Catechism     Essentials 2014     Hands Up     Diet of Worms     The New Black     Pulpit Freedom     Invictus     Stupid People     Weed     State of The Union     Donate

Click To Play Video

Coming to church stinking of ganja is a terrible testimony. It’s also a cry for help. This never should have been a legal argument to begin with, or even an ethical one. Having removed the former, the state has now reshaped the latter. Neither should impact or reshape our interpretation of God’s word. Christians should be anti-drunk, anti-wasted. This behavior abuses your body and denies God’s sovereignty on your life. We struggle with personal behavior and/or shortcomings which do not please God. This is part of the human condition, our carnal imperfection which can only be made perfect through the Holy Spirit. This is a conversation the church should have been having all along: what’s the argument against Christians smoking pot?

Pastors: you ARE going to be asked about this,

so suit up. My biggest problem with Colorado’s decriminalization of recreational marijuana use is how recklessly and irresponsibly the new laws were implemented. The legalization of marijuana poses a substance abuse threat of inestimable proportions. So far as I have seen, Colorado has done little or nothing to prepare for the unknown, the potential tsunami of next-generation pot users who will escalate to become drug addicts. It is as shortsighted as President Bush’s Iraq obsession [LINK], which has created hundreds of thousands more Osama bin Ladens in the children of murdered innocents. Bush has created exponentially, unfathomably, more enemies than he has killed. Legalize pot? Sure. But where’s the prep work? Where’s the multi-million dollar ad campaign to educate children? Where are the toughening of laws against illegal pot sales, especially sales to children?

The law is intended to please college kids and middle-aged bong-heads. It’s most devastating impact will be on four-year old toddlers. Colorado will soon be awash in drug money, billions the state will most certainly end up spending on the pursuant exponential explosion of drug abuse in the generation to come. The implementation of this law seems terribly shortsighted, legislating today at the cost of tomorrow.

Let’s run an actuarial: although the law specifically forbids sale to minors, only a true idiot would presume marijuana use would be confined to adults. Kids, in increasingly younger demographics, have easy access to weed, even more so because of this law which impacts street dealers to whatever degree. These hash slingers will inevitably turn increasing toward a younger market which cannot simply walk into a pot store. Kids learn behavior by observing adults. They want to be more grown-up themselves, so adult behavior (smoking, drinking, sexual conduct) becomes attractive to them long before they even understand what the behavior is or even desire it. Removing the legal penalty for pot re-shapes the moral question of pot. Increased usage among adults, even those who teach their children that this is adult behavior only for grown-ups (which makes the behavior that much more attractive to kids), will inevitably lead to increased usage among kids. Dope is readily available to even grade schoolers.

A certain percentage of pot smokers will eventually plateau in their experience. At first they’ll blame it on a bad bag of weed—it was just some lame dope. Two or three bags later, they realize the ganja buzz is no longer enough to satisfy them, so they’ll go looking for stronger weed or combine it with alcohol. Or they’ll start putting additives into their weed to get a stronger kick. Inevitably, a certain percentage of weed smokers will become frustrated with the mild high and move onto something else, something with a bit more bang.

This isn’t pastoral paranoia, these are facts. Even if the vast majority of kids who start smoking pot stay with pot, become The Weed Nation, there is, undeniably, a percentage of these kids who will move on to increasingly harder stuff.

Today’s three and four-year olds will grow up in a world where pot is perfectly legal and where the ethical and moral questions pertaining to it are muddy at best. None of today’s high-fiving pot celebrants can imagine their little Sally turning tricks to feed her addiction, their little Billy nodding in a doorway. But logic tells us this, not some divine revelation or spiritual gift. I’m talking simple common sense: you remove the moral stigma, your numbers explode. You increase access, you increase sampling. You increase sampling, you increase usage. You increase marijuana usage, you increase the subset of users who move on to harder drugs. This means, inevitably, more drug addiction, which will result in more cost to the state (never mind the tragedy of lives lost, increase in crime, and so forth).

Colorado really should not have flipped the switch on legalized pot until they had a billion (with a “B”) dollars in the bank somewhere to fund education, prevention and rehab. I suppose these items must be on an agenda somewhere, but I do not hear anyone at all talking about this. Absent that infrastructure—before turning the key on legalized pot—we are sadly and stupidly putting the cart before the horse, enacting legislation in a civically irresponsible way, and most certainly creating a much bigger problem than we are solving.

Essentials 2014   Diet of Worms   The New Black   Pulpit Freedom   Invictus   Stupid People   WEED   SOTU   Bigotry   Arrogance   Chimera   GOP   Job   Suffering   Venezuela