Ending the Drug War
by Rev. Colin Bossen, November 7, 2010
The first memorial service I ever conducted was for a married couple. They were friends of mine. I will call them Jane and Craig. Jane committed suicide. Six months later Craig died of a heroine overdose. They would both be alive today if our nation's drug policies were different.
Like her husband, Jane had a heroine problem. I met her not long after she was released from prison. She had been busted for possession and served a year's time. After Jane got out on probation, Jane and Craig moved into the apartment next door to mine. Jane was longtime friends with my roommate. She and her husband quickly became part of my life.
The first six months that I knew Jane and Craig were delightful. After work I would often drop by their apartment for a cup of tea. Sometimes they would come over to share a meal with me and my roommate. They helped me through the end of terrible romantic relationship and, more than once, Jane tried to set me up on a date with one of her friends.
Jane and Craig were warm and personable people. They took pleasure in their dogs--two miniature poodles named Meat and Sweetie Pie that Jane, who worked for a dog grooming business, would occasionally dye bright pink or electric blue--and enjoyed discussing philosophy, theology and poetry.
Several of our other friends rented apartments in the same building. There was a constant interchange between households. It was not uncommon for a Saturday afternoon barbecue to become a late night party. Nor was it out of the ordinary to fix yourself breakfast only to discover that a neighbor or two had stopped by to join you.
All of this began to change when one of Craig's friends brought some heroine to a party. Jane and Craig had been clean and sober for several months. Thinking that they had beaten their addictive patterns with the drug, they tried some. Soon enough, they were hooked again.
The change was noticeable. Jane and Craig started spending more time alone in their apartment. They stopped coming over. They discouraged others from dropping by. Within a few months they had closed in on themselves. The only people they wanted to see were those who shared their drug habits. Everyone else was shut out of their world.
Then Jane was busted for possession a second time. She had been traveling from Chicago to her family farm in Wisconsin when she was caught with the drugs. The violation of the terms of her probation, coupled with her new offense, meant that she faced a minimum of five years in prison. Her first term had been rough. She did not want to go back. One afternoon, out on bail and awaiting trial, she went into the family farmhouse and shot herself in the heart with a shotgun.
Craig heard the shot and found her body. He was never the same. He retreated more and more into his habit. One evening, about six months after his wife's death, he got some bad heroine. He overdosed and died in a college dormitory men's room while visiting a friend.
When Craig died I was in my first quarter of seminary. Our mutual friends asked me to conduct a memorial service for him. When I began to plan Craig's service it became clear that the service should honor Jane as well.
Jane's funeral had been conducted by her fundamentalist Baptist uncle. The service had had little to do with her. During it no mention was made of her drug addiction problem or her suicide. Instead her uncle used the eulogy and the liturgy as opportunities to try to win souls for Christ. He told us that Jane had been saved and gone to heaven because of her relationship with Jesus. Those of us who wanted to see Jane in the afterlife were instructed to get our souls right with Christ. Then we too would ascend to heaven.
Jane was an adamant atheist who had rejected her family's Christian fundamentalism. A fierce bohemian and sometimes sex worker, she did not resemble the caricature of a pious Christian that her uncle created. Her husband and most of her friends left her funeral deeply offended. I was not able to attend, but I have been told that the funeral organized by Craig's equally fundamentalist family was not much better.
The memorial service I conducted was the polar opposite of the funeral Jane's uncle had officiated. In classic Unitarian Universalist fashion, instead of focusing on the promise of heaven, I tried to give space for Jane and Craig's friends to grieve. The facts of suicide and drug addiction were not hidden. We told stories, read poems and gave each other permission to cry and acknowledge the finality of death. For many in attendance the service was cathartic.
In our society we treat drug abuse as a crime rather than a disease. Attempts to control drug use are focused on punishment rather than treatment. The rhetoric of war is marshaled, the police militarized and foreign policy misdirected in an effort to maintain the prohibition of drugs.
The costs to society are catastrophic. As much as half the money spent by law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is related to drug-prohibition. Families are routinely torn apart as parents with drug problems are imprisoned and separated from their children rather than given treatment. Criminal organizations flourish off huge drug profits. Whole regions of drug producing countries like Columbia and Mexico approach political collapse as criminal syndicates flush with drug money engage in open warfare with the police. Elsewhere drug money provides funding to terrorist organizations. As Allen Ginsburg's poem "CIA Dope Calypso" brilliantly depicts, drugs and drug money have been used to intentionally destabilize governments and advance dubious political ends.
The drug war has failed. It is time for a change of course. It is time to stop treating drug use as a crime and recognize drug abuse for what it is, a disease. It is time to end the prohibition on drugs. Doing so will save our country money and save lives. Resources now spent on drug enforcement will be free to used for education, urban development and drug treatment. People who struggle with addiction will more easily receive the services they need to address their disease.
Though it may not seem so at first glance, there are theological issues at stake in the war on drugs. Much of the philosophy behind our nation's penal system and enforcement of drug laws is rooted in old Calvinist understandings of human depravity and the elect. More than one scholar has suggested that the roots of the prohibition of drugs, and by extension the drug war, are religious.
Such scholars point to the efforts of Protestant missionaries in Asia to prohibit the use of opium in the early 20th century. The prohibition of opium in China and the Philippines took place slightly before it did in the United States. Some in the missionary community blamed opium for their own failure at spreading the Christian gospel. Instead of examining their message and trying to discern whether or not it resonated with those they hoped to convert, some missionaries directed their frustrations to opium and opium users. After years of work, they successfully convinced the Dowager Empress of China to outlaw the drug--a decision thought to be partially responsible for the downfall of the last Chinese imperial house. Their success abroad emboldened their efforts to outlaw drugs at home. At the end of the 19th century drugs were legal throughout the United States. A few decades later they were illegal.
A steady and consistent stream within Christian theology has been the rejection of bodily pleasure as wicked and sinful. Whole schools of Christian thought reject the body as a corrupt and imperfect vessel--the source of human disobedience to the divine will. The influential 4th century theologian Augustine contrasted the "standard of the flesh" with the "standard of the spirit." Following the standard of the flesh--embracing bodily pleasure--led away from God while following the standard of the spirit--denying bodily pleasure--led towards the deity.
The apostle Paul also believed that to pursue the pleasures of the flesh was to step away from God. He wrote, in his first letter to the Thessalonians, "This is the will of God, that you should be holy: you must abstain from fornication; each of you must learn to gain mastery over his body, to hallow and honor it, not giving way to lust like the pagans who know nothing of God...". Honoring the body and honoring God meant not giving oneself over to physical delights. Seeking physical pleasure was a pagan, not a Christian practice, and its pursuit endangered one's status in the Christian community. As Paul wrote elsewhere in his letter to the Galatians, "the works of the flesh are: such things as fornication, impurity, lust...drunkenness, drunken orgies, and so on. I warned you before, and I warn you again, that those who behave in such ways will never have a place in God's kingdom."
Such theology should make it easy to understand why many religious leaders were at the forefront of the movement to prohibit the use of drugs and alcohol in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also helps to explain why many believed, in the years leading up to Prohibition, that alcohol was the source of most social ills. If sin was rooted in bodily pleasure then the bodily pleasure of drink could be held responsible for much of what was wrong with the world. When the prohibition of alcohol went into effect, in 1920, the leading evangelist Billy Sunday proclaimed, "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs."
The prohibition of alcohol did not lead to the end of slums or prisons. Instead, prohibition fueled a profitable black market for alcohol that led to open turf wars between criminal syndicates. Alcohol consumption actually increased during the Prohibition era, as did deaths related to it. The lack of regulation, and the profits to be made, meant that under prohibition alcoholic beverages became more potent and less safe. There is no indication that family life or society became more stable while alcohol was illegal.
This pattern has repeated itself with the prohibition of drugs. International news outlets consistently contain stories of bloody pitched battles between law enforcement officials and drug gangs. To ease smuggling and maximize profits, drugs increase in potency. Generally, levels of drug use are higher in countries with stricter anti-drug laws. Depending on the substance, usage is two or three times more prevalent in the United States, with some of the strictest laws of an industrialized country, than in the Netherlands, with the laxest.
The prohibition of alcohol was, and the prohibition of drugs is, bad policy. Instead of acknowledging that drug use will occur in our society the government pretends that it can be eradicated. The human desire for bodily pleasure--drugs are pleasurable or they would not be popular--is denied and criminalized. The apostle Paul's desire for bodily purity becomes state policy.
Just as the prohibition of drugs is partially rooted in questionable theology so too is its policing. Our nation's penal system resembles something wrought by Calvinist theology.
Calvinism is the school of Christian thought fathered by the Protestant Reformer John Calvin--a theocrat noted for, among other things, ordering the execution of Michael Servetus, an early Unitarian theologian. Core points of Calvin's theology include beliefs in the utter depravity of humanity, predestination and the existence of an elect. In Calvin's understanding, humans are born wicked and sinful. Only by turning to Jesus Christ and placing faith in him can we escaped the impending everlasting torments of Hell. God is all powerful, all knowing and all seeing. God's knowledge means that He--God is male in this theology--has known since the beginning of time who has, in Calvin's words, "the Spirit of God" engraved upon their heart. These people are the elect, predestined or chosen by God for divine favor and ascent into heaven. Everyone else is doomed to an eternity of suffering. There is no free will.
To an outsider, the logic of Calvinism makes little sense. It preaches both that sinners will be held accountable for their sins and that God has decided who is and will be a sinner. Nonetheless, its doctrine of divine punishment has been formative for our society. Instead of seeking to reform individuals our penal system punishes them. Impure members of society, criminals are removed from the body politic. The practice of the death penalty is the most extreme result of this reasoning. The death penalty resembles God's vengeance of eternal torment. It should not be surprising, therefore, that many of the strongest proponents of capital punishment were Calvinist clergy.
Nor, perhaps, should it be that surprising that our Universalist forebears number among the strongest opponents of capital punishment. The theology of a God who loves everyone and punishes no one with eternal damnation has been a powerful motive to reform the penal system. As one of the first American universalists, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush wrote, "A belief in God's universal love to all his creatures, and that he will finally restore all those of them that are miserable to happiness, is a polar truth. It leads to truths upon all subjects... It establishes the equality of mankind--it abolishes the punishment of death for any crime--and converts jails into houses of repentance and reformation."
There are strong echoes of the theological differences between orthodox Christians and Universalists in the debate over drug use and abuse. Classifying drug abuse as a crime and placing criminals in prison is not unlike trying to create a ritually pure body. The ritual impurity is thrust out of the body, in this case removed from the civic body, instead of being acknowledged as part of it. Lifting up punishment as a consequence of and a solution to crime has direct parallels with believing in a God who punishes the sinful with the flames of Hell.
In contrast, treating drug abuse as a disease that can be mediated with medical treatment, psychotherapy and addiction counseling resembles Universalist theological teachings. Writing about the correlation between Universalist theology and secular punishment, the early 20th century minister Quillen Shinn declared, "the great principle of Universalism...[is] that punishment is not to satisfy justice or vindicate the law, but to cure the criminal." Diseases can be cured. Crime cannot.
Sometimes I imagine what would have happened to Craig and Jane if our nation's drug policy more closely resembled Universalist theology than Calvinism. If we legalized and regulated drugs the lives of drug abusers in our society would be radically different. Instead of facing jail, Jane would have been able to easily receive support for her addiction. Craig would not have died from an overdose. The impure drugs that killed him would have been replaced with safer forms. Perhaps neither of them would have ever tried heroine to begin with. The lower rates of heroine use in countries with more liberal policies towards the drug suggest that in a different world Jane and Craig might not have been exposed to it in the first place.
I cannot go back and save Jane and Craig. Nor, beyond speaking my own truth, can I change our country's drug policies. What I can do is preach a Universalist theology about addiction. It is a disease. Any of you who struggle with it, or who have loved ones who do, can seek treatment. You are not cursed for all time. You can change your life for the better.
In the hopes that those who need to hear that message can, I say Amen.