I think we whatever PCP. And when you say regulate, would you say like they should be sold in stores? I kind of like how marijuana is in many states. Now you have, you know, dispensaries and everything like or you're just saying like, no, they're not. You can't sell them in a public store. But if somebody does get them, it's you're not criminalized for it. Or what do you mean by.

Yeah, so there's that's a good point. So there's two different kind of ways that you can deal with the harm. So one is decriminalizing use, like just possession. So that's just for consumers. Like, we're not going to arrest you anymore. And Portugal actually did this about 20 years ago in 2001. They decriminalized possession of substances. So you can't legally sell them there.

You can't legally sell them there. You can't legally produce them there. People are still using contaminated substances there that they're buying on the street. But if they catch you, you don't get put in jail. So they're not, they have switched from a criminal justice approach to drug use to a public health approach. And they've made treatment widely available if you're problematically using substances. They've offered tax breaks to businesses who will employ people who are coming out of either incarceration or drug treatment. And they've just kind of taken this, you know, instead of trying to traumatize people out of their substance use, we're going to try to just

help them build a life that they want to be fully present for. And that has worked incredibly well. Their injection drug use rate, they had a really bad heroin overdose crisis when they did this, which is why they took a big step. But their injection drug use rate has dropped in half over that time. Their drug addiction rate has dropped by a third. Their drug-related crime has dropped. As fewer people are addicted to drugs, you've got fewer people committing property crimes to get money for drugs because there's just not as many people addicted to them. So, Christina, what you're saying is like, so in Portugal, you can't go into like the grocery store and buy a needle of heroin.

I don't know if that's the right way to frame it. But if you do get caught, you're not criminalized for it. Where do people get it? So the market for there's still is there still then therefore be an underground market like that's still an issue? Or are you saying that's always going to be there no matter what? So let's not worry about that? Or? Yeah, so they they just addressed if you look at kind of at those three categories of harm of a market of substance, and then of consumer, which we didn't talk a lot about what we're getting into now of what happens when you put consumers in

prison for drug use. So they only address to that third category of harm, just criminalizing consumers, and they stop doing that. And I would say that's great, because that is the right thing to do. We don't need to be putting people in jail for this, because it's a health, it's a complex health issue. It's not a criminal issue. But if we want to end all of this crime from the underground market, and we want to stop so many of the overdoses that are happening today, you can only do that through legally regulating that market again and regulating those substances again. And you can't get that unless you legally regulate. Like that's just the only way that you get some form of control back over the market and over the substances. So for me, that process of changing my mind was actually

like, I ended up in the place I didn't want to end up in. I don't want, I don't want my kids using drugs. I don't want, like, I don't, I don't want this to be the right answer. And yet, when I look at human flourishing and how can we look at what's causing the harm and do something different, it seems like in every category, we're dramatically increasing harm to people, particularly be vulnerable people that live in communities that are most wracked by crime, tends to be vulnerable people that are using drugs off the street instead of being able to get a prescription from somewhere, something like that, if they want to use prescription substances or are addicted to them. Vulnerable people tend to be the ones who are more criminalized for their substance use. You know, if you have connections, you can often not be charged for whatever it was that you were doing. And sometimes just depend on where you live. Nobody is really looking into what you're doing. And so for me as a person who is particularly interested in how do we care for vulnerable people as well as everyone else. I'm not in any way in favor of, you know, over-the-counter heroin. Like, that is not what I want. But I think if we looked at every substance, we could say, given that the potential for harm of this substance, what's the best way to regulate it? Does it need to be prescription?

Does it need to be something you can only use on site? Does it need to be something you can only use if you are 21, which is how marijuana is sold in most states where it's legal, where you have to be 21 to even get in the door of a dispensary, that sort of thing. So we already kind of have these regulatory models that are working for other substances. And I think we could either use some of those models or develop some new models for an appropriate way to legally regulate to reduce harm. Singapore approach. I've been to Singapore a couple of times. You get in the airport, there's signs there saying if you're caught with an ounce of marijuana, you're going to be like 39 lashes or something. My audience knows that I'm a pacifist, so I can say this as a theory, but what if it was like, hey, you get caught with drugs, you get the death penalty. Bam, gone. Like, wouldn't that – if he went super hard, wouldn't that not – wouldn't that actually discourage people from dealing? They would – or would that still exacerbate –

like, is there an underground market in Singapore when the – I'm assuming that the penalty is so high that people are like, all right, I'm not going to take that risk. I don't mind going to jail for a couple of years or whatever, but I don't want 39 lashes, life in prison, you know, what. Yeah. I don't mind going to jail for a couple of years or whatever, but I don't want 39 lashes life in prison. You know what? Yeah. I don't know.

Yeah. Some countries have done Singapore. The Philippines has a super harsh drug policy right now. They have thousands and thousands of extrajudicial killings of people just being gunned down. If you're caught, suspected, anything like that of, um, drug use. And you just, when you look across, it's difficult sometimes with other countries because there's such big cultural divides there of just, um, their cultures are very different. Um, but you don't see that the harsher you get, the less people are using drugs.

So it's easier to kind of compare that in America because we can kind of compare it with our own culture. So I think it was Pew Research that did a study on do states with harsher drug laws have less drug use or less drug arrests or, you know, anything like that. And they found, no, it just does not impact what people actually choose to do. So right now, I just got this message probably two weeks ago on Facebook. A woman messaged me and her husband is serving two life sentences in a Mississippi prison because he was caught with seven boxes of Sudafed, which can be used as a precursor to making methamphetamine. And he had had two previous interactions. Wait, Sudafed, like the allergy medicine? I mean, I got seven boxes. Are you serious?

That's crazy. I mean, I actually don't, and I know I don't run a meth house, but that Sudafed. Wow. don't. And I know I'm not, I don't run a meth house, but that Sudafed. Wow. Yes. Yeah. So he had had, you know, two previous interactions with the criminal justice system years prior. And most states still have these three strikes laws that you can be sentenced incredibly harshly if you are on whatever your third strike is. So this was his third strike and he ended up with two life sentences. So he has spent 15 years already in prison on these two life sentences. Um, his wife and him have six kids. She's raised their kids alone for 15 years that he's already been gone. So you would think that, okay, this is in the papers 15 years ago, two life sentences for seven boxes of Sudafed.

So kind of based on what we think, we would think, well, gosh, everyone would stop doing anything with drugs if the possibility is there of getting two life sentences. And yet it just does not have an impact. Even if you look at people who are selling drugs, you know, you take out one person who's selling. Well, the guy next door is going, hey, I've got more market share now. Now all of his customers still need somebody to buy from. And there's another guy there. And that is law enforcement will always acknowledge that this is the case. You take one guy off the street and there's another one there an hour later. You take five guys off the street for selling and there's five more there two hours

later. It just because that market is always supplying the demand. So you can't win it on the supply side because the illegal drug market globally is 500 billion dollars a year. So you've got this like massive pile of cash that consumers are holding out saying we want someone to supply us with these drugs and we're willing to pay $500 billion a year for it. And we're hoping that then nobody wants, nobody's going to be willing to take part in that. And it's just like you said, is human nature is such that there's always going to be people who are willing to take part in that. So we can't win it on the supply side. So can we win it on the demand side?

Can we decrease demand? And that's where I think really looking into why do people use drugs is really important. And I just don't think most of us really think past, you know, well, it's just a moral failure. They're people without strong character or things like that. And I think if we just step back and think, why do people want to change the way they feel? Well, all of us understand that because all of us live in this broken world. We all want to change the way that we feel sometimes. We do that in positive ways. We can also do that in harmful ways. We can do it, we can do it with heroin and cocaine. We can also do it with Facebook, with gambling, with

pornography, with all sorts of things that some of those things are legal. And we say, you know, they're harmful, but they're still, we're not going to put you in jail for it. And I think we are misdiagnosing the problem by thinking that we can traumatize people out of a way in which they are trying to make their lives better, to feel better. So we're saying, if we can make you feel worse, maybe you will stop wanting to feel better. And it's like the worst possible thing that we could do for people is to add more and more trauma, more disconnection, more being pulled from their families, loss of job, loss of educational opportunity. And then we're surprised when they continue using substances. Well, we know now that for every, even if you just look at childhood trauma,

for every experience of childhood trauma that you have, that could be abuse of some sort. It can also be something like your parents being divorced. Lots of studies have been done on this. For every one of those instances, you are on average three times more likely to use illicit drugs. So it's like a direct correlation between how much trauma you experience and your risk factors for drug use. Not because you become a worse person, but because you become a more harmed person and you have more desire to numb that pain and to find ways for your life to be more able for you to be present in it. So you would say, yeah, that's a good phrase to numb the pain. So when there's pain, it will be people will seek to numb it, whether it's the pain of upper middle class loneliness or boredom or isolation, pandemic or whatever, a pain of trauma. So let's address the pain.

What's causing the pain, what's causing the pain. And then if we somehow can reduce the deal with trauma in healthy ways or reduce the number of people going through trauma and get to the roots of it, then the desire to numb it won't be as strong because there's nothing to numb if they're living a flourishing life. Is that? Yeah. I want to I want to ask you a question about pot. Actually, several questions about marijuana. But before I. So the whole war on drugs in the 1980s, was that like the Reagan or was it Nancy Reagan that did that? And I know that has come up several times in the race conversation. I think there's been books written on this. Do you can you. I think I know probably after i mean having listened to you i

might be able to connect the dots but is that a good the war on drugs in the 80s and that whole like more like strong approach on criminalization is this exact is that exactly what you're saying where it went wrong and it ended up would you say it affected people of color disproportionately and i don't know, help me understand the whole concern about the, or because people talk about the war on drugs as a, obviously that was a bad thing. I'm like, wait a minute. And maybe now, maybe an hour ago, I would have said, well, wait a minute, isn't confronting drug use a good thing? You know, but now having heard you, I'm like, well, okay, I can see the complexity, but yeah. Can you help

me understand the war on drugs and the concerns there? Yeah. So we started criminalizing heroin and cocaine about a hundred years ago. Marijuana was a harsh criminalization for marijuana, but we had already been criminalizing heroin and cocaine for a long time prior to that. But that was the start of a period of harder and harder laws, harder and harder crackdowns. In the 90s, they got even stronger, even harsher crackdowns. And this was bipartisan. This is not like a conservative thing. And I'm conservative. So, you know, certainly we had part of this. But this was bipartisan support for tough on crime, tough on drugs.

We got to rid our communities of these scourges. And it had a dramatically disproportionate impact on communities of color, not explicitly so, but in ways such as the sentencing guidelines were different for powder cocaine and heroin or sorry, powder cocaine and crack cocaine. So powder cocaine was typically used by upper class white people. Crack cocaine was typically used by lower income African American communities. That's what it was most associated with. The sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine was like a hundred to one. Yeah.

In terms of how harsh the sentencing was. And so you had things like that. You have things that are still going on today, such as marijuana arrest. If you look at who is arrested for marijuana. Now, there's tons of white people being arrested for marijuana. But if you look at proportionate to use, white people and black people actually use marijuana at similar rates. That's true across, if you look at all drug use, white people and black people are using drugs at roughly the similar rates. But on marijuana, nationally, black people are about four times more likely to be arrested for that use. So there's lots of white people in prison on drug charges.

There's far more black people in prison on drug charges proportionate to population ratio. And so it's a bad idea in my mind. It's a bad idea for everyone that it impacts, you know, the, the two life sentences, um, that was for, um, that man is a Latino. So it's, you know, it, it isn't that only African-American people are getting harsh sentences. I mean, it's, I would say it's, it's wrong and unhelpful for everyone that it's impacting, but it has dramatically disproportionately impacted communities of color. And for lots of complex reasons, it's not always just sort of overt racism. There's a lot of black police officers and chiefs and sheriffs who I talked with one African-American officer who had spent his career in narcotics enforcement and has since changed his mind on drug policy and the best path forward

and now be in agreement with us that we need to end the criminalization. But he said, in his mind, he said, I was known for harshly punishing people on the street. Like I had a reputation as an officer on the street. And he said, I perceived that as helping the community that I was seeing so much harm in. My own community that I grew up in had all this crime, had all of these drugs coming through it. And I thought I was really helping that by cracking down hard. I was really helping that by cracking down hard. And now I can look back and say I misunderstood the best way really to help that community.

So I think conversation, it's just there's a lot of complexity there around cause and effect and intent versus outcome. I think a big overarching theme I think is intent versus outcome. We intend for this to help people. The outcome is unhelpful. So I'm going to go back really quick because this is something I haven't quite wrapped my mind around. Or maybe I'm missing something. But going back to the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine or crack versus powder cocaine. Cocaine is an upper class. Upper class people use it because it's

expensive. Crack is lower socioeconomic status. And because, well, and so a higher percentage of African Americans are being criminalized for use of crack cocaine. And people have said, have said, therefore, built into this very criminalization is a racially unjust kind of law. To me, it sounds like if there is an injustice here, it's across socioeconomic lines, not necessarily racial lines. Like, it's just on a logical level. And again, I could totally be missing something. But like, if lower socioeconomic people are getting busted with higher crime rates or criminalization um even though they're using the kind of the same substance but it's just a lower grade of it or whatever and if there's a higher percentage of african americans who are using that who are of lower socioeconomic status that's not, that seems like the common denominator, though,

is lower socioeconomic status, not necessarily race, unless one poor white person using crack and another poor black person using crack both got busted, same amount, and the black person got a harsher sentence, then that's across racial lines. But if it's just simply people being busted for crack, you know, being punished harder, harsher than cocaine,

and most cocaine users are white, because higher percentage of higher socioeconomic status. I don't know, it might, does that make sense? My, my, I just, I need one more dot to be connected before I say, oh, this is clearly racial bias. It seems to be socioeconomic bias. Yes. Am I missing something there? You're a state thinker, Preston. Both of them are happening at the same time. So there is a racial bias and there's a socioeconomic bias. So when you get, yes, so both of those are playing out. They are. If you are lower income, you are more likely to be criminalized for it. Yeah. If you are African-American, you're more likely to be criminalized for it. If you are lower income African-American, you're really, really more likely to be criminalized for it.

But yes, there is definitely, even if you look kind of broader outside of drug policy, There is definitely, even if you look kind of broader outside of drug policy, Dr. Anthony Bradley did an interview recently. I heard him talk about, you know, he said, really, when you look at kind of mass incarceration, yes, there's a racial element to it. But he says it's worse than that. It's actually, it's an economic element to it. It's broader than race. It's really, we just, we over-criminalize. Yeah. So I would also, on the flip side, I would also be curious to wealthy people, one black, one white are using cocaine. Is the wealthy black person going to get a higher

sentence than the wealthy white person for the same crime use. So is that, would we say that, yeah, that is most likely going to happen? Or is the racial disparity primarily among white and black in lower socioeconomic, or does it also apply to higher socioeconomic status? A wealthy black person busted with cocaine, wealthy white person busted for cocaine, are they getting the same sentence or is a white person getting off more, more than the black person? I don't know if there's, I don't know. I don't expect you to have an answer. These are the questions that come up for me to, I need to kind of test everything before I say there's clearly a racial bias built into the system. You know, um, I haven't seen any studies on, um, kind of that, you know? I haven't seen any studies on kind of that, you know, high socioeconomic for white versus African American is typically studies that are looking at economic effects of

criminalization or who is being criminalized or racial bias. But I haven't seen them that put those together in a way that that makes that clear. My guess would be that there is racial bias at all levels. But I think it's important to note that the drug war isn't just wrong just because it has racial bias in its enforcement. So you could make, if that was only true, you could make the case that we need more officers enforcing more laws to arrest more white people. Like just as long as it's equal, then it's okay. And I think that's, we're missing the point entirely if that's where we're headed. We need to rethink,

is this good for anyone? Like, is it the right way to handle this period? It has, yes, hugely disproportionate impacts on minority communities. That includes women. Women are at their incarceration rates for women have gone through the roof over the last couple of years. And I had at one of our discussions here at End It For Good, which is the nonprofit that I lead here in Mississippi, there was a former federal agent, drug agent, and she came to one of the discussions and she said, drug agent, and she came to one of the discussions and she said, you know, the thing that got me rethinking my own take on drug policy and her career is in enforcing our drug criminalization. She said, as I saw how many women we were incarcerating because women were being used as carriers for drugs, they were kind of

doing the things, but they didn't have access to all of the inner workings of who was higher up the food chain. So they didn't have anybody to give in order to make a deal with prosecutors to get, you know, a lower sentence or to get just probation or to get let off the hook. So they were getting held on the hook for their roles, even though they were, you know, minor kind of, you know, street level roles in this, um, the, the drug trade, but we, they were loading women into prison when she could see these aren't the people that we're really after. Um, they just don't have the power really. They don't have the connections to know somebody else higher up the food chain to give up, to save up their, to give up to save their own skin.

So there's lots of different pieces of this that impact lots of different communities. Okay. So thank you for the work you do. I mean, it just sounds the deeper you dig, the more complex I could see it gets. And you don't have a law degree or anything. You sound like you know the politics of this really well. You probably had to. No, I am an avid learner.

And I just really wanted to know. And I spent a lot of my time prior to this just doing, I kind of have this crusader's heart of like, I want to make the world a better place. I want to be part of righting the wrongs. And I see that as direct outworking of my Christian faith of wanting to bring more of the good of the kingdom of God on earth and to stop the harm. And yeah, so that's kind of what drives me. I've just done a lot of learning, a lot of reading, a lot of talking to people.

So that's kind of what drives me. I've just done a lot of learning, a lot of reading, a lot of talking to people and just trying to bring that to people, not as an expert of a PhD in it, but more of as somebody who's been on a journey, who spent a lot of time learning and is inviting other people onto this journey to learn with me. Let's talk about marijuana. Let's begin with – so I have a question. I've had people ask me this and I said I just don't know. With the states that have legalized marijuana, not just – I mean for recreational use, has that had a better impact on society, a worse impact on society, or is it too early to tell? Well, it depends on who you ask. So there are some people who say, you know, it's destroyed the state. Um, and Colorado is the one that they typically point to and say, you know, it's destroyed Colorado. This is a, you know, it's a wasteland here. Um, now, and I think, so again, I think you have to pull out and say, get that 30,000 foot view of not just an anecdotal comment from someone about how they dislike

that marijuana is legal there now or what they perceive to be the impact of that. Um, but look and see, okay, you know, are the, are the markers of harm diminishing? So they have far fewer arrests for marijuana there now. So that I would say is a good thing because I don't think we should be arresting people for marijuana. It's just not the right way to handle marijuana use. There are some things people will point to and say, well, look at that, you know, that got worse. Well, I was talking to somebody a couple of weeks ago who lives in Colorado and he said, you know, it's annoying to me now that I smell marijuana more frequently, like if I'm at a festival or something like that. That's annoying. I wish I didn't smell marijuana.

But he said, you know, for me, it's a tradeoff. And I would say this is all about tradeoffs. We're not looking for the utopia. We're not looking for the perfect world. That's not going to be here till heaven. So he says, you know, I can, I can handle the trade-off of smelling marijuana sometimes when I don't want to for getting other things such as the market coming out of the underground market, you know, less crime related to that, less people being arrested for marijuana. Now, overdoses are not, you can't really overdose on marijuana. So that's,

marijuana legalization doesn't impact overdose deaths in the way that, you know, legal regulation of, you know, something like heroin might, where people are overdosing on heroin. So there's a lot of people, you know, as with all kinds of stats, you can pick whatever you want to and come up with whatever you want to make those stats say. But yeah, there is less of an underground market. Teen use has not increased, which is a lot of people point to and say, what about kids? What kind of message is this sending to our children? We're just, we're signaling to them that we don't care if they use marijuana. And that's been true across states. So you've got states, Maine has legalized marijuana for recreational use, Washington, Colorado, Michigan, you've got states all over the United States now.

And across the board, they have found that teen use does not increase when you legalize. Some states have actually found that it decreases, which kind of makes sense as you think about right now, like in a state where it's illegal, you know, 14 year olds and 34 year olds buy their marijuana from the same place. Like nobody's checking IDs. They buy it from a guy on the street. There's no regulation. There's no age restrictions. And it's everywhere. You can, anyone who wants to buy marijuana can find it. So if you put it, if it's legal, it's at least now behind a counter where most businesses

are going to be checking IDs because they don't want to lose their, they don't want to lose their adult use license to sell to adults. So some of those outcomes like teen use and things like that are just they're either unchanged or in some states they've actually gotten better. which on a public health standpoint is actually a positive because alcohol use has far more societal harms than marijuana use does it's you know really very dangerous to drink and drive yes yes by far that was my assumption violence huge deal i was wondering if yeah if alcohol uh well, I'll say abuse, creates more societal and even personal harm than marijuana. I just don't know the science behind marijuana. I listen to Joe Rogan a lot, and he smokes pot all the time. And he's like, dude, this is way better for you and society than alcohol.

He's very big on people abuse alcohol all the time, or even overeating or lack of exercise, all these things. And like marijuana is not bad for you. Is that is now of course, somebody who smokes pot is going to say that. But can you give us a basic overview of the science behind that the health I mean, is marijuana not that bad for you? I grew up, you know, kills your brain cells and, and you know know you're hot i bet i mean pre-christ i used to smoke pot a little bit so i know what it's like to be high and um i've also been drunk before pre-christ

and and they're very different, but I would say, I don't know, just anecdotally, I think probably being high was less maybe destructive than being drunk. Now, again, I'm not advocating for drunkenness and, you know, whatever, but I think each one could be bad. But it seems anecdotally I could see somebody saying marijuana use is not as bad as alcohol use or abuse, maybe. Is that my way off on that? Or is that about right? Or, yeah. So, um, I think if you look, yes, I think you're right on that. Um, now there are people who say, you know, marijuana uses, it can be so harmful if you're younger, it can be so harmful. It can lead to psychotic episodes. And the edibles can be – I've heard a lot of cases with the edibles that that's really different.

People have had really horrific reactions to edibles. Is that a thing versus smoking it? I don't know if that's a thing. I have not heard that, although that may be a thing. But I think there's always going to be people who are saying this is the worst thing that could possibly happen. So I try to, again, take that 30,000-foot view and say not just based on a few instances or one study over here, but on a big scale, is this causing lots of mental illness or anything? And we just don't see that. So 50% of Americans have now used marijuana. Like this is widespread use of marijuana. Even when you see it legalized in states, you just don't see huge increases in, you know, public, you know, mental health crises

and things like that. So, you know, on a, now I'm not a, this is where I get into the nuance of my own perspective on this, because I, if marijuana was legal in Mississippi, I wouldn't use it. Like, I don't, even though I think you're right, there's a lot of nuance there around, well, is it, is it any different really than alcohol in terms of you're putting a substance in your body to feel differently than you do right now? And I think that's true. Even if you're non-problematically using alcohol, people drink alcohol because they like it. It makes them, makes them relaxed or it makes it, you know, it makes a meal more enjoyable or, you know, it makes a party a little more fun, even if you're not getting drunk. And so if you look at kind of societal harms, you have far more societal harms with alcohol.

There was a sheriff who came to one of our community discussions that we have in Mississippi where I'm kind of presenting these ideas and inviting people to dialogue about it. presenting these ideas and inviting people to dialogue about it. And he came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, the drug that officers are most hoping they don't come across when they are out doing their work is somebody who's been drinking because we're not worried about people who are high. Like they're just not, they're not going to be combative and angry and, you know, do crazy stuff. It's people who are drunk. Like that's where we see the most harm towards us. It's where we see the most domestic violence harm, like by far. And even on, you know, on the driving spectrum now, should you drive high? Absolutely not. But, you know, should you drive drunk? Certainly, absolutely not. Um, and so, yeah,

there's, you know, I'm really careful and we're really careful as an organization never to trivialize any kind of drug use, um, including marijuana. Cause I think about it as it really, whether or not it should be legal is kind of a separate discussion from whether or not you should do it. Kind of like with adultery. Like you shouldn't commit adultery, but we're not saying that just because you shouldn't commit adultery, it should be illegal and you should go to prison for it. Like those are two separate conversations.

And I kind of see this the same way. Like whether or not drugs should be legal is kind of about how do we reduce harm. Whether or not you should use them. Now that's kind of another question. It's a good question. So, so yeah, so that, that, that'll be our final question. Um, is it morally okay to recreationally use marijuana? People keep asking me the question and I'm like, I don't, I don't think so. And they're like, okay, why? Cause they know I'm the Bible. I like to say, what does the Bible actually say? I'm like, don't know. So my opinion, I actually don't know.

I don't know. When I grew up, there was, this is such a bad argument. There's a Greek word that's often, well, it's only used a few times in the New Testament, translated sorcery in some translations. I think it's in the book of Revelation, maybe once in the gospels. And the Greek word is pharmakia, from which we get pharmacy. And the argument I grew up is, this includes all pharmakia, all kind of substances or whatever. And I used to kind of repeat that argument and people are calling me on that. I mean, I don't use it anymore, but like, eh, is that really a sound way to read back into the Greek word? What you just, because an English word is derived from it. I'm like, yeah,

no, that's not good. So is there a bit, I mean, biblically, um, is, is marijuana use, wrong? I just, I think we have to, the conclusion that people come to on that should be informed by seeing all substance use on a spectrum. It is not, it isn't that some of us are substance users and some of us are not, or some of us are drug users and some of us are not. Those drugs from, you know, the coffee you're taking a sip of right now. As I'm chugging coffee right now. As you're chugging the coffee. To, you know, heroin and cocaine, fentanyl, morphine, you know, on the harder end of that spectrum, those drugs all exist on a continuum of substances that change our bodies in some way. Tylenol changes our bodies. Tylenol changes the

way that we feel. That's why we take it. We hope that it stops the headache we have or the pain that we have in our hip or whatever it is. So I think of all substances on a continuum and all substance use is on a continuum of wanting to change the way that we feel. Sometimes that's in small ways through a cup of coffee in the morning. Sometimes it's through really big ways of, you know, some huge amounts of physical pain that can only be medicated by the strongest kinds of opioids. Sometimes it's psychological pain that can also, you know, the, the best way people find to, um, to mitigate that is through, you know, substance use. Um, some people are recreationally using, and I, I, it's hard for me to make the, even though I,

I don't want to use marijuana and I have like this, still this visceral side of, uh, don't feel comfortable with this. Um, I can't make a case that it's okay for you to recreationally use alcohol and it's not okay for you to recreationally use marijuana. I just think that's a, I think that's a really tough case to make. If you, if you're thinking about kind of those bigger questions of both of them are being used to change the way that you feel. You know, now it is getting high. The same thing is getting drunk. I mean, that's, that's kind of a separate, I don't know. I don't know myself kind of where that falls. Can people use marijuana medically for wonderful effect? I've talked to a lot of people in other places that have, so I think there's gotta be some space for that, for people to be able to use, you know, to use it as a pain

management tool or to treat epilepsy or whatever it is that they're using it for. So I'm still on that. I'm still on the journey myself of kind of where does that fall? My work isn't in that particular question because that question I see is separate kind of from whether or not they should be legal. Um, but I think it's a question that there's more nuance to than just if it's ever been illegal, it must be like sinful and wrong to use. Uh, I think we just to be really careful about, um, you know, uh, saying this is wrong or it's, you know, it's, I think there's just a lot of gray area there that if we actually look at the harms of substances, you know, the two most addictive deadly substances on the planet are legal and regulated right now, which is alcohol

and tobacco. And, you know, it's kind of, it's hard, you know, we just have to wrestle with that over what we do with those and what we do with other things. So I think, you know, if you look at people like Joanne, Joanne today, who I started out with way back in the beginning, doing great. She's five years sober. She's a wonderful mom to Beckham. She works full time now in drug treatment, helping other women and other moms enter long term recovery. Now, it doesn't always happen like that. Certainly, there's a lot of people that go to treatment for whom, you know, it doesn't work the first time around or the second or the third. And I would say for them, the path is still not that prison is going to fix the reasons

why they're using those substances. But for people like Joanne, we love stories like that. We love, you know, Hallmark movies about it. We love seeing them in the newspaper at Christmastime about these kind of, you know, rags to riches sort of stories of, you know, terrible life of addiction back to, you know, this wonderful thriving life. But for all the stories like Joanne, there are stories like Nikki, who is, this happened about the same time as this Joanne story was happening with me, that Nikki was, she relapsed during her pregnancy. Her son was removed from her custody at birth and was placed with some friends of ours, another foster family. But Nikki was arrested for her prenatal drug use and prosecuted for it. And she is now about two years into a 15-year prison sentence in North Mississippi.

So her kids are growing up without her. Her mom is raising her kids while Nikki is incarcerated. I try to always ask permission for the stories that I share. And so I'd asked Nikki's mom if we could share their story as I talk about these issues. And the first words out of her mouth were, thank you for not forgetting us. It's just incredibly difficult for families and who are trying to support their loved ones while they're incarcerated and support the families left behind on the outside, their children or their husbands or their wives or, you know, parents. And so we have this kind of we can do more of Joanne, but we're doing an awful lot of Nikki.

We're doing an awful lot of NICI and we can we can stop. I see it now as kind of we can stop this second category of harms that are coming from prohibition. All of this crime and violence, all of these overdose deaths, all of this unnecessary incarceration that's tearing families apart. And we can focus instead all of our resources on decreasing the harm from the substances themselves. of our resources on decreasing the harm from the substances themselves. So stop the harm from prohibition and focus all of that resources on, you know, substances ingested in your bodies. And that's what I want to invite people to lean into, to say, don't jump to conclusions, open the door, listen to people's stories, do a little research, think through cause and effect, come join us at End It For Good. Follow along this journey with us. And take the time to lean in because it really is in the hands of people like us what happens to people like Joanne and Nikki.

Because we're voters. We're supporting laws. We're voting for politicians. We're voting for ballot initiatives to legalize or not legalize various substances. for ballot initiatives to legalize or not legalize various substances. And so at the end of the day, we do kind of sit in this role of judge over millions of people's lives because it's people like us that led us into drug prohibition a hundred years ago. And it's people like us that can lead us out of it. Christina, thank you so much for all of your wisdom and nuance and clarity. I'm shocked just how you're

excessively clear in everything you're saying. And I really appreciate that. Where can people find you, your work that you do? I think you just mentioned it in passing right now, but. Yeah, you can find us at enditforgood.com. And on that homepage, there is a TEDx talk that I gave two years ago, which is kind of a condensed version of what we talked about today. So if you're feeling mind blown, like what? What on earth? I got to like think about this some more. You can go watch that.

It's also a great way to introduce this conversation to somebody else. Send the link to this podcast episode or that TEDx talk to somebody else and say, hey, what do you think about this? Let's have a conversation. else and say, hey, what do you think about this? Let's have a conversation. And that's how we get more people thinking whether or not we all end up at the same conclusion is kind of a secondary thing for me. I want people considering people really making thoughtful decisions about what we do with drugs. So you can find me on social media at Christina B. Dent across platforms and End It For Good is on social media as well. And I do a lot of talking about my social media accounts.

I use a lot for conversations like this, question and answers that people send me, thinking through what about this? What about that? What about the moral argument against drug use? Well, okay, what about the moral argument of tearing families apart and causing unnecessary death? Like there's more moral questions here than just

should people use drugs? So yeah, come join me, come join us. We'd love to have more people on. I love the way you think, by the way. That just so resonates with me. Like when people give a quick kind of answer, like maybe you're right, but I'm in my just natural reaction is what about this? What about that? What about like, let's, let's make sure we think through the totality of this whole thing. So thanks for coming on Theology in Raw. You guys check out Christina Dent's work. You have the stats, the info it's in the show notes as well. So thanks so much for being on Theology in Raw. Christina, best of luck to you. Thanks so much, Preston. I appreciate it.