Author: Josie Williams

By Christina Dent

Seven years ago, I became a foster mom. Through serving children and families in the foster care system, I saw that there are times when cannabis use can negatively impact a person’s life. But I also saw firsthand how the criminalization of cannabis produces far more devastation. For the last fifty years, our government’s approach to cannabis has ruined individuals, families, and communities.

As a Christian, I believe every person is made in the image of God and valuable beyond our imaginations. The sanctity of every single human life is one of my deepest values. Because of that, I believe government should enact drug policies that cause the least amount of harm to people. I’ve become convinced that ending cannabis prohibition is the best way to reduce harm.

Near the end of 2021, Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced the States Reform Act to legalize and tax cannabis at the federal level. Less than ten years ago I would have adamantly opposed this kind of legislation, believing it conflicted with my conservative values and my evangelical Christian faith. Today I’m the Founder & President of End It For Good, a conservative Mississippi-based nonprofit inviting people to support approaches to drug policy that prioritize life and the opportunity to thrive. This includes ending cannabis prohibition. My values haven’t changed, but my understanding of the policies best aligned with those values has. And I’m not alone.

In my home state of Mississippi, 83% of us identify as Christian and more than half of Mississippians now support the legalization of cannabis for adult use. As I’ve traveled across Mississippi with End It For Good, leading educational events with well over 1,000 participants, I’ve heard why minds are changing. I’ve also listened to the concerns of many people who still support cannabis prohibition. Their concerns tend to fall into the categories of crime, kids, and moral compromise. I too want safe communities, healthy kids, and a culture with strong morals. Ending cannabis prohibition gets us closer to each of those, for the following reasons.

First, any popular substance that is banned from the legal economy will be supplied by a criminal underground market.  In this way, cannabis prohibition creates crime. As long as the cannabis industry is barred from legal operation, criminal activity is financially rewarded and billions of dollars from consumers are funneled directly into the coffers of organized crime every year. The prohibition of cannabis does not fight crime. It funds it.

Second, cannabis legalization does not lead to increased use among youth. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association looking at data from 10 states with cannabis programs found youth use either remained the same or decreased in the years after cannabis was legalized. This makes logical sense to me because under a state and federal ban my 13-year-old son can buy cannabis just as easily as a 33-year-old can. Dealers don’t check IDs. Legalization puts most cannabis transactions behind an age-restricted counter, offering at least one layer of protection to our children where prohibition offers none.

Third, many people of faith believe cannabis legalization is a loss of moral ground. I’ve become convinced the opposite is true. On the supply side, thousands of peopleare killed every year with predictable, preventable violence from the underground drug market. On the demand side, the lives of tens of thousands of consumers are ruined every year through unnecessary arrests. If they are incarcerated, they get disconnected from their work, family, housing, and community. When people come out of incarceration they’re traumatized and have a criminal record, making it immensely more difficult to build a thriving life.

This was brought home to me at one of End It For Good’s educational events. A career law enforcement officer came up to me afterward and said, “In all my years in law enforcement I’ve seen that marijuana is not a gateway drug, but the prosecution of marijuana is a gateway to a destroyed life.”

Even though cannabis prohibition is devastating to individuals and families, many people feel they can’t support legalization because of a personal or religious belief that recreational cannabis use is wrong. We can dialogue about that while agreeing that it shouldn’t be considered a criminal activity. Christians already separate religious belief from police action on a host of issues. Even the vast majority of the 10 Commandments in the Bible are not legally enforced, nor is anyone lobbying to make them so. Morality and legality are not the same things. It’s entirely possible to be against recreational cannabis use while simultaneously against making it a criminal activity.

There is no perfect path forward with cannabis, but I support legalization because it stops prohibition’s devastation from harming even more people who are made in the image of God. Congresswoman Mace has taken a courageous step by introducing the States Reform Act. Our kids, communities, and country are better served by ending cannabis prohibition.

Christina Dent is the Founder & President of End It For Good, a conservative drug policy reform nonprofit based in Mississippi. Her TEDx Talk details the journey that changed her mind on drug policy. Connect with her @ChristinaBDent on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

By Christina Dent

When my son was four years old, he was given the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Twice. We were in the emergency room at the hospital after his finger was crushed in a door. A cheerful nurse gave him fentanyl two times to numb the pain while a doctor stitched him up. At that time, grown men and women were dying by the thousands from overdoses involving fentanyl. Today they’re dying by the tens of thousands. What’s the difference? My son got fentanyl in a legal, regulated environment where it was protected from contamination and dosed accurately. People dying from fentanyl are getting it on the underground market where there’s no quality control and dosing is a risky guess. To save lives we have to address why people buy contaminated drugs on the street, and why those drugs are increasingly potent.

The Centers For Disease Control recently released provisional data on overdoses for 2020, showing fentanyl as a factor in almost 85% of opioid overdose deaths. Increased restrictions on prescriptions over the last decade have made legal, regulated drugs harder to get. But they haven’t stopped consumer demand. As restrictions on legal drugs mount, people buy illegal ones. This includes some pain patients who are desperate for relief after being cut off of their medication. Basic economics tells us supply will always meet demand, whether legally or illegally.

Suppliers of illegal drugs are risking arrest, though, so they need to smuggle small packages with big profit margins. Fentanyl fits the bill perfectly. It’s 50-100 times more potent than morphine, making a small quantity extremely profitable. Increased potency of drugs is a predictable outcome of the incentives of prohibition. Today we have fentanyl, but tomorrow it will be carfentanil or any number of increasingly potent drugs.

Decreased availability of legal drugs has led to increased demand for illegal ones. The incentives of prohibition have made illegal options increasingly potent while removing quality control. The collision of these policy disasters is driving today’s overdose epidemic.

Society’s knee-jerk reaction to do something – anything – to stop overdoses is understandable. Over 100,000 people died last year alone. A breathtaking tragedy. We often look to the criminal justice system to address drug problems, but cracking down is futile. There are hundreds of billions of dollars being offered by adult consumers every year, and a never-ending line of people willing to supply whatever drug consumers want. Getting consumers to stop buying potent, contaminated drugs off the street will require allowing them some form of legal access to quality-controlled options.

This is an uncomfortable idea for many people to grapple with, myself included. But the evidence is clear that prohibition is causing enormous loss of life. As someone whose deepest values include the sanctity of human life, I have to reckon with this. Another 100,000 families will pay the ultimate price for our failed drug policies in the next year alone.

But there’s hope. As we look towards a new year, we can choose a new path on drug policy. We can explore the least harmful ways to allow adults to access a safer supply of drugs. And we can simultaneously offer honest education about the risks as well as help for those struggling with addiction. This will give people the best chance of taking the most important step towards a thriving life – staying alive.

Fentanyl didn’t kill my son. Rather, it helped a traumatized little boy make it through a hard night in the hospital. I’m thankful for it. It helps thousands of patients in medical settings every day. Fentanyl is not the cause of our overdose epidemic. Our overdose epidemic is a result of policies that incentivize consumers to buy potent, contaminated drugs from the underground market. Allowing a pathway to legal, regulated options could save thousands of lives every year.

Christina Dent is the Founder & President of the nonprofit End It For Good. Her TEDx Talk details the journey that changed her mind on drug policy. She lives with her family in Ridgeland.

“We pray people change their thinking on this issue. It’s a matter of prioritizing life and allowing others to thrive.” — Lana Butler

Hi friends,

In early December I got the note above. Lana and her husband came to one of End It For Good’s events 2 years ago and she’s stayed in touch as they’ve continued to walk with her son, Brandon, through seasons of addiction and sobriety.

Less than a week later I got another message. Brandon had passed away.

It’s impossible to imagine the depth of this loss for Lana and her family. This is the very thing we work to prevent at End It For Good. It’s why we exist.

Brandon’s family chose gifts to End It For Good in lieu of flowers to honor Brandon’s life, and asked us to share this with the End It For Good community.

That’s a sacred trust.

Over the last 2 weeks, people who didn’t even know Brandon or his family have given as a way of expressing support.

By Dr. William Sansing

Recently a colleague and I were discussing taking new approaches to crime and addiction, and he said something I hope will stick with me for the rest of my life. He said, “It’s just easier to kick the can down the road by locking folks up and letting someone else deal with the problem.” The challenge with kicking the can of addiction is that the can has a way of compounding itself as new problems emerge from incarceration while the old ones continue.

In my professional experience as a therapist for people struggling with addiction, I’ve learned that locking people up often does just that. It doesn’t stop the addiction, and it frequently compounds the problems in that person’s life.

There is a saying in the addiction recovery world; you keep doing the work and keep coming back until the miracle occurs. Over the past 25 years, I have witnessed this occurrence among many people. I often share that recovery is a gift.

Striving to live a recovery lifestyle is nothing short of a miracle.

During late April, on a Thursday evening in the dining room at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, my wife and I, along with about 50 others from the Golden Triangle area of Mississippi, witnessed a different sort of miracle take place. A young woman from Jackson, Mississippi, and her team from the organization End It For Good hosted a groundbreaking community discussion about the harms from drugs in our community.

At the community discussion, Christina Dent gave a thought-provoking presentation about the harms of the war on drugs. Each attendee then had one minute to voice their thoughts and perspectives. The only rule was to be respectful. No arguing.

Their program is like another recovery saying: “It’s very simple, but one of the hardest things you can ever do.” Dent closed by asking each person to ponder what would really reduce harm and increase safety and thriving for everyone in our communities.

Have our efforts to punish people struggling with addiction achieved their intended results, or are the unintended consequences of disconnected families and unemployable citizens just too great?

I can’t speak for everyone in the room, but for me, it felt like a shift in our represented communities’ understanding. The dialogue that night was free of judgment and shame. Perhaps it was the beginning of healing and introspection for many. It seems to me, End It For Good is striving to end us kicking these cans down the road and ask what is truly best for our communities.

My professional experience, as well as research on addiction, confirms that the most successful path out of addiction often includes deep relationships, a sense of life purpose, and healing from trauma. We’ve spent many decades doing the opposite of that through incarceration.

To help more people exit addiction, we need to build communities where relationships, purpose, and healing are available to everyone. Not only will this help those currently experiencing addiction, it will also help prevent the next generation from going down that same harmful path. If not for ourselves, we need to consider changing our approach to addiction for the good of our kids and grandkids.

William Sansing, Ph.D., of Starkville has 25 years of experience as a disability policy advocate and substance use disorder professional. He is a therapist with the Oxford Treatment Center and the Starkville Wellness Group. 

Yesterday I got an email from a young woman in Mississippi who agreed to let me share part of her message with you:

“I am a single mother and am in recovery. I have been sober almost a year and I have also been to prison because of my drug addiction. 

I am not a bad person or a criminal by any means. I was just a drug addicted woman that was trapped in a horrible cycle of trauma that y’all speak of. Now I am on the other side of my battle and I want to make a difference and help someone else come out of the pit of despair that I was once in. 

I am grateful that there are people like you out there in this world because people like me mostly get thrown away due to a decision that was made because of an addiction that I couldn’t beat…”

Mothers struggling with a substance addiction are often stigmatized because of society’s understandably strong feelings about the potential impact on their children.

I came to this work as a foster mom grappling with this exact issue.

If we lack personal experience, as I did, it can be hard to understand the life-altering hold addiction can have on a person.

Honestly, it’s also easier to rage against behavior than weep over what caused it.

So we often ask a reactive question like:

How should we punish mothers who use drugs?

 

But what if we asked proactive questions like:

How can we create the safest, widest path to help, so more mothers can overcome their addictions?

and

How can we reduce the collateral damage of a mother’s addiction, even if she can’t overcome it today? 

and the biggest question of all

How can we decrease the trauma experienced by each person in our community so we decrease their risk of addiction in the first place? 

If you read the woman’s email above, addiction wasn’t enjoyable. This was a woman “trapped in a horrible cycle of trauma,” someone who has just come out of “the pit of despair,” someone who was once “thrown away.”

If trauma could heal, she wouldn’t have been addicted. 

That’s the thing we’ve missed. More hurt doesn’t heal.

Sometimes I wonder if the term “recovery” also applies to the healing journey many people need after the trauma-filled ways we mishandle their addictions.

When we offer care instead of condemnation, we might just get more mothers echoing the end of the woman’s email:

“My daughter is back with me and life is going well.”

You may have seen on social media that I’m working on my first book! This week I’ve been writing about my childhood and how we use our imaginations.

This movement towards health-centered drug policies is primarily about preventing harm before it happens. But valuing prevention requires imagination.

Here’s why:

Kevin called me a couple of weeks ago asking for help finding gainful employment since he has a felony cocaine possession conviction.

But what if Kevin’s cocaine possession had been handled the same way as his neighbor’s alcohol possession? What if Kevin had never gotten a felony and had been able to work a regular job and provide for his family?

In the first scenario (what really happened), I can help someone who needs me. That feels really good, full of purpose. It takes no imagination to value that.

In the second scenario (what I hope will be true in a few years), I don’t even know that Kevin exists because he never got a felony or had trouble finding a job, so he never calls me. He doesn’t need me.

The prevention of Kevin’s need takes a lot more imagination to value than meeting his need. But which one is better for Kevin? 

Think of it this way: Would you rather someone stop a car from running over you, or let it run over you but make sure you get to a great hospital to fix all your broken bones?

As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Ending drug prohibition is ultimately about stopping tomorrow’s harm before it happens. 

That requires imagination because it doesn’t make the news.

But it does change lives. 

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon declaring a “war on drugs.”

We need to ask ourselves a very important question:

Has it worked in the United States? 

Even though the US spends $50B every year enforcing drug prohibition:

·       1 out of 10 adults has used an illegal drug recently.

·       We’re in the worst drug overdose death crisis of our history.

·       Drugs are readily available in small towns, big cities, even prisons. (Think about that for a second…we can’t even keep drugs out of prisons.)

Has it worked globally? 

In 2009, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs developed a plan to combat the world’s drug problems within 10 years. Four of their major goals are summarized below.

In 2019, the International Drug Policy Consortium compiled data from numerous sources to track the success of the 2009 UN plan. The results are summarized below, as well.

Goal #1: Reduce Cultivation

Eliminate or reduce significantly the illicit cultivation of opium poppy, coca bush, and cannabis plant.

 

Results: Cultivation Increased

Cultivation of the opium poppy increased 125% and coca bush increased 30%. Although no cultivation estimates were reported for cannabis, the UN did report that cannabis is grown in countries representing 94% of the world’s population.

 

Goal #2: Reduce Demand

Eliminate or reduce significantly the illicit demand for drugs.

Results: Demand Increased

The overall number of 15 to 64-year-olds who used an illegal drug at least once in 2016 (the last year data was available for) increased 31% from 2009.

Goal #3: Reduce Supply

Eliminate or reduce significantly the illicit production, manufacture, marketing, and distribution of, and trafficking in, psychotropic substances, including synthetic drugs.

Results: Supply Increased

In 2018 the UN reported that ‘the range of psychoactive substances available on the market has never been greater.’ The dark web has also made it easier than ever to buy illicit drugs.

Goal #4: Reduce Precursors

Eliminate or reduce significantly the diversion of and illicit trafficking in precursors. (Precursors are the chemical substances used in the manufacture of drugs).

Results: Precursors Increased

International Narcotics Control Board reports an increase in the use and number of precursors in illegal drug production.

What do we do? 

Well, if we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always gotten.

We have a choice before us: Punish? Or save lives?

We can’t do both. They’re mutually exclusive. To save lives we have to let go of harsh penalties and consider allowing people to access unpoisoned substances.

Prohibition of drugs by law is a new idea in the history of the world. Not only has it failed to achieve its goals, its left hundreds of thousands of dead people in its wake. People who otherwise would have lived.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of the ‘war on drugs,’ what do you want for the next 50? If you want something different than the last 50, it’s time to get involved.

Together, we can chart a new course.