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.
