Curious

      Happily many people from widely different backgrounds and experiences have reached the same conclusions that I have about the failure of our country’s policy of Drug Prohibition.  One of them is Ms. Christina Dent who lives with her young family in Mississippi.  Ms. Dernt has written a book entitled CURIOUS: A Foster Mom’s Discovery of an unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction (End It For Good, Inc., 2023), and I strongly recommend it to anyone who cares.  The story starts by us seeing Ms. Dent as a deeply Christian mom with two young boys, but who feels driven also to be a Foster Mother.  So she and her husband applied to the appropriate social workers and were soon the foster parents of a newly-born little boy.  The boy’s birth mother was addicted to illicit drugs, so custody was taken from her and vested with the Dents.  Ms. Dent asked herself why would a loving mother ever put herself into the situation of losing custody of her child by using drugs?  So the mother must not have really loved that baby!  But over the coming months the Dents saw in the child’s supervised visitation with the birth mother that the mother cared so deeply that she was simply changing away from her decade’s long use of these drugs.  And the birth mother was so successful that within a year she re-obtained custody.  And she is continuing to be that same new person, with tears flowing every time that she and her son visit the Dents. 

      But then, as she tells it, this profound experience changed Christina Dent’s heart.  People who use these illicit drugs are actually people.  Putting them in jail for that usage doesn’t often help anyone.  And she goes on to discover that “Seizing drugs doesn’t stop the sale of drugs.”  Then she quoted one of the men she met on her journey of discovery and who had been addicted to drugs for several decades as telling her: “Drugs are not hard to obtain.  Never in my years and years of drug use was it hard to get drugs.  (Even when law enforcement seized huge quantities of drugs) they’ve never interrupted the drug supply.  The void was filled immediately. We knew that as users. There was always someone else waiting.  No one had a worry that one day all the police would get all the drugs.”  So as Ms. Dent continued on her learning campaign, she came to the understanding that people used these drugs for many reasons, such as depression, suffering from some mental illnesses, were bored or wanted to be a part of the “in-crowd,” etc.  But they all were people, and should be respected accordingly.  Of course, if they burglarized someone’s house, or drove under the influence of any mind-altering substances they should be held accountable.  But otherwise they should be understood, and helped humanely.  We all have our different backgrounds and beliefs, but this story was deeply refreshing to me.  How about to you?  I strongly recommend you get and read this book because I believe that you will never see this situation in the same way again.

Thought for the week: Whoever said “Out of sight out of mind” never had a spider disappear in their bedroom.