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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is James Gearing and this week
it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show the woman behind End It for Good and
author of Curious, Christina Dent.
Now Christina described herself as a homeschool conservative Christian and it was only in
2014 after becoming foster parents that she began to reframe the way she looked at addiction.
So we discuss a host of topics.
From her journey into fostering, meeting a mother named Joanne that would reframe the
way she looked at mental health, chasing the scream, decriminalization in Portugal, the
prison system, how psychedelics are healing our first responders and military members,
multi-generational trauma and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for
others to find and this is a free library of over 950 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Christina Dent.
Enjoy.
Well, Christina, I want to start by saying two things.
Firstly, thank you to Johan Hari for connecting us and obviously we'll get into the connection
there.
And secondly, I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast.
Thanks so much, James.
It's really great to be here with you.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this afternoon?
I am in Mississippi in the US.
So born and raised here, lived here my whole life in the southeastern part of the country.
Brilliant.
I want to start at the beginning of that life then.
So tell me exactly where you were born and then tell me a little bit about the family
dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
Yeah, I was born in Jackson, Mississippi.
I've lived in the Jackson area my whole life.
I grew up in a wonderful, warm family, great family environment.
My dad worked at a Christian school.
My mom was a stay at home mom.
She homeschooled me and my three older brothers, kindergarten through high school back in the
1980s, which was kind of the beginning of the homeschooling movement in the US.
And she just wanted to spend time with us.
It wasn't like a big anti-world move or anything like that.
She just really thought she would rather be there for education.
And so we ended up doing that.
So we lived in a tiny little house, about 800 square feet, my whole growing up, which
allowed for my dad to work for not very much money at a school and for my mom to be home
with us.
But we had a really warm childhood, wonderful Christian home.
Conservative community that I grew up in.
All of my friends' families were conservative Christians also.
So it was very much the culture that I saw the world through also.
Now you're doing the academics at home.
What about sports and exercise?
What were you doing physically through those ages?
We never did any kind of organized sports.
We played volleyball and basketball every week at my church.
My parents would chaperone and all the kids in the church would come and we would play
together for a couple of hours every weekend.
And a lot of running through the woods around our house.
I grew up in the city, but on some property that our landlord owned.
And so we had a lot of space to kind of roam, ride bikes.
My mom was big on send us outside and don't come in for six, seven, eight hours.
Just be out there building things, building forts in the woods.
We had a, there was an old barn on his, our landlord's property that he let us turn into
a clubhouse, the whole loft of it.
So my dad would go with my brothers like dumpster diving to find remnants of carpet and old
couches and just random things that people were getting rid of.
And they turned the whole loft area into basically a little house that we could use for our clubhouse.
So lots of time, many, many hours went into those kinds of projects.
When you look back at the childhood in, you know, arguably quite a small home, and then
you look at what we are sold as the kind of place that we should be living in 2024, what
are your thoughts?
Yeah, it's interesting because I haven't chosen that life for my own children.
I have three boys.
I don't live in an 800 square foot house.
I live in a 2000 square foot house.
And so I can, I take so much of that as such a great example.
I think a lot of the reason why I'm able to work on the issue that I do today, which
is a controversial issue, and I have a controversial opinion about it and do that very publicly.
I think a lot of that came from seeing my parents make decisions that were different
from other people and realizing, hey, you don't, you don't die if you do something
different from other people.
Like it's really okay to follow what your convictions are.
And even if people don't agree with you, they tend to respect that you're living out
of your values and you're living out of your convictions.
And so, you know, it hasn't been in some ways I've taken the way that I grew up into
my adult life and continue to live in some ways that way.
And yet in other ways, it was a really unique kind of calling that they felt.
As Christians, they felt like it was kind of part of the calling God had given them
was to just live a very simple life.
They gave really generously.
My mom kept journals her whole adult life.
And so all through there is kind of financial information, what things were costing, what
they were giving to, how much my dad was making.
And when you kind of look at the percentage that they were giving to charity, it's pretty
astounding.
So they just really lived out of this different set of values of, you know what?
The big house is not going to make us happy and it's going to add a lot of stress to
our lives.
And we're going to have to have two working parents.
And my mom wanted to be home.
And they just said, you know, we're going to give that up and we're going to live a
much simpler life and focus on the intangibles of family time and living in this, you know,
house that still gave us a lot of yard space because of the land that it was on and really
just leaning into the intangibles.
And they found so much fulfillment in that.
They were very happy.
My dad had two master's degrees.
He could have been making a lot more money.
And yet it really was just this choice for a simple life.
And they never regretted that.
All through my mom's journals are this delight in the life that she has and in the family
that she has.
And, you know, there's certainly times as we grow up that a lot of, you know, six people
in the 800 square feet gets a little dicey sometimes.
But that was a price she was willing to pay for what it was able to give us.
And she used to say, everything I have in this house takes up mental space.
It's something I have to clean.
It's something I have to worry about getting broken.
It's something I have to repair.
And so when you have a space that's that small, you can only fit very few things in it, which
just she felt gave her so much more mental space not to have to be worrying about so
much of those kind of possessions.
And she spent a lot of that time reading classic literature and all kinds of other pursuits.
She was an avid bird watcher and she had time for those things, even homeschooling us.
And she loved that.
Beautiful.
I think it's an important perspective.
I traveled around the world for a year and I had literally a guitar and a backpack and
then I got hired in Japan.
I wish I could remember exactly how many square feet but it was but it was a tiny little apartment,
but very, very efficient.
And I spent 15 months living there and it really reframed between those two things.
What do I actually need?
A couple of pairs of jeans, some board shorts, a guitar, a walkman back then.
And then, yeah, just like you said, I look around and I kind of groan at parts of my
house that we hardly ever inhabit.
It's like, why is this even there?
It's just tax and AC and everything else.
My home is humble compared to what a lot of Americans are actually told we're supposed
to have.
So it is an important conversation in the financial and the mental health conversation.
So what about the addiction side?
Obviously, we're going to get into that.
Did you have any exposure to anyone who was struggling when you were younger?
And then were there any kind of philosophies that were being taught to you back then that
now in 2024, you've kind of reviewed and changed?
Yeah.
I didn't have any personal experience with drug use growing up.
Even when I was in high school, my friends weren't drinking alcohol.
I knew people were and I knew people who did, but they weren't in my kind of inner circle
of friendships.
And so it just was not a part of my personal experience.
I definitely looked down on people who were using anything, whether it was even alcohol
in high school.
I very much had this kind of a perfectionistic personality and learned very quickly sort
of how people pat you on the back.
And I loved that.
So I thought, you know, here I am, be a good girl.
I'm going to make all the right decisions and the adults love me.
And you know, this is how you do well in the world.
And so my lack of kind of personal experience plus my judgmentalness towards other people
who were using whatever the substance may be.
And really, alcohol was about all I had knowledge of.
I mean, I would have been hard pressed to name anybody, you know, who was using much
else than that.
But the messaging around people who were using substances was very clear, even though I cannot
point to a specific instance where I remember being taught a particular way of thinking.
It was very much just part of the cultural messaging.
And now that I'm more aware of it, I still hear that messaging all around me.
We don't even realize that we do it.
But we often use someone struggling with addiction as sort of the far end of, you know, if we're
saying, you know, well, so and so is making some bad decisions, but they're not a junkie.
We do things like that.
We don't even realize it.
It's so much a part of just the terminology of culture where we kind of make comparisons
and how often that negative comparison is made towards somebody who is struggling with
an addiction.
And so I think those kinds of things were very much internalized, along with, you know,
I grew up in the South in a conservative Christian home and culture in the 80s and 90s where
it was moral majority and very much behavior focused, you know, we want to get people to
act right.
And it was very clear that using drugs was definitely not acting right.
And so I picked up a lot of that in the way that I thought about people.
And it took me until my 30s, really until I started this journey of learning after we
became foster parents.
It took me that long to realize that the empathy that I had a lot of in many ways, I always
thought of myself as an empathetic person, but that the empathy was always conditional,
even though I didn't recognize it.
It was conditional for people whose suffering seemed random, suffering that was not brought
on by their own decisions.
You know, somebody gets in a car accident or somebody has cancer or somebody, you know,
loses a parent or a friend's parents divorce, like those kinds of things that were outside
of their control.
I could have a lot of compassion for that and didn't even realize that I was kind of
making these decisions based on what I perceive to be your own, whether you're responsible
or not for the suffering that you are enduring.
And so for people who were using drugs, that was clearly in my mind, a category of, hey,
you're making a bad decision.
And so that empathy just switched off completely.
I could immediately not engage with that at all.
And I really think what I saw in my home is certainly my parents could be judgmental also.
I mean, part of the decisions that they made, there was certainly a part of kind of judging
people who didn't make those same decisions, you know, people who are living in these massive
houses or people who, you know, whatever it was, that certainly came through sometimes
because when you live in 800 square feet, you can hear everything.
So I overheard a lot of conversations of my parents, even if they didn't expect that I
was listening.
But, you know, my dad, when I was growing up, would meet at the local library with a man
named George.
And George had struggled with alcoholism for I have no idea how long.
My whole childhood, I have memories of answering the phone.
And there's George on the other end, always drunk, always slurring, asking to talk to
my dad.
And, you know, I'd put my dad on the phone and every now and then he would go meet George
at the local library and just try to listen and help.
And my dad didn't know anything about alcoholism or addiction or, you know, recovery or anything
like that.
And I don't even know how they got connected.
All I remember is throughout my childhood, I would answer the phone sometimes and George
would be on the other end asking for my dad.
So I saw this consistent showing up for my dad, for somebody who's struggling.
My mom agreed to babysit for a neighbor.
So the street that we lived on, there was a house on either side of us.
And often there was a lot of dysfunction in the people that rented those houses.
And there was a young woman that moved in and had a baby and needed child care.
And my mom agreed to watch the baby for I think it was like a dollar fifty an hour.
And she thought, well, you know, hey, I'll make a little money.
I'll help this mom out.
I know she's in a really tough position.
That turned into this disaster of the mom leaving the baby with us for hours and hours
of unplanned time.
Just wouldn't come home from work to get the baby, et cetera.
So I could see, you know, even there, this from my parents, sometimes I could hear some
judgment, but I was also seeing them try to push into those areas of suffering in other
people's lives and try to be to be a compassionate presence and a support for them.
But it was not enough to really deeply draw me into that.
I very much the the push of kind of black and white thinking that I was already kind
of geared towards.
That's where I went was just it's it's just a lot easier.
It's a lot easier to just categorize people and and move on rather than having to really
sit with this gray area, which is where I think most of life really falls is into this
lots of complexity, lots of nuance, lots of reasons behind the behavior.
And that really is what my journey as a foster parent finally broke through that wall of
black and white thinking and brought me into that gray area.
Well I want to get to that.
But one more area that the phrase has been used so often and in this conversation, I
always go back to parents, maybe sometimes grandparents, because the impact of multi-generational
trauma is glaring.
Now I think that's the next conversation when it comes to mental health is unpacking not
just parents, but grandparents, maybe even further back than that.
And so the phrase they did the best with what they had, I think is a very important one.
You can't judge these generations and be like, why didn't you think about this when we're
thinking with it with the 2024 lens?
However, it's important to understand what happened, reverse engineer it so we can unpack
it.
Where I really struggle in America with being such a faith based country is, and I'll just
take Christianity because that was kind of the route that I was brought up in, is you
have this prophet who was out there amongst the community anointing sex workers and lepers
and all kinds of people.
And yet people learn about the story and then leave their holy buildings and want homeless
moved away from their communities and think that Narcan's a waste of money on drug addicts.
And I'm trying to figure out where is that disconnect because I never really aligned
to one religion, but I kept those core values and it resonated.
These are people, these are human beings that were toddlers once that were giggling and
chasing balls and now they're living under a bridge with a needle in their arm.
They're still human beings.
So when you look back now and not just specifically your church, your family, but at America's,
let's say Christianity for this example, how did we deviate from the actual altruism that
was taught to us in the Bible to this, as you mentioned, this kind of judgmental element
that actually has done the polar opposite of many of these prophets teachings?
It is such a good question.
I spent a lot of time thinking about that in my own life of how I was in church.
I was not just sitting in a pew, but reading my Bible, studying my Bible in junior high,
in high school, in young adult life.
I was part of Bible studies.
I was part of really trying to understand how to live faithfully.
A big part of my own journey of seeing that I didn't know everything and I wasn't quite
living as faithfully as I thought was becoming part of a church that was a very intentionally
multi-ethnic church in my early 20s when my husband and I got married.
Over the years that we were there, that was a really transformative experience just being
in proximity and being in relationships with people who had different upbringings than
I did, different views of the world, different politics.
We were aligned on this one issue of loving Jesus and that's why we were there and wanting
to come and be part of this community of people who were following him.
And yet, seeing so much that was just culture that I had thought was gospel was actually
part of Christianity and realizing, wow, there is a lot here that I think of as normal that
maybe isn't so normal, that maybe is just cultural things that I took in.
Timothy King wrote a book called Addiction Nation and one of the things that he talks
about in there, and he's a Christian as well, he talks about in there this long history
in Christianity of scapegoating, of kind of through the years, through the centuries,
it will be different things, but there are, for a long time it has been drugs that has
been kind of the thing that we, it goes beyond Christianity as well, but really in a culture
when there's something that you don't like and you don't want to be there or something
you're afraid of, that you are finding sort of an easy thing to blame for that.
And so drugs is an easy thing to blame for all sorts of things and when we see the external
suffering and the external chaos in someone's life, it's easy to just pin that back on
the drugs or bad decisions or whatever and we can sort of move on instead of saying,
wait, like you said, what happened that brought a person who used to be playing and laughing
in their yard with their friends to now being under the bridge with the needle in their
arm?
What was the trajectory that led to such a different outcome in their life?
So I feel simultaneously convicted as a Christian who still has so much learning and growth
to do in my own fidelity to what I say that I believe in my own really living out the
values that Jesus lived and brought to us and also looking back and saying, how did
I not see the disconnect there?
And I would say, I definitely think Christians can have different views on some of the policy
sides of what do we do with drugs and that sort of thing.
I don't think there's only one approach that you can support.
But in terms of the overarching thought process of how do we look at people who are suffering
and struggling and how can we more frequently see them as Jesus sees them, which is what
we say that we believe is that He came for everyone, that He loves everyone, that every
person is made in the image of God.
So I feel both.
I feel both kind of uncertain of why I couldn't see that earlier, convicted that I still have
so many blind spots now, wanting to help other Christians think more deeply about how we
think about the value of life and where that value ends.
We wouldn't say it ends anywhere, but our actions sometimes belie a very different sort
of functional belief about that.
It's something that is continually on my mind because my faith is such a core part of who
I am and yet I'm shocked at my own ability to be blind to the things that aren't consistent
with it.
And I even think now, it's so easy to look back on previous generations and go, what
were they thinking?
How could they not see?
And we see that all through.
Look at slavery, look at Jim Crow, look at women's rights, all kinds of things and go,
gosh, how could they be so blind?
And yet that also means that us right now have lots of blind spots that in 20 or 30
years, people are going to say, how could you not see?
And I have no idea.
Maybe it's going to be my 2000 square foot house and Christians in 30 years are going
to be living in much smaller homes and giving away like my parents did, so much of their
income.
And they're going to say, isn't this what scripture says?
Don't lay up for yourself treasures on earth, but in heaven and invest in future things.
It might be.
So I am right there in the wrestling of how can I be more faithful?
How can I try to see what I might be blind to?
And how can I have grace for where people are and also be trying to dig deeply into
where we've lost our way?
Well, speaking of altruism, you mentioned about the foster care story kind of being
a pivotal moment in your life.
So kind of walk me through your mindset prior and then the metamorphosis that happened through
that experience.
Yes, and my husband and I in 2014 became foster parents.
And that process for us was that was not a lifelong dream that I had had.
We had talked about adoption, but we had never talked about foster care.
To me, that sounded very messy, very local, very uncertain.
And I thought I just I don't want any part of that.
I want to just adopt a child from somewhere where there's a very clear kind of break in
relationship from previous to now.
And we can move on from there.
I did not know anything about childhood trauma, about bonding, about all of the things that
are part of adoption, even if it is an adoption from birth.
And so we became foster parents really as a in between while we were kind of figuring
out the path of adoption.
We thought, well, we'll foster for a little while while we're figuring out kind of what
this adoption path is going to what that path is going to be for us.
So we became foster parents and we had one child placed with us who ended up staying
with us permanently.
We adopted him.
He was never able to return to his birth family.
And about 18 months after he came to us, because he came as a baby.
So I said absolutely not to any more children while he was in his baby stage.
That was I was I had my hands full.
I was homeschooling our other two boys and it was a it was a busy time.
But when he was about 18 months old, we got a call for another baby.
And my husband called me and he said, Christina, I just got a call for another baby.
And I really feel like we're supposed to say yes.
And I think, well, that's well and good for you.
You're sitting at your office in the quiet 40 hours a week while you're at home trying
to homeschool these two older boys and raise this toddler and keep food on the table and
clothes on everybody that are clean.
And I did not feel at all that we needed to say yes to this baby.
So I tried not to shut him down.
I tried to just ask a few questions.
How old is this child?
Well, he didn't know.
And how long were they anticipating this placement?
He didn't know.
And so I said, OK, I'll I'll call the social worker and get some more information and we'll
go from there.
So I talked with her and she said it should be a short term placement.
His mom seems really motivated to regain custody.
But he was removed because she was using drugs while she was pregnant.
And so he's being released from the hospital after his birth.
And he needs a foster family.
And I asked her when that would be needed.
And she said this afternoon in just a couple of hours and we ended up saying yes.
And Beckham came to our house that afternoon straight from the hospital.
He had been born premature and so he was five pounds, nine ounces and just this adorable
little little bundle.
And a few days after that, I took him to his first visit with his mom at the local child
welfare office and popped his car seat out of my van.
I had not met her yet at this point, turned around in the parking lot to walk in.
And here comes this woman running across the parking lot, weeping, which runs over to me
and just starts kissing this baby while I'm holding his car seat.
And I feel very awkward.
I'm not sure what to do.
I was not expecting this at all.
And so we walk into the child welfare office and in my mind, my first response to that
is just suspicion that this is a ploy.
She's just trying to get me to put in a good word with the social worker.
It's not real.
I couldn't formulate at that point why that was so important to me to believe.
But what I realized in reflection is that everything I believed about people like her
hinged on that not being real.
It hinged on her being a bad person who didn't care about her son, who was not a mom like
me because she was using drugs while she was pregnant.
But at the time, I just thought, this just feels really uncomfortable.
So she had one hour of visitation with him.
She came back or I came back to pick him up.
And she's sitting in the little tiny visitation room at the child welfare office.
There's an old couch in there that spans one whole wall.
It's just this tiny little room.
And she's sitting in the corner on the edge of that couch and has Beckham sleeping on
her shoulder.
And she's just sitting there with her eyes closed, just enjoying this one hour that she
gets to spend with him.
Not scrolling on her phone, not doing anything, just really trying to enjoy the time.
And that stuck in my mind along with many of these other experiences with her.
She left for inpatient drug treatment.
And I had agreed that she could have my phone number and call me once a day and check in
on Beckham.
And she would.
Her name is Joanne.
So Joanne would call once a day.
She would ask me anything I could tell her about him.
And then she would ask me to put her on speakerphone.
And she would sing to him over the phone.
It was just this powerful experience because the more I got to know her, the more I realized
all of these things are real and true.
This is a mom who deeply loves her son, who wants to be there for him, who wants to parent
him.
And she's struggling with this health crisis.
And that's what I began to see that it was, was not a moral crisis.
It wasn't a character crisis.
It was this really complex health crisis that she had struggled with for 20 years by the
time that I met her.
And that started me on this learning journey because I was finally able to really believe
what was true, which is that she is a mom like me.
She loves her son just as much as I love my sons.
And so when I was able to recognize that, I had to start putting that together with
the other things I believed and it didn't fit because what I had supported up to that
point was people like her needed to be in jail and they didn't need to be with their
children and they needed to be punished because they were bad people.
And so that started this learning journey of, wait a second, have we misunderstood something
about the nature of addiction?
And that turned into this much bigger learning journey about, have we misunderstood this
whole issue of drugs and how to reduce harm from them?
Well, as I mentioned before, Johan was the one that connected us.
And I heard him, I think initially on, I think it was a Joe Rogan show and I was driving
long going, this is everything.
And ironically, before that, my mom who'd moved to Portugal had told me, hey, do you
know about what they did about drugs and decriminalization?
So I went, when I was visiting my family one time up to Lisbon and sat with Zhao Gu Lao
and interviewed him about what they did and heard about how they reframed the way they
looked at addiction and they had this horrendous opioid epidemic from one of the wars.
And I think at the time they had the worst addiction.
I always forget if it's Europe or even greater than that, but certainly in Europe.
And by simply looking at this as a mental health issue rather than a criminal issue,
they took away their kind of war on addicts.
They absolutely had a war on dealers and smugglers as continues to this day, but they introduced
simultaneously with the budget, addiction counseling, job creation, mental health counseling,
less than 10 years, they had gone from the worst addiction to the lowest at that point,
I believe.
So, you know, and then I sat with him virtually this time, just a few weeks ago and kind of
revisited it.
And the actual philosophy is beautiful.
But again, politics come in, some of the financial support had been pulled away and they immediately
saw some of the issues creeping back.
So again, they're going to re bolster it now.
So that was a huge aha moment for me from what intrinsically made perfect sense.
But now you had these people proving it in another country and then Johan articulating
it so beautifully in his book, Chasing the Scream.
So what was your kind of journey to discovery from the origin of drug prohibition to where
you sat 10 years ago?
Yeah, it felt like being kind of strapped into a rocket and shot into outer space, basically.
It was a, you know, it is not comfortable rethinking something that you've believed
for a long time.
It's why we don't do it very often.
It is not fun to be confronted with something that challenges a deeply held belief.
And in conservative Christian culture, the way that drugs have been positioned so deeply
as a moral issue, it has sort of set them side by side with something like abortion,
where very different issue, but the same sense that the weight and the morality and the what
is at stake if we change anything to sort of begin to think about, you know, pragmatic
solutions and that sort of thing.
I felt that very much.
I remember having a specific memory after I had started learning Johan's book, Chasing
the Scream was one of the things that I read on my own learning journey that was super
helpful to me to kind of really understand that big picture.
But I remember having this moment of thinking, wait a second, this approach of kind of ending
prohibition, moving back to health centered approaches to drug markets and drug use, can
I even support that and be a Christian?
This feels like somehow I'm giving up because it has been so deeply tied to this issue of
morality.
It took me a long time to pull those pieces apart because even a book like Chasing the
Scream was super helpful, but Johan is not a Christian and he doesn't come from my sort
of political value system either.
And so there was a part of me that I got to the end of that book.
It's part of the reason why I wrote a book, Curious, which is my learning journey, because
I wanted to provide that kind of extra piece to people who are maybe coming from a conservative
perspective or are people who are people of faith that how the conclusions that he comes
to in that book based on kind of the research are also compatible no matter where you're
coming from on the religious or political spectrum.
And that was important to me.
So I started learning and it was kind of this beginning learning because of Johan and wanting
to know how we can help kids in foster care like Beckham and people like her.
And that opened up this whole other side of beginning to learn about drug markets and
that when they're pushed underground, they increase crime and violence and they introduce
contamination and lack of quality control.
And so that part of it was even harder to rethink because I remember the first time
that somebody asked me, do you think drugs should be legal?
I literally left the room.
I thought it was so insane.
I couldn't even conceive of how somebody could entertain that idea and be a normal person.
It just seemed crazy to me.
Now that's also, I would say, probably the worst approach to asking somebody to kind
of enter a conversation about this issue because I didn't know anything about it.
I had no idea what that question really even meant or what the cost is of the current approach
of prohibition and criminalization.
I had no none of that context at all.
And so all it did was make me angry.
And then a few years later, I started this curiosity of learning journey, trying to understand
and started really my goal was, wait a second, how can we reduce harm?
And I think that took me a while to figure out what was happening there, which what was
happening is this shift in my thinking from this is a moral issue.
So there's no great area here to thinking about the actual pragmatic outcomes of policy
and what they were, the harm it was actually causing.
I didn't know anything about underground markets.
It's a concept you can explain in three minutes, but I just hadn't been exposed to that.
I didn't take an economics class.
I didn't understand about that.
And so as I started learning about that and realizing the pragmatic harm of how many people
are dying from contaminated drugs, how many people are living in communities that are
wrecked by violent crime from the underground drug market, how many consumers are sitting
in jails and prisons, not because they hurt anyone else or committed any other crime,
but just because they were in possession of a drug that we have labeled illegal.
So as I started to kind of rack up those harms, I started wrestling with, wait a second, this
is doing so much harm.
Is it really the moral position to keep holding this policy perspective?
Because it began to feel like, I actually wonder if the moral high ground is on the
other side, where we look at how do we actually save lives and help people get the help that
they need if they are struggling with an addiction, but we don't increase the amount of crime
and overdose and family destabilization that comes from the criminal justice system.
And so that was a real wrestling for me and just realizing that just because something
might not be healthy to do doesn't mean it should be illegal.
Just because something can harm you doesn't mean it's illegal.
Even if you think something is religiously wrong, you look at the 10 Commandments in
the Bible, only two of them are criminally illegal, murder and theft, and the rest of
them we teach in other ways.
We don't use the law to try to force people not to covet or force people even not to commit
adultery.
We don't put people in jail for that.
So I started kind of pulling these things apart.
Those were all things I had never thought about before.
The culture I grew up in, the idea I had was, again, I don't remember anybody teaching
me this, but my thought process was I think the goal is that we sort of make sin illegal.
We're kind of on this trying to make the culture more moral, and the way we do that is through
the law.
And it really took this learning journey to begin to pull that apart and say, no, that's
not the role of government.
That's not the way that we teach values.
And there are real costs to using the law to try to teach something that it is not designed
to teach.
I think what's so haunting about the origin story of drug prohibition is it comes at the
very end of the complete failure of alcohol prohibition.
And the only reason we know Al Capone's name is because of alcohol prohibition and the
horrendous crime.
So then you have Harry Anslinger trying to justify his job, screaming racist because
of his own mental ill health, and then he starts Reef of Madness, and that's the beginning.
My perspective as a firefighter paramedic is in the 2000s, I get to see the impact of
drug prohibition.
Now we're talking about 60 years later, and the homelessness and the addiction and the
gang membership and the overdoses and the sex work and all these other things, that
are all directly or indirectly a product of this ridiculous prohibition law.
And what's interesting is if all the police officers, for example, I've interviewed, 90,
95% of them have said the war on drugs is an epic failure because even if you do end
up taking someone off a street corner, it's like whack-a-mole, another one just shows
up and fills the place.
In fact, sometimes you can start a turf war again and more people die.
And we look at the science that's touted to us more in modern day and the sample size
might be 14 people.
Well when it comes to the war on drugs, it's a 100-year longitudinal study with arguably
billions of subjects.
And so we know it's not working.
I mean, I would talk about this all the time.
Why is it that there aren't gangs and homelessness everywhere and addicts everywhere on the streets
of Oslo or Reykjavik?
They're human beings too, but they've got slightly different ways of looking at society
and systems.
Same with Portugal.
So this is such an important lens today for us to have the humility to take a step back
and go, it is not working.
Our police officers look like they're going to Fallujah now.
We have gangs and this horrendous thing at the border and that's just economics.
That's supply and demand.
If you have addicts in America, we're empowering the underworld in Mexico.
So for me, that was a huge aha.
This is the enormous elephant in the room for not just the addiction conversation, but
the crime conversation as well.
Yeah.
I talk about it sometimes like it's a blanket that covers the world.
Think of it kind of like a Gotham City.
It's something we're all breathing.
We've breathed it our whole lives.
We don't even recognize until we take a little time to learn that the world we live in is
marked by drug prohibition, whether you use drugs or not.
You live in a world where the level of crime and violence is much higher than it would
be without prohibition.
We live in a world where the rates of death among people who use drugs are much higher
than they would be without the contamination and lack of dosing that prohibition brings.
We live in a world where in my home state of Mississippi, one in four adults has a criminal
conviction of some kind on their record.
Not all of that is drug related, but drugs is the easiest way that people enter our prison
system.
It's the number one offense at sentencing for people who are entering prison in Mississippi.
We have the highest imprisonment rate in the country.
In the country that has the highest imprisonment rate in the world, if the drug war worked,
it should be working right here in Mississippi.
And yet it's not.
Our rates of illegal drug use have doubled in the last 20 years.
That's true here in Mississippi.
It's true across the United States.
So when we look at just outcomes, it is a disaster and it is so much a part of our world
that we don't have a cultural memory anymore of what it could be like without that.
We've lost that vision of the world that prohibition is a really new idea in the history
of the world.
I mean, this has only been just over 100 years that we have been experimenting with this
idea that you can ban drugs and you can incarcerate consumers and that that's somehow going to
fix all of the problems.
And instead, we've just become accustomed to living with the problems and we keep blaming
drugs for the problems when really it is drug policy that is creating most of the problems.
Certainly there are some problems with substance use itself, but the way we've chosen to handle
it has made dealing with the real problems much, much harder.
It's made them much, much worse because you now have places where you think about what
creates risk factors in a child's life for them to become addicted to drugs.
The drug war creates those risk factors in children's lives.
Living up in an unsafe neighborhood is one of the risk factors.
Well, prohibition creates lots of unsafe neighborhoods because of the amount of crime that it creates.
You have things like being in the foster care system is another risk factor for developing
an addiction.
Well, the way that we have demonized people who use substances has created lots of children
entering foster care here in Mississippi for years and years simply a positive drug test.
It could be a positive marijuana test.
That was all you needed to remove a child from their parent's custody.
You didn't need evidence of abuse or neglect.
Just testing positive was evidence enough.
So how many children have we created those risk factors for?
And then when they become addicted, we say, oh my goodness, here's another person who
just is making those bad choices.
And the way we have approached this has created so much harm, many children now losing parents
to overdose or brothers and sisters to overdose.
Prohibition is this trauma production machine on so many fronts.
And then that trauma increases the likelihood that the people who experience it are going
to use drugs and become addicted to them.
And so we just keep going down this same path and the harm continues expounding, compounding,
and we just continue to go down it a little further, hoping that at some point we're going
to kind of win.
And I say this in my book and curious that I really think this term drug war has been
really harmful for us to understand why it doesn't work because wars can be won.
If you have enough manpower, if you put enough money into it, if you've got enough tanks
and guns and whatever, you can forcibly win a war, but you can't win the drug war.
It's not a war.
It is a fight against economics, which is an unwinnable war.
It can't be won.
It is not something that enough resources can possibly be used to win because as long
as we have demand, we will have supply and we can choose who is supplying, whether that's
legal or illegal pathways.
But as long as that demand is there and we are creating more demand by the trauma that
comes through this criminal justice approach, as long as it's there, we're going to have
people that choose to use substances and some of them will develop addictions and we are
right back where we started with trying to help people heal.
They need healing, not more punishment.
One of the most judgmental things I hear thrown about when it comes to the issue in the states
at the moment is, oh, it's those broken homes.
I was like, well, what do you think is breaking these homes?
Whether it was addiction, whether it was crime associated with addiction, how many families
do you hear that either aunties and uncles or grandparents are raising kids and there's
that multi-generational trauma, just like you said.
By putting the empathy and compassion that most holy doctrine actually teaches back into
this issue and understanding that people are hurting and they're filling it with whatever.
We're talking about something that's deemed illegal, but alcoholism is rife in this country,
in my profession and that's perfectly fine.
In fact, some drunk guy just tried to kick in my wife's door the other day.
He was the wrong apartment building and they just brushed it off.
Oh, well, he was just drunk.
They literally put him to bed.
The police officers scared the hell out of my wife.
Had that been someone on an illicit drug, he would have been carted off.
That's how little we care about the massive alcohol problem that's facing us, staring
us in the eye.
The pandemic shut the world down, but God forbid, you got to give everyone an alcohol
still.
There's so much hypocrisy in this conversation and we have to break the cycle, but it's
going to take all of us to stop that next domino from falling.
Yeah, I think when I think about alcohol, I'm so glad you brought that up because we
were hosting an event in North Mississippi a couple of years ago and a woman came out
to me afterwards and she said, I appreciate all of this.
This is helping me think differently about drugs and how we approach them and how we
could get better outcomes.
She said, but it just makes me sad how little we take seriously alcohol misuse because her
dad had struggled with alcoholism her whole childhood and was an elder in their church,
in a conservative Christian church.
She said, either people don't realize it and the ones who do just sort of turn a blind
eye.
It's just kind of like, well…
It's almost like we've relied on the law.
We don't really want to address the very difficult deep roots of why people's substance
use is so problematic and chaotic.
What's the underlying cause in their life?
What's the thing that they need to deal with?
How can we help them deal with that so that the substance is not causing so much problem?
Instead, we've just relied on the law.
We say, well, if you're using some illegal drug, we just focus on that.
We shouldn't be breaking the law.
It's bad because you're breaking the law.
Then alcohol is legal.
We kind of just say, well, I don't know.
Let's just look the other way and not really deal with it.
Meanwhile, families are really suffering.
I think we need to stop relying on the law to give us some reason to tell people not
to use drugs.
We know we can teach people not to use substances like we have with tobacco and cigarettes.
We haven't criminalized that.
We've educated people.
We've incentivized them to make healthier choices through better insurance rates, through
making it harder to find places to smoke cigarettes.
We've increased the number of people making healthy choices around tobacco without using
the criminal justice system.
We can do that with other substances.
We can do that with alcohol by recognizing that a lot of people who drink do have a problem
with their drinking.
We need to address that more fully and to address the use of illegal substances as the
same thing that it is, which is this very complex health crisis.
Instead of just offloading the crisis as a criminal justice issue, well, the real issue
is that they're breaking the law.
No.
The real issue, if they're struggling with an addiction, is whatever that deep pain in
their life is that's driving their need to numb the way that they feel.
It's the easy way out to just say, let's just make it illegal.
We really don't have to deal with it.
We can just say, don't do it because it's not illegal.
If people do, we can say, well, you shouldn't be doing it because it's illegal.
I think we're taking the easy way out on both fronts.
We just don't want to deal with the very difficult realities of why people change the way that
they feel.
Why do they not want to be present fully in their own life?
How can we help build communities that are much more open where people can admit the
struggles that they have, where they can find people to walk with them through whatever
healing journey they need for however long that might take?
That I think is a big area where the church can really, whatever faith practice it is,
whatever community or group it might be, can really play a huge role because people are
lonely.
There are so many people.
You see these studies out now.
It's like how many people don't even have one person that they say they could rely on
if they had a crisis.
That's just tragic.
We are in need of community.
It's how we flourish.
If we can begin to shift our thinking towards how do we build communities where people can
be known and accepted and loved and supported and walked with, that's how we're going to
deal with the addiction crisis that we're in, not by punishing people more and hoping
that the adult version of a spanking is going to be the thing that turns their life around.
I've been talking about this now for about eight years.
Again, that was the beginning of my, not so much about the way I viewed addiction because
I've always had a pretty empathetic view to that, but certainly understanding behind the
curtain.
Again, we see behind the curtain and the ripple effects and the trauma that's created.
Again, the devolution of law enforcement, the fact that they're blamed for trying to
work in an environment that we've just destroyed.
One of the big ironies, speaking to a lot of special forces and SEALs and those kind
of people, is you start hearing, oh, MDMA and psilocybin and some of these other so-called
air quotes, illegal drugs are actually healing first responders and military members, but
they're having to go overseas to heal from the things that they did here in the United
States of America or for the United States.
There's that complete irony there.
Again, you look at the way that Portugal did it.
When you create decriminalization, for example, you have to pour all the money into the solutions.
As Johan said, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety.
The opposite of addiction is connection.
You have to be able to fill that void in these people that are struggling.
Now, as we've progressed a bit further, I'm seeing a huge resistance from, I'm assuming,
the pharmaceutical companies fighting against psilocybin, MDMA, CBD, all these plant-based
or very therapeutic compounds that are working.
They are working and they're being kept from the men and women and arguably children that
need them, that can use these plants or these compounds to actually heal their trauma and
then thrive in society.
What are you seeing from any kind of area at all as far as the resistance to this decriminalization
conversation from a self-serving perspective?
I think a lot of it is there are a lot of self-serving perspectives.
There's a lot of people who make a lot of money off of the current approach, whether
that is in the prison system.
I think it is much too short-sighted to say private prisons.
Most prisons are not private prisons, but all of them operate with the same need for
budget money, the same need for services of various sorts.
There's all kinds of businesses that provide phone service and uniforms and food and all
kinds of things to prisons.
It's not just private prisons that are incentivized to keep our incarceration numbers high.
There are lots of businesses that are incentivized and then are lobbying to keep those numbers
high.
On the other side, there's a lot of incentive to keep different types of treatment out of
the hands of people.
When you think about something like PTSD, and this is a newer issue area for me because
I was on the psychedelic therapy front because I was convinced of the failure of drug prohibition
at large.
I was already working on inviting people to book discussions on Chasing the Scream.
I was founding End It for Good, the nonprofit that I still work for today.
I was doing all of that before I ever heard that there was such a thing as psychedelic
therapy because I was just convinced that prohibition at all was just very damaging
to the whole world, not just to my local community.
I was introduced to that conversation by a man who sent me a Facebook message and said,
hey, I saw your TEDx talk.
A friend of mine at church shared it with me because he thought I would think it was
interesting.
He doesn't live in Mississippi.
He's in another state.
He said, this is my story.
He's a Christian.
He was working at a church at the time, father of four children, him and his wife, wonderful
marriage.
But he struggled with debilitating depression to the point where he was worried that he
was going to take his own life.
It got so bad, he just started Googling anything that could potentially help.
They thought they had tried everything.
He started learning about psilocybin for the treatment of depression.
He talked with his pastor and the pastor said, I think it's okay to try.
If you feel like that's the right thing to do.
His wife was up for it.
He ordered some mushroom spores and he grew them in his basement.
This is a very conservative guy.
He says, I was desperate at that point.
I was desperate.
I wanted to be there to see my children grow up and I was afraid that I wouldn't be if
I didn't find something soon.
He took the mushrooms and experienced a psychedelic experience on them, had people with him.
His wife was there.
I think his pastor was one of the people maybe who was there with him also.
The depression was gone for the next nine months, just gone.
It was unbelievable to him that something could have that effect.
About nine months later, he started to feel it coming back again.
For the last several years, about every nine months, he said usually his wife is the one
who says, I kind of feel like you're headed down again, feel like you're struggling again.
He'll take mushrooms about every nine months.
He says, it's now the thing that has helped me to be fully present and able to live and
able to continue for him in ministry, doing a lot of ministry things that he does.
I'm reading this.
I had no idea about this at the time.
This was a couple of years ago.
Thinking, what on earth?
This is crazy.
Is this real?
I asked him about that.
He starts sending me all of these articles and studies and videos on YouTube and all
this stuff about psychedelic therapy.
Just continuing to learn.
My mind is just blown by the potential.
Certainly they don't work for everyone.
They certainly can have adverse effects.
You need to be sure that you don't have the risk factors that would make it particularly
risky for you to use them.
Some of them can kill you if you don't use them appropriately like Ibogaine.
You need to be under the care of people who know what they're doing.
That really shocked me.
It was another piece of, to your point about who doesn't want people to have access to
those things.
When we think about something like PTSD, which now research is showing that MDMA can have
significant impact on PTSD and can actually, for some people who use it, they no longer
qualify as having the diagnosis of PTSD.
We think about PTSD management.
It's not management.
It really is cure for some people.
Well, as you can imagine, people who are making drugs for people with PTSD to take for the
rest of their lives, that's not a good thing if it can be actually cured rather than you
just need to continue taking prescriptions of something for the rest of your life.
I'm not one who's big on conspiracies or anything like that, but you can follow the
money in most of life and see that what you think of as maybe a moral conviction is sometimes
really a financial conviction that is being sold as something else.
Certainly here on this whole issue of drugs.
I'm one too that feels this tension between pharmaceutical companies because if we don't
want people buying drugs on the street and we see that opening some sort of legal pathway
is going to be the best path to reduce harm, well, somebody is going to be making money
from that legal pathway.
We can't demonize everyone.
We can't demonize the illegal market and the legal market because then we're stuck with
no solution.
I think of it as responsible regulation.
How can we have some responsible regulations but open those markets up where it's not just
one company that's got a patent and nobody else can have access to the product, but we
actually offer people what could really help them.
For some people, psychedelic therapy is absolutely life-saving, life-transforming.
I've never used a psychedelic, but I absolutely believe people should have access to make
whatever choices they feel like could help improve their lives.
In some instances, save their lives.
That is tragic to me that we have made it so difficult for people to even know that
other options exist.
Well, there's an irony as well when you think about what you would imagine a classic drug
dealer would do to a potential junkie, use that term again, someone that's trying to
get hooked.
First one is free.
Well, what happened during the Oxycontin crisis?
The first one was free.
These companies are doing exactly the same thing and arguably prescription meds were
the precursor to the opioid epidemic that we're seeing now if you look at the pill mills.
There is that element of, yeah, if you give these organizations too much power, these
corporations, should I say, they'll abuse it the same way as the crack dealer on the
corner.
Ultimately, that's the same practice, the predatory practice.
Regulation is absolutely a thing.
I think one of the real issues is if it's a plant, leave it as a plant.
Don't develop a synthetic version and then say no one can sell it but you.
Go find something else to make.
You know what I mean?
If it's CBD, leave it alone.
Let the best CBD growers develop the best tinctures and allow them to sell it holistically.
This is the other issue I see.
I want to get to the nonprofits.
I know we're getting close to the end of the time.
If you were queen for a day and you could move the chess pieces and change everything,
what would be the dynamic that you would want to use to try and move the needle back to
mental and physical health in this country?
I would want to start shifting resources from the money that we spend on enforcement of
drug possession right now, moving that to how can we use that for helping people get
the help that they need who are struggling with an addiction.
People say, well, I don't want to give more tax money.
Let's not talk about more.
Let's just talk about shifting the resources we've already allocated and using them more
effectively.
Shifting away from enforcement towards more better mental health treatment including emerging
therapies like psychedelic therapy.
And also beginning to shift markets.
Now market shifting is really difficult to do.
It's very painful to roll back failed policy on drugs.
So you see with cannabis.
Some states have implemented legal markets much more effectively than other states have.
Some states have technically legal markets, but the regulations are so tight and the taxes
are so high that legal businesses can't even function.
People are just buying from the underground market.
So there is this need to be able to experiment with different kinds of policies and see what
works in various places.
I'm not one who would just say, well, open the doors and just let people buy whatever
they want to.
I don't think that is healthy.
And because prohibition has been around for so long, we don't know yet what the best regulatory
models are for various substances.
And they should be different just like they are today for different substances.
We have prescription models, pharmacy models, on-site models like a bar for alcohol.
We have take-home models.
There's already different regulatory structures that should be based on the risk factor of
a particular drug and how we can reduce the risks of that particular drug.
And there's going to be some trial and error in there figuring that out.
But I think the sooner we begin that process of trial and error on other substances, the
better it will be.
And the first way to do that, I think, is to open a pathway for people already addicted
to opioids to be able to receive them under the care of a doctor.
There is just nothing healthy about somebody going to the street to buy a contaminated
drug that they're much more likely to die from an overdose because they can't dose it appropriately.
So in the short term, we can allow people to come back under the oversight of health
care and receive opioids that are at least a known quantity and potency and they can
be dosed appropriately.
And also begin that process of moving markets back legally, figuring out what those best
regulatory structures are, and beginning to develop the social norms that we have lost
around other kinds of substance use.
So because it has been pushed underground for so long, we don't have the kinds of social
norms for something like cocaine use that we do for something like alcohol use, where
you're legally allowed to drink at 9 a.m.
It's not socially acceptable to drink at 9 a.m.
And most people don't because it is not part of our cultural understanding of what's appropriate
with alcohol.
Now, is there a lot of harm from alcohol?
Yes.
But we at least have some social norms around that.
We have been very effective at changing social norms around cigarette smoking.
And that has very effectively decreased the number of people who are smoking.
So we can help people make healthy choices and we can help society have healthier outcomes
through influence, not enforcement.
And I think that's what we need to begin thinking about on the policy front as well as on the
culture front of how do we allow people to access a substance legally and really honestly
teach people about the risks and make it where it is not celebrated, where we don't want
everybody using cocaine and heroin.
We want to minimize use, but allow those markets to operate in some form of legal way where
we don't have all of the harms of prohibition, plus all of the harms of the substances.
When people talk about Vancouver and some of these other places, oh, they tried it.
It was an epic failure.
It's not apples to apples at all.
They tried a piecemeal version the same way as Obamacare was nothing like National Health
back in England.
It was just a part of it.
So if you decriminalize but don't put in addiction counseling, job creation, et cetera, you're
not solving the issue.
So I think this is the first thing.
The second thing when you're asked about legalizing drugs, and I like the decriminalization model,
they think, oh, you just go in the store and buy.
Like, no, you can't just go into your grocery store and buy PCP.
It's not how it works.
But if you're caught with PCP, you get educated on all the resources that are available to
you.
You get told that you're not going to have a criminal record.
Therefore, the chances of getting employed are a lot higher.
And then most importantly, with the law enforcement model, if you're not arresting addicts all
day, the legal system frees up, the prisons open up, and the number of officers that can
chase all the real horrible people of the world now have magnified.
So you've helped everyone and every single chain from the civilians themselves all the
way through to the prisons.
Yes, absolutely.
And we look at the amount of violent crime in the United States that is never solved.
There's never an arrest made in it.
It's almost 50% of violent crime that there's never an arrest made.
So when we think about the allocation of resources, like you were just talking about for law enforcement,
and how we think about what actually keeps our communities safer, we know that the number
one reason that people will not commit crime in the first place is if they believe that
they'll be caught.
It's not how much time they're going to spend behind bars.
Nobody has any idea what the sentencing statutes are for the thing they're about to do.
So if you say, well, we'll increase the penalty from 10 years to 20 years or 20 years to 50
years, that doesn't impact people's choice to commit a crime.
What does impact it is whether or not they believe they'll be caught.
So can we stop allocating so much of our resources to policing this drugs?
And we have, in America, there's one in 10 adults that's used an illegal drug recently.
That's like government data.
So any random person you stopped on the street, you've got a one in 10 chance that they might
be in possession of an illegal drug.
So in some ways, it's an easier type of policing because when you have a crime that was committed,
somebody stole something, there's one person you're looking for who did that crime.
That's a lot harder to find that person than it is to stop a random person who you have
a one in 10 chance of discovering has committed a criminal act by being in possession of a
drug.
But when you look at community safety, are we most wanting for justice to be done for
people who have had a crime committed against them, whether that's murder, rape, assault,
theft, crimes that are serious that we want people to be held accountable for?
I think it's really tragic that we're at a 50% arrest rate for crimes like that where
there is a victim waiting for justice and yet we have here in Mississippi drug possession
being the biggest reason, the most people heading into prison on a possession charge.
Sometimes those are pled down certainly.
So I think we really have to think about what is important to us on the public safety front.
What's actually going to make our communities safer and what's actually going to incentivize
people not to commit crime in the first place, which is believing that they're going to
be caught if they go assault someone or if they go steal something.
And right now, very few of them are on theft in particular property crimes have a very,
very low arrest rate.
You're far more likely not to be arrested than arrested if you commit a property crime
of some sort.
So I think most of the public probably doesn't realize how many of the resources are going
into drug policing and how many of the crimes are remaining unsolved.
And I think that I don't blame law enforcement for that.
I think that is a, they are responding to the incentives in front of them.
We have given lots of incentives culturally and monetarily to law enforcement to police
drug crimes.
And if we want more resources to be spent on solving violent crime, then we need to
incentivize that.
Speaking of becoming part of the solution, I want to get to the nonprofit, but just before
we do, you mentioned about Joanne and Beckham at the beginning.
Talk to me about where they're at now.
And then I heard you speaking again on the PUD podcast, you mentioned Nikki as well.
So that kind of contrast between those two stories, I think really illustrates what we've
discussed for the last hour.
Yeah.
So Joanne today is doing amazingly well.
Beckham is eight years old now and she's been sober since he was a baby, which is really
shocking.
We went to his one year old birthday party and I tell that story in the book and I walk
in and we're with family and there's some of the nurses from the NICU came, her social
worker from when Beckham was in foster care was there.
These people from this year of her life and I was sitting across from one of her family
members and her family member looked at me and said, can you believe that we are here?
Can you believe that this has actually happened?
And for me, I've only been part of her life for a year and I've only gotten to see the
positive side of it.
Her addiction for the 20 years prior to that was before I knew her.
And so her family though has been with her for that whole time, so frustrated, wanting
to pull their hair out, very strange relationships, just chaos in her life for so long.
And she was able to find recovery and able to parent her son and is now working at the
treatment center that she got sober at.
She works there part time.
She works at a drug court part time.
She's opening a sober living home for moms with children to give people who are in a
similar situation help.
She started a nonprofit.
I mean, she's just an incredible person.
She is, she's unbelievable.
That's not always the pathway.
It's not that everyone has a Joanne story.
Some people, just recently I met a guy who had been to treatment 19 times, 19 times before
he was able to get sober.
He's probably my age and I'm 40.
And yet he has now found sobriety and has been working.
He's rebuilt his relationship with his son, helping other people get sober now.
So there's no guaranteed outcome like Joanne.
That's not to hold her up and say, look, if you just don't arrest her, she will have this
outcome.
But it could only happen because she's not sitting in prison while Beckham is growing
up without her.
So we don't have a guarantee on the positive side, but we absolutely know what will happen
if we put her in prison for the next 10 years and Beckham is growing up without her.
We know that that's going to increase all kinds of risk factors in her life, for her
addiction, in his life, for his own trauma that he would experience and would give him
a greater risk factor for addiction.
So they're doing really amazingly well.
And Beckham, I have to tell you this because it is adorable.
He is a drummer.
He loves music, started learning drums when he was very young.
And now he will play drums with local bands at blues festivals where they live.
It's incredible.
This little eight-year-old back there just hammering away.
He's really, really gifted.
And it's just so neat to see.
And it's heartbreaking to realize how many people are sitting in prison, not because
they're different from Joanne, but because they just happen to get caught.
And I think that's what we do not allow ourselves to sit with long enough.
We want to believe that there is something intrinsically different about the people who
are on the outside and getting help and building their life back and look at the amazing success
story.
And it's the newspaper articles at Christmas time, rags to riches.
Look what used to be.
It was, I spent my last dollar on heroin and now I'm running a business or whatever.
And those are amazing stories, but they give us an unrealistic view of what the majority
of people experience.
And there's nothing different about that person than there is about the person who's sitting
in prison for 10 years.
We had friends who were fostering at the same time that we were, and they fostered a little
baby, very similar situation.
Mom had relapsed during her pregnancy, but she had been caught and arrested because she
relapsed on prescription medication, which came up in the prescription drug monitoring
system.
Joanne was using drugs.
She got on the streets.
So there was no monitoring system for that.
So this mom was arrested.
She spent a year working before her sentencing hearing.
She completed everything that was asked of her.
She had regained custody of her son from Child Protection Services.
She had completed, was in drug court, had had no problems, and got to her sentencing
hearing and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Just unbelievably heartbreaking.
She had other children.
So now you've got four children who are growing up, separated from their mom, trying to be
parented in the family system.
But you think about, that's an awful lot for even a set of very committed grandparents
to suddenly be raising four small children.
It just was so heartbreaking.
I ended up connecting with her mom after her sentencing hearing.
Her mom said, thank you for not forgetting us.
That's the reality of 20,000 families here in Mississippi right now who have a loved
one in prison.
Now, some of that can't be avoided.
Prison has a place.
There are some people who cannot be out in the community because of what they have done.
But we've used prison as this slap on the wrist for everything that's wrong in the
world.
Something's not going right and we say, let's get law enforcement on it.
Law enforcement are frustrated because they're going, we're not trained.
We're not mental health professionals.
We're not doctors.
We can't solve every problem.
Testing someone doesn't solve the problems in their lives.
In many cases, it makes it a whole lot more challenging.
You have the opportunity, we have the opportunity to make a different choice than we have made
for the last couple of decades.
We chose to go down this path of prohibition and criminalization.
We can choose a different path.
That is something that many generations have done before us on hard things where they realized
I think we have lost our way and they have made a change and it's been really hard.
It's hard to change the way you think.
It's hard to admit that maybe you haven't been right about everything and it's hard
to change culture and change policy.
That's a hard path.
But I can only vote today because people before me said, hey, wait a second.
Why can't women vote?
They did a lot of hard work over a lot of years to open that pathway.
That's how change happens.
It's a lot of hard work by people who say there's a better pathway and we're going
to go pursue that.
Well, I mean, that's such a powerful parallel perspective.
There's a term the Green Berets use, force multiplier, and I love that.
The way that they work rather than kicking indoors is more often than not they're training
local militia.
If you look at Joanne's story, she became a force multiplier in the side of the solution.
She was mentoring other people who are struggling with addiction.
She's helping out in the drug court.
She's starting an addiction program.
Then you take the other story, I'm assuming that was Nikki, and now you've got someone
who's using tax money.
You've locked her away.
You've kept her away from her children and now they're going to probably struggle.
Even economically, it makes sense to help people heal.
The same with the immigration thing.
If someone's been here for a while and they've proven that they're a great human being and
they're here to work, then legalize them, let them pay taxes, and therefore they're
another member of our organization or our country.
By locking people away, again, like so many of these conversations, someone's making a
lot of money with that person being in that cage, but it doesn't benefit us as a community,
as the communal human experience, or even economically.
Our taxpayers' money is going into the war on drugs, it's going into the prison, and
someone's sitting there counting it.
Do you want the person who's drawing the tax money away, or do you want the person who's
adding to the value of the country?
The human compassion story obviously is the most powerful one.
Do you want that person suffering, or do you want that person healed, the thing that Buddha,
Jesus, and Muhammad would teach anyway.
That aside, economically, when your teachers are begging you for school supplies because
they don't have enough money to even put pens and tissues in the classroom, ask yourself,
well, where is that money going?
We don't need more tax money.
Just like you said, we're just bleeding money and some of these corporations are getting
it, at the expense of Americans, the men, women, and children that are supposed to be
our brothers and sisters in this country that are being dragged into these dynamics that
are completely against any real religious belief, if you look at its core, just because
it benefits someone.
I think this is such an important conversation to look at those two and who do you want,
not only in your community, but who do you want moving back into your neighborhood one
day when they've completed their sentence, the person that was in the box, or a person
who's truly rehabilitated?
Yeah, absolutely.
If we think about even that there is no guarantee and that maybe we will offer someone a chance
at rehabilitation and they won't take it, I love some of the stories in Chasing the
Scream and other stories that I've heard since then about the sort of in-between of
that addiction does not have to look as harmful and chaotic if a person is physically dependent
on a substance, but they're able to get it from their doctor and they're able to not
have to participate in the underground market, not have to pay the inflated rates of an underground
market, that they can actually manage that addiction in a way that allows them to work
and to parent and to be present in their life in many other ways.
That's not to say that it wouldn't be even better for them or that they might be even
more present or an even better parent if they weren't struggling with a dependence to something.
The way that we have approached addiction has maximized the pain and the suffering of
the addiction, not just for the person who's experiencing it, but for their whole family
unit as they're pulled into that along with that person.
I think that has come in large part because of this deeply held belief that people must
hit rock bottom.
They must have a life changing painful experience before they're ever going to get help for
their addiction.
Research just does not bear out that that is true.
Most people who recover from addiction don't go to treatment for it.
They end up, it's called spontaneous recovery.
They age out of their addiction.
It's hard to believe because when we think addiction, we think person living on the street
with a needle in their arm, that's kind of the picture of addiction that we have.
Addiction encompasses all kinds of different levels of substance use.
Some people, depending on their economic level, can hide their addiction because they have
enough money to buy drugs without losing their job.
They are able to maybe manage that addiction a little more so that they're able to still
show up for work even if they are high or whatever it is and maybe are able to still
do a good job at their work.
There's lots of levels of substance use.
When we cut people off from, incarceration is a trauma production experience.
We cut people off from their employment, from their housing, from their family.
We put them in an environment where they're very likely to experience physical, sexual,
psychological, mental abuse.
They come back out.
Like you said, about 95% of people who are incarcerated are going to come back home.
Now they're coming home with all of this additional trauma.
We've made their life much more painful as well as made their family's lives much more
challenging.
I was in a courtroom one day and there was a man who was, I was there not for this particular
case, but you just sit through all the cases if you're there because they go very quickly.
It was a sentencing hearings and this man came in and his lawyer was asking the judge
to reduce the amount of bail that he had to post to be able to get out.
They're talking through the charges.
He had been brought in, he was probably in his early 20s, he had been brought in on a
heroin possession charge, so non-trafficking possession.
Very first time he'd ever had criminal justice involvement.
There was no, he wasn't assaulting anyone or anything like that.
First time charge, heroin possession, I can't remember what the, I think it was $10,000
or something like that that had been said.
Well, he didn't have that money.
And so the judge, he had been sitting in jail at this point for four months already because
he could not pay enough money to get out until his sentencing hearing.
So he comes in and the judge says, well, what if I lower it to 5,000?
Could you do that?
And the guy's like, I don't know, maybe.
I don't, you know, that's better than 10.
So this guy had a really unique name.
So I thought, I wonder if I can find him on Facebook.
And I went and looked him up.
Sure enough, there he is on Facebook.
And you can easily, you can scroll and see immediately he's married.
He's got a toddler daughter.
He worked at, was an electrician.
And you just start to think what has happened to this family over the four months that he
has been incarcerated.
He had a job, he had a wife.
He has a daughter.
What if she was a stay at home mom?
I don't, I don't have any idea.
What if they were barely making it with two incomes and suddenly bam, your, your probably
primary income is gone.
How are you going to survive?
How are you going to keep your house?
How are you going to try to manage childcare and all of the other things?
We don't think about that.
All we think is just, Hey, shouldn't have been using heroin.
If he hadn't have been using heroin, he wouldn't be in jail.
Well, the level of harm that's happening because we approached his heroin use through the criminal
justice system is just gigantic.
And so we have made it, even if he's struggling with an addiction, we have made it much harder
now for him to stop because we have destabilized every area of his life and, and his family's
life.
And so now we've got to deal with all of these other harms that are happening at the same
time.
Um, so I think we don't realize that we don't have to traumatize people that that's really
the approach we take.
We try to traumatize them into healing.
We try to, we try to make their life so painful that they will change.
Um, and every family on earth who has had someone struggling with addiction can, can
testify to the fact that no matter how much you try to force someone to stop what they're
doing, they will not stop until they are ready to take that journey for themselves.
Sometimes a painful experience is part of that journey, but for most people it happens
as they get older, their life stabilizes.
They're able to get some perspective, some reflection, maybe find some healing, maybe
go to some therapy, um, and be able to exit that addiction.
And we don't have to make addiction so chaotic for so many people.
Some people's addiction is going to spiral into that anyway, but there are a lot of people,
um, Tim King, whose book Addiction Nation, his, his own addiction, his doctor was able
to manage it the whole time.
His doctor sat him down and said, Tim, these opioids that you've been taking that used
to be helping you after this life threatening illness that you had are now actually hurting
you and you have become dependent on them, but it's not your fault.
This is just something that's happened in your, in your body and your brain, and I'm
going to walk with you through this and we're going to get on the other side and work together
towards that.
And so his addiction was able to be managed early on and it was, he wasn't shamed for
it.
He wasn't cut off from medical care and that's how most people experience it.
As soon as their doctor realizes that they have a problem, they're, they're forced in
many places to cut them off of the, whatever prescription it is that they're giving them
for opioids because they can't be prescribing for an addiction.
So we're cutting people off from healthcare and from a regulated supply of something they're
already dependent on at the very moment when they're most vulnerable and where they need
that healthcare the absolute most, which is, it's just crazy.
You've got to rethink how we think about healing and helping more people find that journey.
Absolutely.
When you mentioned about the kind of secret addiction, I don't know if that's the right
term, but you know, the, the functional addict that is able to be present with their family
and go to work.
That's most of us.
Like I'm literally just began a year of no alcohol starting last week after a great conversation
with the guy who's his whole platform is about that.
He's got a thing called one year, no beer, but how many of us drink a glass or two of
wine or a bourbon or whatever it is, you know, one, two, three, four times a week.
That's exactly what we're talking about.
That's a functional addiction.
And yet there's so much judgment.
I want to get to your nonprofit before we run out of time.
So talk to me about the creation of end it for good.
And what are the resources that people can find there?
Yeah.
So I took this passion as you can tell, I'm kind of passionate about this issue.
And I, I wondered if other people would be interested in rethinking something as, as
broad as where I had ended up on completely changing the way that I think about solutions
to drugs and addiction and how we approach those things.
And so I started hosting book discussions using Johan Hari's book because it's story,
it's very well researched, but it's very story driven.
So I thought it would be the most accessible thing for people to kind of engage with.
And people came the first discussion, I had 12 people that came the next one, it was 25
people.
The next one was 50 people.
And at that point, it really was a lot of people I didn't even know.
They had heard about it from someone else that were coming.
And they were just kind of one off events.
It was not a series of them.
It was just, you know, come and read the book and come for an evening and let's have dinner
and discuss this.
And so I thought, wow, here in Mississippi, Mississippi is one of the most conservative
religious places in the United States.
And so people are interested in this here.
And that that grew into I wrote a couple of opinion articles that were published in our
statewide newspaper and then more people learned about it through that and contacted me.
And so in 2017, I started hosting those discussions in 2019.
I founded Ender for Good, which is a 501c3 nonprofit to give some legs to this work that
we continue, which is inviting people into this conversation.
I wanted to provide a way for people to learn.
That's kind of like what Christina 10 years ago needed.
How could I have come into this issue?
If I didn't have an experience like Joanne that prompted my curiosity, how could I help
more people realize the harm they're living with even if they didn't feel directly impacted
by it?
Or how could I help someone who is directly impacted understand the real root causes that
are impacting them instead of just blaming the drugs, start to think about what caused
that overdose, the contamination that was at the root of that, the policies that introduced
that contamination.
And so Ender for Good has been going now for almost five years and we host events.
We've hosted about 50 events at this point.
We do publications, we do media, do lots of interviews and speaking and all on this platform
of bringing education and an opportunity for respectful dialogue about these ideas to people.
I'm deeply committed to that.
I am deeply troubled by the amount of polarization and hate that people have for someone who
has a different way of thinking, different mindset than they do.
And I don't think that's how people engage with ideas.
We don't engage with ideas when we're angry or when we're feeling defensive.
We're not in a learning state.
We're not in a state of openness at that point.
And what I've always wanted is not to, you know, I don't own anyone's mind.
I can't force anyone to change their mind.
But can we provide opportunities to learn in a way that people can come to with an open
mind and maybe move from opposed to change to curious about change?
And at that point of curiosity is where people begin to read research, where they begin to
listen to stories, where they begin to consider maybe there is more to this than I thought
there was.
And we've done it, you know, everywhere from rotary clubs to university classes to conferences,
national, state, in different parts of the country.
I did a book discussion on my book, Curious, recently with a sheriff's department in North
Mississippi.
The sheriff had come to one of our events and read my book and asked me if I would come
and lead a book discussion with all of his deputies.
And I thought, well, that's a little intimidating.
But yes, I definitely want to do that.
So I went up there and there was about 30 of them, all of his deputies, all their support
and office staff.
And just a great, I spent about three hours with them just wrestling with these ideas
and they're trying to think through, are there better solutions than what we're using?
They're all universally frustrated by the lack of effectiveness of what they've been
doing.
But it's just this thinking about a solution that is so different from what they've been
doing previously.
And really, really wrestling through that when we say not arresting someone for drug
possession, we're not saying don't arrest them because they're abusing their children.
Like that's a very different thing.
And that I think gets lumped together a lot.
We think of drug possession as anything anybody using that drug might be engaged in.
And our take it and it for good is no, we make very clear distinctions between drug
possession and public intoxication, public drug use, abuse, assault, whatever else somebody
might be engaged in.
That's a totally separate crime than drug possession.
And so we need to be careful not to swing that pendulum too far and say, well, we used
to arrest everyone for abusing drugs and now we're not going to arrest them no matter
what they're doing.
If they're using a drug, we're just going to try to kind of be compassionate to what
might be going on in their life.
I think there needs to be a really clear pushback against that perspective to say, no, we can't
just allow people to go do whatever they want to as long as they're using drugs.
It's not healthy for society.
It's not healthy for them.
It's not healthy for the people that they're harming if they're harming other people in
that situation.
So we do a lot of education, some policy advocacy, but most of our work really is on bringing
these ideas to people who aren't already considering them and helping people rethink and understand
what the root cause of harm is.
And wherever they land on solutions, that's okay.
We're not going to shame you or blame you or tell you you're wrong.
I think I respect people's intellectual autonomy.
We get to engage with ideas and then we get to decide what we think about them.
And nobody else can force us to think anything that we don't think on our own.
And so that sheriff is still not convinced himself that we are right about ending prohibition,
moving towards regulated markets.
But he said, I think we've got to do something differently.
I'm open to ideas.
I want to learn.
I want my guys to be learning.
And I think we need to shift from a lock them up mentality towards a little more nuanced
approach to how we think about drugs and drug use.
Yeah.
I always go back to just that hundred year longitudinal study.
If you drew a line, is it going up or is it going down?
If it's going up, it's time to change.
It's that simple.
Well, speaking of which, the way that you really engage people, I think, is through
story, just like this conversation today.
So talk to me about Curious and then let's talk about where people can find that and
end it for good.
Yep.
So I wrote Curious.
I started in 2020 thinking, hey, while events are shut down, because we host a lot of events,
I'll just write a book real quick over the course of a couple of months.
And that wasn't quite how it worked.
It ended up being a four year project, but it just came out.
It's called Curious, a foster mom's discovery of an unexpected solution to drugs and addiction.
And I wrote it for people who aren't yet curious or people who maybe have heard a little bit
here and there.
Maybe they've heard a podcast that sparked their curiosity, but they're not really sure
what they think.
It's short chapters.
It is written in memoir style, very story driven.
Every chapter starts with a story and tells my own story starting when I'm nine years
old and how I developed the way that I think about drugs and addiction until the point
where Joanne helps put me on a different learning trajectory.
And I always say too, she changed my heart.
That needed to happen, but research and evidence changed my mind.
I think it is really important that we don't just have a life experience and say, hey,
I know what laws need to change based on my one personal life experience.
That's a really dangerous thing, but I think the research and evidence backs this up.
So I wrote the book to bring people along on my learning journey with me.
So it's written first person, real time.
It's like they're living those years with me through foster care, through Joanne, through
wrestling with these ideas as a Christian, as a conservative, as a mother who has teenagers
myself now.
How do I keep them safe?
I don't want them using drugs.
And then what I learned about the harms that happen through the stories of other people
who have lived some of those harms that I haven't lived.
And then what are some of the solutions to that?
And talk through the challenges of faith-based recovery versus allowing people to really
have a wide open pathway of multiple pathways to recovery.
I talk also about the way that we think of recovery as this quantum leap to sobriety.
One day you're using and the next day you have started your abstinence.
And is that really the most effective way for people to change the way that they're
living?
Or are there other pathways that we could take that would be a little more in keeping
with what people are most able to do?
What research says is most effective for people to change the way that they are living.
And maybe most importantly, to help preserve life from people not dying from an unintentional
overdose.
So people can get a copy of Curious on Amazon.
You can learn more about it on our website at enditforgood.com.
And we would love to dialogue with you.
So you can always shoot me an email at curious at enditforgood.com.
I love talking with people about this.
I love people sending in, this is why I don't think it could work.
And then having a great dialogue about those ideas.
I'm always still learning.
And this is a really complicated topic with a lot of moving parts.
And I think the way that we get a better path forward is by diving into that complexity
and being willing to see the nuance where it exists and not throw out the whole thing
just because there are hard parts of it.
When you look at the world right now, are there hard parts about how we handle drugs
today?
Yeah, there are.
There's all kinds of harm from it.
So let's consider how we could address those kinds of harm.
We've also got some other resources on the website.
We have one that is what we've learned about having productive conversations on polarizing
topics.
So maybe the issue of drugs is not your thing, listener.
Maybe it's something else that you think, gosh, if I could just help the world understand
this, they would all come to see the light.
We've learned a lot after talking with about 10,000 people in person at presentations and
events and so much of our events revolve around dialogue.
Most of the time is spent in audience participation and talking, not us talking.
So we've learned a lot about what people are thinking, what they're worried about,
and how they can engage with something that's really difficult and that people tend to have
a very emotional response to.
And also if you are a person who has a loved one who's struggling with an addiction, I'd
encourage you to do two things.
We have a freebie on our website at endofreggood.com slash freebies called three ways to help someone
struggling with an addiction.
You can go grab that.
But also one of those ways that I'll tell you in case you don't make it over there,
go and learn about craft.
It's community reinforcement and family training.
It is done most effectively through training through online virtual trainings and support
groups by a organization called allies in recovery.
We're not connected to them other than that I know them and am friends with them and I
think they do amazing work.
But they are passionate about helping families better engage with their loved one who is
struggling with an addiction.
Craft has been studied and been proven to help families stay healthy themselves while
they're trying to walk with their loved one.
And it teaches ways of interacting with your loved one that have been shown to increase
their likelihood of getting help and making a positive change in their life.
So I know that people often feel like they are just being, you know, they've been stuck
on a Ferris wheel going a thousand miles an hour and it just is crazy.
I want families to at least know this is out there.
There are support groups.
There's great support in places like Al-Anon or Nara-Nan.
They mostly teach families how to disengage enough to stay healthy.
Craft teaches people how to stay healthy and engage with their loved one in a way that
is positive and increases the chances that their loved one will get help.
And so it's a really incredible program.
Allies in Recovery offers it virtually so that wherever you are in the world you can
participate in it.
It is very cheap.
They're a nonprofit that's just trying to keep the doors open so they can help more
families and encourage you to just come on the journey.
Get on the journey with Allies in Recovery if you're a family member.
Grab a copy of Curious, come on the journey with me and learn about these ideas.
Or maybe you're already on board but there's somebody in your life you think could really
benefit from hearing a perspective like this from someone who is coming from a conservative
or faith-based background.
It's a great tool.
We've had a lot of people say, oh, my mom needs to read this or my dad needs to read
this.
There's somebody who I think this could reach maybe that other types of messaging haven't
reached so far and help them kind of rethink things.
Beautiful.
Well, I mean, again, thank you so much for all those resources because they're needed.
I think just to kind of cap the Christian conversation, people say about how complex
issues are.
And that's fine as long as you're using them just to analyze it and figure out how to fix
it.
And I think people use that, oh, it's complicated as a dismissive term.
But I think at its core, to pick a phrase that I know the Christian world loves to use,
what would Jesus do?
What would Jesus do if he came down here right now and saw the addicts and the homelessness
and all the things that we mentioned today?
Would he tell them to go to prison or would he pull them together with their family and
create that community that person needs to fix their healing?
Absolutely.
I think we've got a lot of work to do to figure out how we truly help people solve
and heal from the problems and the suffering in their lives.
We're all suffering.
We all need each other.
We need support and we can offer that to more people and find ways to meet people where
they are, not where we wish they would be, but where they actually are and help them
take whatever the next step is for them towards a thriving life.
Absolutely.
Well, Christina, I want to thank you so much.
We started off with less time.
I've been able to steal another 30 minutes from you, so I appreciate the flexibility,
but it's such an important conversation.
And obviously we're kindred spirits when it comes to this topic.
But I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and creating these
resources that will help so many people listening, whether it's their personal journey or members
of their family.
Thanks so much, James.
I really appreciate you and hosting this conversation.
It's been amazing and I hope very helpful to listeners and hope they'll take advantage
of some of those resources we are here to serve.
That's why we exist.