Christina Dent: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Christina Dent, founder of End It For Good, an organisation dedicated to helping those impacted by the harmful effects of drugs. They discuss America’s current drug problem, how Christians should view the drug problem, how Christina became a Christian, why she became so involved in the drug epidemic debate, why some drugs are legal while others aren’t, how becoming a foster mum changed Christina’s life forever, what is the solution to drug addiction, what are the root causes of drug addiction and does prayer work with overcoming drug addiction plus so much more!

Episode Summary

• The American drug problem
• How Christians should view drugs according to the Bible
• How Christina became a Christian
• Why she became so involved in the drug epidemic debate
• Why some drugs are legal while others aren’t
• How becoming a Foster Mum changed Christina’s life forever
• What is the solution for drug addiction
• What are the root causes of drug addiction
• Does prayer work with overcoming drug addiction
• What did Jesus have to say about drugs
• The problem with drug laws in America
• Why Christina’s personal experience with drugs will challenge you
• How you can find freedom from drugs and thrive

Christina Dent: Episode Transcript

Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student wellbeing, character development, and academic improvement.

Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project, where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.

Brendan Corr
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast, where we get a chance to talk with people who’ve made a success of their careers and of their adult life and have also been able to find an expression of their faith in that. Today, we’re talking with Christina Dent. Christina is an author, a TEDx speaker, and a perpetual question asker. She grew up in a conservative Christian home and earned a degree in biblical studies with an emphasis on Christian ministry from Belhaven University. Christina has become best known as an advocate for decriminalising drugs and addiction in an effort to win the war on drugs. Her book on the topic is called Curious, and she’s the founder of End It for Good, a not-for-profit organisation committed to winning the war on drugs at both a social and a personal level. She was a featured presenter on TEDx events and a number of other platforms explaining her arguments in support of decriminalising drugs. Christina’s married to her college sweetheart, Thomas, and lives in Mississippi in the Southern United States. Christina, thank you so much for your time this morning.

Christina Dent
Thank you, Brendan. Thanks for having me.

Brendan Corr
So what an interesting career that it’s ended up for you. I guess when you set off from university and you were doing your Bachelor of Ministry you might have had a different end point in mind than where you’ve ended up.

Christina Dent
Yes, absolutely. This is a total shift from anything I ever thought that I would be doing. I definitely have always wanted to do things that I’m passionate about. I definitely have a little bit of a crusader spirit in me. That was usually channelled into ministry, volunteerism at church. I helped lead a tutoring programme at our church and then I switched into a foster care ministry and then a family preservation ministry trying to help keep children out of foster care. So that was always what I thought I would do in my spare time and raising kids and all of that, but never in a million years would’ve thought that I would be working on the issue of drugs and addiction and certainly not on the issue of decriminalisation, but here we are. I feel that it is an extension of that desire to live out the purpose that I think God has given to me. And yet, I try to remain humble in that and wherever He leads me at whatever time be willing to follow in that.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. Well, one of the things I’m hoping that we will cover in our conversation is the transition from what might’ve been the predicted, the expected path, even some of the assumed thinking that might’ve been part of your upbringing in the social environment that you’re in and where you’ve ended up with, what I’d imagine, some controversial views in possibly your background, your social circle, and find out how that happened and what has it meant, as well as dig deep as to the rationale. Obviously, as face-to-faith people we hold convictions, but we also think through those convictions and test them in various contexts. I’d be interested to explore that with you. Part of that bio described you growing up in a conservative Christian home. Not being a US citizen or being part of that, we have maybe caricatured ideas of what the Bible Belt or what Southern USA actually is like to grow up in. Can you help us understand a little bit what that means, that description of a conservative Christian household? What does it mean?

Christina Dent
Yeah, so I am the youngest of four children. I had a dad who worked at a Christian school. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She homeschooled me and my three brothers from kindergarten through high school. We went to a conservative Presbyterian church. Pretty much everybody in my social circles was politically conservative, socially conservative, religiously conservative. I experienced that in very positive ways growing up. It was a very warm community, a very safe and protective community. I look back on my childhood and think I had an incredibly happy experience in my family, in my friend community, my church community. It was such a warm and nurturing environment, but it also lent itself to my personality, which is a rule follower. As much as I’m doing things now that are very outside the box, I always figured out early how to perform and get adult pats on the back for that, how do you do the things that people like, the things adults like, and the things that they praise you for and figure that out and thought, “This is great. I like being praised for things.” And so I walked down all those expected pathways, checked all those expected boxes of following the rules and not getting into trouble and making good grades and being a good Christian girl. I wouldn’t trade any of that. I don’t look back and say, “Man, I wish I had just pushed the boundaries and gone a little wild.” I don’t think that at all. I’m very thankful that I don’t have the pain that would’ve come with some of those decisions. And so it was a really warm community, but because I grew up in that context, part of what was part of that, not just here in Mississippi but in the broader US in conservative politics and religion over the ’80s and ’90s when I was growing up, was this very black and white way of thinking about right and wrong, good decisions, bad decisions, good people and bad people. I took all of that messaging around drugs, drug use, addiction, and I took with it into my adulthood that bad people use drugs and if you become addicted to drugs, that’s just another level of bad and very much a moral vision of people who are using drugs are wanting to rebel, they’re wanting to do bad things. That really wasn’t challenged. I don’t remember anybody specifically saying those things to me, but it was definitely part of the teaching in the larger context of the culture that I grew up in. I took that into my early 30s and that really was not challenged until I became a foster parent and got to meet someone up close who was part of that group of people that I had stigmatised and thought very negatively of my whole life.

Brendan Corr
I want to pick up that story as to what was the point of challenge for your presuppositions, but if I can dig a little deeper as to what that early experience was of your faith, being immersed in the social faith of Christianity, conservative Christianity, how would you have explained or described the personal aspect of that faith, your personal connection with Jesus in that period?

Christina Dent
It’s interesting. I kept journals off and on for most of my life. My mom was an avid journaler, I kept journals for my whole adult life. My husband is now going back and reading all of my journals, starting with the ones I wrote as a kid, and he’s in the journals right now when I’m 16, 17 years old. And I’m often, all through those journals, I’m talking about the Scriptures that I’m reading and how they are impacting me. I’m writing out prayers. So very much I experienced faith not as cultural but as personal, in my own home, in my parents, in the families that I was a part of. It wasn’t something that it was just we go to church on Sundays and we don’t care the rest of the time. It was a deep commitment. I’m very thankful for that, even for the parts that I look back on and say, “I think we misapplied it in some areas.” I’m very thankful that I always grew up knowing this is not a checking-the-box thing, this is a life commitment, this is a commitment you’re making, this is a commitment to walking with Jesus for the rest of your life.

Brendan Corr
So you had that understanding, but I’m wondering, and I don’t mean to project inappropriately, it’s just a legitimate question of you, some of that description that you now you can look back with some self-reflection and identify a personality type that maybe you were not so conscious of as a teenager and with all the authenticity of that experience of a personal connection with Jesus and engaging with Scripture and with teaching and the reality of that, do you now see that the relationship that you had with God and with Christ Himself may have had elements of that same socially conditioned it’s conditional on keeping the rules?

Christina Dent
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that a part of that comes through in my journals also. I was reading a little section of one of them from my high school years and I’m talking about, “So-and-so is making this decision and that’s not pleasing to God. And so I’m doing this thing over here so that I don’t do something that’s not pleasing to God.” There’s an element of that that’s good, we want to be walking in the ways of Jesus, and yet very much believing in grace in my mind but struggling to apply that, very much looking at outward behaviour and judging based on outward behaviour, judging people’s, you know, the condition of their souls or their motives or whatnot based on the outward behaviour. I think that was one of the biggest shifts that has happened in me. Partially through all of these experiences in foster care and everything I’ve learned about addiction since then is realising that so much is underneath outward behaviour. And really, some of the people who have impacted me the most in a positive spiritual way are people whose outward shell might have made me completely look the other way when I was in high school. And so that has been a really humbling experience for me to begin for the Lord to help me to see that even though I would’ve said I knew the right answers all growing up, I knew those right answers, that it’s by grace, that legalism is not the path, I was very blind to its application in my own heart and life and the way that I applied it to other people. I could be extremely empathetic with certain groups of people, and I could turn that empathy off immediately with other groups of people. And I didn’t even recognise it. I just thought of myself as an empathetic person. I couldn’t see that, no, it’s actually only empathy when I think someone deserves empathy. If I don’t think they deserve empathy, then it’s judgement that I have for them. So I’m on a continual, probably lifelong process of the Lord helping me to see that when that pops up in my mind still of looking at that outward appearance, making those judgments, and pushing into that legalism rather than into that grace.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. Now that you’ve seen life in a different context and seeing faith in a different way and seeing the world in a different way, I’d be interested in exploring a little later in our conversation your own reflections on are you able to be as empathetic with that version of yourself now that you are more empathetic to people who were not meeting this? Do you understand what I’m saying?

Christina Dent
Yeah. I just told someone recently that 2O-year-old Christina did not need a microphone. I thought I did because I thought I had all the things figured out. What a grace that we have the ability to learn and grow. I often cringe at my younger self, and yet, I look at that and say, “It is part of the process of how the Lord ended up changing my heart.” I can still inhabit that person. I can still remember very much how I used to think, how I used to feel, how I would’ve responded in various situations. And so I can have compassion for that. I was seeking, I was wanting to grow. It’s maybe also a testament to the fact that we can’t just change ourselves just because we want to. We really need the Holy Spirit’s work to help open our eyes. Even as I tell my story and as I do this work, no matter what people agree or disagree on the policy side related to drugs, my heart needed to change in respect to how I thought about people who were using drugs, people struggling with addiction, parents whose children were struggling with addiction, anything that revolved around this issue of drugs. That was a heart issue that needed to change no matter what happens on the policy front. I’m thankful that the Lord didn’t let me continue in that but did bring me someone who showed me in a person in front of me that I had radically misunderstood and devalued the lives of incredibly valuable people who were made in the image of God.

Brendan Corr
Well, that’s a lovely segue to pick the story up again. You mentioned that you were in your 30s and had an encounter with not an idea, not a political agenda, not a platform, but with a person that caused you to come up sharp and review how you understood personhood and life. Unpack that for us.

Christina Dent
My husband and I became foster parents when I was in my early 30s. That decision, it was not one where I had longed to be a foster parent my whole life. In fact, I had no interest in being a foster parent because it sounded incredibly messy, and I could not envision having children in my home whose birth parents might live 10 minutes away, they might still be visiting with them. All of that sounded very messy, and I didn’t want any part of that. And so we were pursuing adoption, we had talked about that for many years. But that path had not opened to us, we couldn’t really figure out what would the Lord want us to do in that. Is it from a different country or what? We just didn’t feel much direction and felt like we don’t want to pursue this until we fill that direction. We had the opportunity to do a short-term fostering thing, and we said, “Well, while we’re thinking about adoption and praying about that, let’s pursue this.” That didn’t end up working out, but it did open our minds to, “Wait a second, if we were open to something shorter term, maybe we should actually consider just becoming foster parents through the State of Mississippi.” And so that’s what we did. Never thought that would be part of our story, but we became foster parents and through that we had a couple of different placements for kids. One of those was with a newborn baby boy. He was coming to our house straight from the hospital after being born. He was born premature, and so he was very tiny, just five pounds nine ounces when he came to us. His mom had been using drugs while she was pregnant. She had been using for about 20 years by this point. This was her first child, but she had been using since she was a teenager. She was not able to beat that addiction during her pregnancy, and so she ended up continuing to use while she was pregnant. And because of that, her son was automatically removed from her custody, which is typically how it happens here in Mississippi and in many states. And so he came to our house, we became his foster family. I had no way of understanding her behaviour other than through the lens of what I had grown up hearing from the culture, which is, “This is a bad person who was doing bad things.” And especially a mother using drugs while she was pregnant, I just couldn’t imagine that. I already had children by that point myself. I just couldn’t imagine how that could possibly be. And so in my mind, she couldn’t love her kids or her child because what mother would do that if they did? So we brought Beckham to our house, and then a few days later he had his first visit with his mom at the local child welfare office. I brought him to that visit. I popped his car seat out of the van and turned around in the parking lot to take him into the building and here comes this woman across the parking lot running. She runs over to me and is weeping. She just is crying and starts talking to him and kissing this little baby who I’m holding in his car seat. I just stand there awkwardly wondering, “What on earth is happening? This doesn’t make any sense to me. If she loved him this much, why was she using drugs while she was pregnant?” So I take him in and she has her one hour of visitation with him. And then I come back to pick him up and she’s sitting on the couch in the visitation room and he’s sleeping on her shoulder. She’s just sitting there with her eyes closed. She’s not playing on her phone or anything, she just is drinking in this one hour that she has with him. And she has to give him back to me and I take him back to my house and she leaves for inpatient drug treatment. She would call me. We had decided that she could have my phone number to call me and ask me how he was doing and get updates, so she would call me once a day. They let her make one phone call a day to me. She would ask me how he was doing and I would tell her anything I could think of. There was not a whole lot to say about a newborn. And then she would ask me to put her on speakerphone and she would sing to him over the phone. I could be standing in my kitchen with that image of holding my phone and listening to her singing Jesus Loves Me to her son. All of this was, on the one hand, incredibly touching. It was like experiencing holy ground being part of this. And yet, on the other hand, incredibly disconcerting. It just built up this turmoil in me because both of these things couldn’t be true at the same time. I mean, either she’s a terrible mother and follows what I had thought growing up until that point, or she is a mom who desperately loves her son and wants to be there for him and something else is going on that is causing this addiction that she is also dealing with. And that for me was the beginning of this learning journey of I need to reconcile what’s actually happening here because most children in foster care are there for some drug related cause. And so if we’ve misunderstood something related to addiction, drugs, if there’s something different that we could be doing, it would impact many, many children in vulnerable situations. The more that I learned, the more I realised, “Oh, this actually impacts almost every area of our lives in every country in the world.”

Brendan Corr
That’s a huge revelation to come to at that moment. Personal. I’m hearing you describe that encounter and that moment of gut-wrenching raw emotion of the biological mother and her outpouring of love and grief, and then the gut-wrenching moment where you take her back and your view of the world is irrevocably changed, or upended at least. Were you conscious in those moments about the scale of insight that you were beginning to see, or was it at that stage just an incredibly personal thing?

Christina Dent
Beginning, you start unwrapping something and you start to realise, “Oh wait, there’s more to this.” Then I thought, “Wait a second.” It was like beginning to open Pandora’s box in a good way, I guess. I mean in a hard way because the more that I learned, the more pain and suffering. It uncovered the way that we’ve approached these things I’ve come to believe is making it far worse, not better, approaching drug use and drugs through the criminal justice system. So there was a lot of pain in that, but also looking for the solutions and saying, “If the problem is really big, that means if you can find a solution, it’s a really big deal because it can radically improve the quality of life for people.” My learning journey happened… I can tell the story in 20 minutes in a TED Talk, but it was a year and a half of meeting her, of rethinking, of starting to learn, of reading books, of talking with people, of trying to develop this whole new picture as the foundation that I had believed previously was destroyed, trying to rebuild. What are the true things? What really causes addiction? What could reduce harm? How does crime play into this? Why are so many people dying of overdose? It’s a really complex issue. People often will hear me talk and it feels inspiring to them. The journey of having something that you’ve believed your whole life ripped out from under you is not inspiring. It doesn’t feel inspiring at the time. It feels really, really hard. And that was how it felt, it felt like getting the rug ripped out from under me. I remember having a thought as I was learning, as my perspective on the solutions was changing, having this thought, “Does this mean I somehow am not a Christian anymore?” because I would be rethinking this. That’s how deeply ingrained that connection between this is how we think about drugs and this is what good Christians do. It was deeply wound together in my mind and trying to unravel that and look at solutions, it felt very scary. And only much further down the line did it feel like, “Yes, I’ve rebuilt the way that I think about this in a way that I think is more consistent with an ethic of life and valuing life and people.” But it was really hard, and I think that’s why we don’t lean into rethinking things very often. It is very challenging. I don’t give myself credit for that. I give the Lord and I give Joanne credit for that, the mother of our foster son, because she could have held me at arm’s length. She could have not let me in on seeing her level of love for her son. She’s in a position of the state just thought some random lady was a better mother than her to her son. It’s a very fraught relationship between a foster parent and a birth parent. She didn’t treat me that way. She just let me in, and she just showed who she is, and it changed me completely. And I’m so thankful to her for that.

Brendan Corr
I can see the value in that journey. While I appreciate your humility in saying that it wasn’t you, and we do know there was the Spirit of God who let you step out onto the waters of uncertainty and waves that were unstable around you and buffeted. I’m sure you’ve had this conversation in other contexts, so bear with me, but that is a very beautifully emotive picture of adults wrestling with their identity and wrestling with their impulses and their capacity for self-control and self-regulation. But there’s that other little life that’s involved. I can’t remember the name of the son that you must have… Beckham. Would he not have been in danger if he’d stayed with Joanne? Was there not genuine, practical, justifiable reason for intervention that should trump the love of a well-intentioned but desperate mom?

Christina Dent
That’s a really good question. So Joanne would tell you today that the right thing to do was for her son to be in foster care at that point, that she needed that accountability. She needed him to be in that safe place until she could regain or gain sobriety. I think part of something that we try really hard at the organisation today to do is to always make sure that we’re not swinging the pendulum really far in one direction or the other, but we’re really trying to lean into the nuance of a situation where in a situation like that, I can simultaneously have compassion for Joanne, I can see her as a mom just like me, which is what she is, a mom just like me, even when she was struggling with addiction she was a mom like me who loved her son, and can also see appropriate levels of accountability where he was not safe to be with her at that point where she was using. And so it was appropriate for him to be in foster care, and she’s thankful for that. What I’m thankful didn’t happen, and what happens to many other people, is that she wasn’t put in prison for her drug use. And so when she was able to go and get help, they were able to reunify very quickly and she has been able to parent him ever since. So that accountability question I think anytime we’re talking about substance use or addiction is really important because we don’t want to swing the pendulum from, “Let’s just lock everybody up” to “Let’s just let everybody do whatever they want to without any kind of accountability.” It’s really important to find that middle path where we do hold people accountable for how their actions are impacting other people, even if we decide to allow them to make a broader range of personal choices about what they’re going to do that they’re not going to be incarcerated for.

Brendan Corr
That’s good. That reflects, if you don’t mind me saying, some of the personal transformation that you have described in your own story of it’s no good having a black and white absolutist extremist view of good and bad people, right and wrong Christianity and just superimpose it on a social system, that it’s one thing or the other. I’m hoping our conversation is going to allow us to explore the concept of Christianity as a redemptive force rather than as a moral code that gets in place. But in this space, as we’re talking about your growing understanding of Joanne as a person, not just as a statistic or as an example, again, and if you’re happy for me to test your thinking a little or explore your thinking… not test it, that’s not the right word. I mean I want to understand it. What I would understand is the traditional conservative Christian view that maybe was part of your background and part of the social circle that formed your views places a high priority on personal accountability, that we make decisions. It’s rooted in evangelicalism, right? You make a decision for Christ or not. It could feel as though the arguments that you’re presenting are reducing that, it’s providing excuses and it’s ameliorating the personal accountability for this whole section of life. Is that fair to make that comment, or is that a misunderstanding?

Christina Dent
I think part of what I learned that has helped me to see how that personal accountability piece plays into it is to be able to separate in my mind, because it is separate in real life, maybe not in the media’s portrayal of drug use and addiction, but it is statistically true, that there is a lot of substance use that doesn’t turn into addiction. So when we think about what we see on the news would be the most chaotic levels of addiction that’s going to be reported, where maybe people have lost their housing and they are injecting drugs on the street in front of a news camera kind of situation. And yet, for most people who are using substances, it’s very similar to most people who are using alcohol, which is legal, where most people who use it don’t have a problem with it. They use it on the weekends or at a party or something like that. Most people who use substances, illegal substances included, don’t develop addictions to them. I would always say there’s a level of personal accountability and responsibility for the choices that you make. And a person has responsibility and accountability for how their choices impact other people. But we have to separate that into something like drug possession, we’ll say the crime of drug possession as it currently stands in most places in the world, is different from driving under the influence or assaulting someone because you were under the influence of a drug and it changed your response to someone. Those are separate things. So much of the way that we think about it, particularly in conservative culture, is to mash all of those things together and believe that they always all happen together. That is not the case. So we would say we need to be really, really careful to maintain public order, public safety. And in order to do that, you can’t just let people do whatever they want to do. You have to say, as with alcohol, “Well, maybe you can make the choice to drink, but if you get out on the road and you’re drunk, you’re going to get arrested because now you’re putting other people in danger. Or you can make the choice to drink, but if you get drunk and get in a fight and assault someone, well, you’re going to get arrested for assault. You can’t do that. It doesn’t matter if you made a personal choice to drink, now you’ve stepped over into this other category where you’re harming other people.” And that, I think, is what we want to see with other kinds of substance use, where people are responsible and accountable for the choices that they make, but we’re not adding extra levels of harm to them by incarcerating them for that personal choice. And that I think is a big important thing to try to separate in our minds because it can sound like there’s no way that you can just have somebody who’s possessing a drug and not also doing lots of other harmful things to people. Statistically, that’s not the case. There are all kinds of people all around us who are using substances unproblematically. And when they’re problematic, particularly related to children… I was giving a presentation at a sheriff’s department here in Mississippi recently, and some of the deputies, their number one concern is what happens to the children of people who are addicted and they’re not caring for their children and their children are not in a safe place and they’re being neglected. We would say, “Absolutely, we need to step in there. Those children need to be removed from that home if their parents are abusing or neglecting them.” We don’t at all want to just say, “Hey, their parents are just making a personal choice.” No, at that point, a personal choice has become a choice that is significantly affecting children. And so, we step in at that point and we say there’s accountability for that. I actually think it is not at all a step back from accountability, it’s just using different kinds of accountability, ones that we’re already very familiar with, even for other issues. You think about something like adultery, adultery is clearly sinful in the Bible. It always impacts more than just one person. It is incredibly destructive in society and in families, and yet we have not chosen to incarcerate everyone who commits adultery. We don’t look at that and say, “It’s no big deal.” And we don’t say, “Well, people aren’t accountable.” We say, “Yes, they’re accountable and it’s a really big deal, but we also recognise that putting someone in prison isn’t really the right response to adultery. We need to address that grievous harm in a different way than through incarceration.” I think that’s some of the nuance I think we’re… For me, I had never thought about that before. In my mind growing up, what I thought was the goal is to enact biblical morality in our laws. When we really get to the ideal place, it will be that sort of the Bible and the laws of the nation are in the same place. I never stopped to think, “Wait, what would that mean?” That would actually mean that all of us would be breaking the law because we’re all sinners and we wouldn’t have anybody left on the outside, we would all be in prison. So clearly there’s a line there where we decide, “Wait a second, no, the law and prison is not meant to try to keep us from sinning or to keep us from making any bad choices.” And I think this is one issue where we have used the criminal justice system in a way that’s actually increasing the level of harm in people’s lives rather than actually helping them find healing and make better decisions.

Brendan Corr
That’s interesting. That last comment is suggesting that we are weaponizing the law to cause greater harm. I want to come back and ask you… Some of our conversation has made me think of a book I read called Respectable Sins and the notion of how western Christianity does demonise certain behaviours and turns a blind eye or an understanding nod to other sins. I want to ask you to give some thoughts as to why drugs have been the focus. But if I can ask you a little bit more, what I think I’m hearing in some of your responses and some of your reflections on this scenario, when a conservative Christian is decriminalised, it flashes red warnings about opening the torrent of imports of illegal drugs and it is going to turn the black market into the open market. There is that fear for free market use of drugs. I wondered whether, as you were describing, it’s the notion of changing the penalties rather than decriminalising, de-panelizing. I don’t actually think that’s a word, but do you understand that nuance or that difference? What’s your thoughts about why decriminalising things is such a factor that we have to worry about?

Christina Dent
Yeah, so for me, I think about it as there’s a sliding scale of policy solutions that could reduce harm. I am one who is willing to say, “Hey, we might be able to work together to get halfway to where I think we should ultimately be.” And, hey, if we could get halfway there in a particular place, that’s great. Let’s take whatever small step people are willing to take. But for me, a big part of why I landed as far down that line of sliding scale of solutions as I have and I would say drug possession should not be a criminal offence and that drug markets should be slowly brought back into legally regulated markets, the way that I got there was in beginning to trace the trail of harm related to some of the biggest categories of harm that we associate with drugs: crime, overdose, addiction. When I started to look at where crime related to drugs come from, the vast majority of it comes from the underground market that drugs have been forced into because they’re not allowed to be sold in legally regulated markets. And so they switch markets. They don’t go away because consumers still want to buy them and demand drives supply, and so the underground market picks up that market and says, “Great, we will sell the drugs.” They’re not regulated. There’s no licensing, there’s no nothing. It’s whoever wants to sell them they can sell them to anyone, they can sell whatever they want to, they can cut it with whatever they want to, they can put fentanyl in it. There are no regulations at all. It is a complete absence of any kind of control when you put a drug into the underground market. But it does provide all of that consumer cash going into criminal organisations. So you end up having about $650 billion a year in the underground drug market. All of that money is going to people who are breaking the law. Gangs, cartels, terrorist organisations, all of them receive primarily funding from drug prohibition from that underground drug market. So in thinking about how to reduce crime, the vast majority of that crime related to drugs doesn’t come from people taking drugs and committing crime, it comes from the market and the forces of that market operating on the underground market outside of the rule of law. And so thinking about how to reduce crime, I became convinced that underground drug markets are one of the biggest catalysts of crime that we have in our world. And when I look at the overdose death rates, which are absolutely tragic, particularly here in the US where fentanyl is such a big problem, we look at why people are dying of overdose. And when you look at the numbers of people who are dying and what they have in their system, they have drugs that they bought illegally. Very few people are dying from drugs that they bought legally because when you buy them legally, you can dose them appropriately. If you get something from a regulated… You get a pill bottle and you know exactly what’s in it and you know how much to take and you know how much is going to get you high or buzzed or whatever, and you know what is going to kill you If you take it. In the underground drug market, you have none of that control. You buy a baggie of something or a pill that has been pressed with what you hope is whatever the drug you think you’re buying, but you have no way of knowing. And so, we have so many people who are dying from contamination, and the contamination is a direct result of that underground drug market that they’re buying from. So here in the US we have cracked down considerably on the pathways to buying opioids legally. But what we’ve seen is now illegal drug use has doubled in the last 20 years in the US. That is not a win. We might be able to point to opioid prescriptions and say, “Look, we’re writing fewer prescriptions.” But we’ve got way more people dying and way more people using drugs that they bought on the street outside of legal markets. So we have increased crime, we have increased overdose rates. And then thinking about addiction rates, I started to learn about what causes addiction and that so little of it is the actual drug. So much of it is what’s going on in a person’s life that is leading them to want to numb the way that they feel. And so when you think about the deepest addictions, I now think about the deepest addictions are often the result of the deepest pain. So people who have been through the most in their life, often starting with many, many things that happened to them that they had no control over, things done to them, not choices that they made, and they’re trying to grapple with that as adults. It might be a result of childhood trauma. I was talking with a guy and he said that his addiction started when he moved to a new city and he didn’t know anyone. He had just been kind of recreationally using before that, was never a problem. But he moved and he got really lonely and now he didn’t have a social community and he didn’t have other ways of filling those needs in himself, and so his casual use became a very negative addiction. It doesn’t have to be that you had a terrible childhood or anything like that, and certainly people with difficult experiences in their childhoods, not everyone becomes addicted. But we know risk factor wise that the number one reason people become addicted is because they are trying to numb the way that they are feeling about other things in their life. That’s what really broke my heart because we’ve been saying, “Okay, if we just arrest them, if we put them in jail, if we put them in jail for longer, if we take away every good and positive thing in their life, let’s take away their driver’s licence. How can we make their life as hard and painful as possible?” And then we’re frustrated that it doesn’t stop people’s drug use. That is a consistent frustration with law enforcement that we talk to. They’re so frustrated. They arrest people, they put them in jail, they take them out of jail, and it doesn’t stop the drug use. It makes sense because we’re trying to use pain and trauma to solve a problem that’s made worse by pain and trauma. The criminal justice system is a good tool for some things. But for this issue of drug use, it actually ends up for most people causing a lot more risk for them to become addicted or deepen their addiction than it does actually helping them stop.

Brendan Corr
Christina, I respect the depth of thought and reflection that you’ve obviously gone through in this reconstruction. You speak very passionately and persuasively, and that’s a wonderful thing. In the face of that, when you’re talking and you are identifying that the problem of drug overuse or even casual drug use is indicative of deeper social issues and deeper personal issues and issues of identity and trauma, coming from somebody with a Christian faith, where is the place of salvation and entering relationship with Jesus and being made whole at your deepest level? What role does that story have in fixing this problem?

Christina Dent
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’ll say too that I am completely convinced that Christians can come to different conclusions about the right solutions on this. I think that’s just really important to say because I don’t like the weaponization of the law or of Scripture to say God is on my side. I am positive there are people who are working on the opposite side of this issue that also believe that the Lord has led them to that place and He wants them to do that. I am doing my best to put forth the kinds of solutions that I think best value life and best help people find their most thriving life, which is what I want for them as people made in the image of God. And yet, I absolutely believe that Christians can have different perspectives on that, and that is completely okay. I completely forgot what you just asked me, but I wanted to go there. What were you asking about?

Brendan Corr
The role of being born again.

Christina Dent
Faith, yes, okay. Actually, I end up talking about this in my book, and I think probably here in the South is maybe the most controversial part of what is in my book, Curious, which is talking about the role of faith in recovery. So much of the way that we think of recovery here, especially in the Bible Belt of the United States, is that people must have a spiritual experience, they must come to know Jesus or they will never be free from their addiction. That makes me really sad because I think it can hinder people’s recovery and hinder their faith by holding hostage recovery so that you must be saved, you must come to Jesus or you’re never going to be able to exit this heroin addiction or fentanyl addiction or whatever it is that they’re struggling with. That is not true. People exit addiction all the time who are atheists, who are Buddhists. There’s all kinds of different religious perspectives. I think as a Christian I would say everyone needs Jesus. That’s what I believe, that’s what the Christian faith teaches. And yet, I don’t think that people should be held and pigeonholed into just this one pathway because I think it can set them up for incredible disillusionment when they become a Christian because that’s what they’ve been told they must do and then it doesn’t solve their addiction. There are many, many Christians who are struggling with addiction today, and there are people who are not believers who are finding recovery. It’s not that I give God this, He gives me that. This is not a transaction of I will give Him my faith and He will give me the end of my addiction. All of us are going to be struggling with different things in our life. Some of us are never going to find the end of that struggle until we die and enter glory. And so I think it’s important to offer people the opportunity. A spiritual experience, a saving experience can be absolutely the thing that immediately turns a person’s life around. And those tend to be the stories that we tell. We tell the most extreme stories. No matter what it is we’re talking about, drugs or whatever, the stories we tell are the stories that are the most rags to riches, the most black and white, the most this and then that. Most people’s recovery journey is not that way. Most people’s recovery journey is the same way most of us grow spiritually, which is fits and starts and steps back and steps forward. And you look back and you go, “Oh my gosh, I really was thinking I was going to be way more mature in my faith at this point in my life than I was. And yet, here I am, I’m still struggling with a lot of those same things. I’ve made some progress here. I’ve not made progress there.” That’s the way most people exit addiction. Most people who exit addiction do so without going to treatment. It’s called spontaneous recovery. It happens for a lot of people as they enter their late 30s. Again, we don’t want people struggling with addiction for 10 or 15 years until they hit their late 30s. And yet, if they can stay alive long enough, most people will exit addiction as their lives sort of calm down, as their brain is fully developed and life begins to maybe get a little bit more stability to it, a little more coming out of those early adult years. And so I want for people to find saving faith, and I also want them to find a pathway to recovery and to recognise those can be connected but they don’t have to be connected. We want healthy faith and we want healthy recovery. I think that forced marriage between those things can be really toxic for faith and recovery. We don’t want that for either one. We want faith no matter if the addiction ends or not, and recovery, even if that is not a pathway of faith, we want people to live healthy lives.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, I think Christina, what I’m hearing is a very earthy, gritty, real look at the touching of faith, the touching of the divine and the human, that at any point, whether it’s those that are yet to find faith or those that have faith, there is an authentic… When I use the word fragility, I don’t mean that it’s vulnerable, but it is subject to our humanity. Whether it’s strong or whether it’s weak, that’s part of the reality of living a life of faith. Yet, I want to come back and ask you this idea, this respectable sins, why it is that the church, the Christian world, society itself has found it hard to change its views about illegal drugs, interestingly, even in comparison to the legal drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and those sorts of things that you’ve mentioned. But I wonder, before I get you to reflect on that point, whether you’ve had any change in your perception of some of the great stories of Scripture in relation to your journey. Has it changed the way you see the story of the Good Samaritan?

Christina Dent
Yeah, I think it changes the way that I see the stories of Scripture where you over and over again see the person that society has cast out and they are the ones that Jesus holds up as the ones He’s leaning towards, the ones He’s going to, the ones He is most protective of. And the ones who He is most critical of are Christina at 20 years old who had the world all figured out and had, everybody, if they would just act right, life would turn out well for them. And if they weren’t acting right then, well, that’s judgement coming your way. I read those stories in Scripture now… I can’t get through the story of the woman coming in and wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair without crying. It is just the level of vulnerability of just coming to Jesus in front of other people in such a humiliating public owning of her life and her story and yet knowing Jesus is accepting of me, Jesus is the one that I am bringing to my most vulnerable self too, and I will find safety there. That is just incredible to me. And yet, the people who thought they had all the right answers and checked all the right boxes, they couldn’t see Him for who He really was. The people who had nothing to offer and had been cast out were the ones that had the greatest vision for who this person was and for bringing themselves as they were without trying to get all cleaned up and just coming as they were because that is what Jesus came for. And they could see that. That to me is so beautiful. The more people that I have gotten to know in recovery, the more I see just the incredible people that they are, who have been humbled, who have seen themselves do things they never thought they would do, who have been incredibly remorseful and regret many of the things that they did. And yet, rising out of those ashes of decisions and being able to, for many of them, be just wonderfully big-hearted, compassionate, kind, resilient people. They’re some of the most amazing people that I’ve ever met. For most of my life, I couldn’t have told you one person I knew in recovery. It was just not part of my world at all. I think my world was worse off for that. Meeting people who have suffered and have come through that and have found hope on the other side is incredibly inspiring. I always hope that my work is an honour to people like Joanne who have done the hard work of finding and maintaining recovery, making that decision every day, “I’m not going to use. I’m not going to use it. Today, I’m not going to use,” day after day, year after year, it is just incredible.

Brendan Corr
It’s a wonderful form of courage in itself, isn’t it?

Christina Dent
It is. Yes.

Brendan Corr
Before we finish up, I wonder, have your experiences and your reflections considered what it has been about the drug trade or the drug problem that has resisted the sense of reworking, reimagining that you’re advocating? Why is it such a sticking point?

Christina Dent
I think for people that grew up maybe in a similar culture to what I did, drugs in general have been talked about, written about, portrayed as a moral issue our whole lives. There really has not been a sort of a, “Hey, pragmatically, is this working? Is the approach working?” It’s just that drugs are bad, therefore they should be illegal. Therefore, people who use them are also bad. And so, in my mind, and this was one of the first questions I got when I started talking about this publicly on Facebook, somebody said, “But wait a second, is this just like abortion? If we’re going to take a step back on drugs, is it just saying people go, ‘My body, my choice,’ kind of thing?” And so for me, I think we have misunderstood that when we’re talking about substance use, we’re talking about something most of us do all the time. We ingest Tylenol, which is a drug that’s intended to change the way that you feel. We drink coffee, which is a mild drug with caffeine in it. We drink alcohol, which most Christians would say that’s okay. The Bible speaks against drunkenness, but not against alcohol use. Alcohol is a drug. As much as we like to say alcohol and drugs, that’s not correct, alcohol is a drug. It’s one of the most deadly and harmful drugs that there is on the planet. And yet, we have taken an approach to that that says, “We’re going to let people make that decision to use alcohol, and we’re only going to step in if they start harming someone else.” Or we only consider it to be a moral problem if they are misusing that drug, if it is negatively impacting their life and their family. And so we recognise some kinds of substance use that’s not a moral issue. And yet, for other kinds, we have said that it is a moral issue. I think we need to reckon that all substance use is on a continuum. All substance use is meant to change the way that you feel. It’s in very different ways, certainly. And so, we can’t say drug use is just wrong. And even if you could, we still have to go back to that question of, well, there’s a lot of things that are wrong. If you look at The Ten Commandments, only two of those are actually illegal, like criminally liable, murder and theft. The rest of them, we don’t try to enforce with the law. We enforce it in other ways, through social norms, through teaching in our homes, through teaching in our churches. There are lots of different ways that we can teach those things, but we haven’t tried to use the law. And so there is a long history, even if you go back 100 years, this Christian moral tradition and also the use of drugs as something to blame when other things are going on that we don’t like. So when we think about some of the actual core issues behind drug use of purposelessness, of hopelessness, of unresolved pain and trauma, of grief, loneliness, those are really hard issues to deal with. It is much easier to blame a drug than it is to actually deal with why people are using that drug. There’s an author who studied drugs and addiction for his whole career, 50 years, and he says, “Every now and then, it’s just very convenient to have a drug scare.” That’s not to say the one we have currently with fentanyl is just a scare, it’s a very real loss of life, but the focus on fentanyl rather than on why are so many people using drugs right now, it is just much harder. I asked him, “Why is it that we don’t actually look at the real issues?” and he said, “That’s really painful. It’s really hard to do.” And so we have this tradition of thinking about it morally, we have a long history of blaming drugs for lots of other issues that we don’t want to deal with, and we’ve really lost our cultural knowledge that there even are other issues there. When we think of addiction, we think, “We just got to get that person off the drugs.” Well, you can get a person off the drugs for weeks and months at a time, but why do they relapse? Well, because it’s doing something for them. There’s something else there that’s driving that. It’s not about just getting the drugs out of their body. It’s about healing the real reasons for that. I think it’s something we really have to push against and recognise that the law is not the right tool to teach everything we want to teach. And we need to even reconsider that thought of all drug use is sinful or all drug use is bad because we just have to recognise almost all of us are using some sort of drug. It may not be psychoactive. People like to say, “Well, a glass of wine, that’s not really taking a drug.” There’s a reason you like that glass of wine. There’s a reason you feel relaxed after you drink it. It’s because you’re under the influence of depression. Nobody in the history of the world has ever drank alcohol without feeling its effects as a depressant. If you only drink a little, you’re only going to feel a mild impact. But alcohol is a poison that slows your body’s systems down. That’s why people enjoy that glass of wine or that beer. We just have to recognise that that is what’s happening, we are enjoying the effect of a substance on our body. And so certainly at some point Scripture is clear, with alcohol certainly, there’s a point at which that does slide into sinful behaviour. I would imagine the same is true for other substances, but holding that middle ground, not sliding one way or the other I think is really important for us to be able to understand a little more nuance. There’s a pastor in Canada, he says, “I tell people, ‘We’re all substance users; it just depends on the degree.‘” That’s hard for us to take in. That’s not in any way to discount the harm of addiction or anything like that. He works with people that are struggling with addiction. He’s very close to this issue. Yet we need to recognise some of the ways that we have tried to swing the pendulum very far between quote unquote “people like us” and people who are using substances.

Brendan Corr
I think that’s one of the things that I’ve appreciated about the flow of this conversation, Christina, is that it has at many points reinforced the commonality that we share, that we have all sinned and fallen short, and that we all do those things that we’d rather not do from Romans 7 and that the acceptable addictions that we might have, whether it’s to coffee or to people’s approval and being respected, they are equally expressions of the inherent weakness in our sinful personalities, our sinful nature. If people wanted to know a little bit more about the work you were doing, the End It For Good organisation, let our listeners know how they might be able to connect and do some follow-up.

Christina Dent
Yeah, you can go to enditforgood.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, I send those out every two weeks or so. You can get a copy of my book on Amazon, it’s called Curious: A Foster Mom’s Discovery of An Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction. And if you’re thinking I’m not really a policy person, that’s okay because the book is not really a policy book. This is my story. I call it a memoir on a mission. It’s my story of growing up, how I thought, meeting Joanne, what I learned along the way. It tells other people’s stories to illustrate some of the things I learned where my story doesn’t illustrate those things and invites people to consider. This issue touches almost all of us in one way or another. And even if we come to different conclusions on the solutions, we need to come to those conclusions understanding the full breadth of the picture that we’re looking at, and making sure that we understand the actual cause and effect of harm and healing and how we can get more of that. So you can get that on Amazon. There’s links to that on the website also. And there’s also freebies on the website. We’ve got several freebies. There’s one for family members of people struggling with an addiction, ways that they can help them that are evidence-based, research-based. We’ve got one on having productive conversations on polarising topics, which is what we try to do all the time. This is a tough conversation. People have very strong opinions about what we do with drugs and addiction. We’ve learned from 50 different events that we’ve hosted over the last five years what makes having a great conversation and being able to communicate. Whether it’s on drug policy or whatever it is that you’re passionate about, all of us should want to talk about that in a way that draws people towards us, that draws us into good dialogue where we actually are engaging, we’re thinking, we’re listening. We’re losing that, and that is a really, really sad thing. We’re just screaming at each other. That is not helpful. If you want more people to take your position, screaming at them, let me just tell you, it doesn’t win anybody over. But it’s possible that you can win people over or that you can at least help them understand what you’re saying by approaching that in a way that invites conversation. And so we’ve got some great freebies there. And you can find us on social media all over the place. End It For Good is on social media. I’m there. Would love to hear from you. You can shoot us an email at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you, hear your thoughts and would love to engage.

Brendan Corr
Thank you, Christina. Just as we close, I’m really glad that God hadn’t finished with the 20-year-Old Christina and continued working. I’m really glad that for neither you nor I today are we the finished product and then He can.

Christina Dent
Thank you so much, Brendan. Thanks for having me.