ONE TOKE OVER THE LINE ,SWEET JESUS?

Christians aren't stoked on the idea of drug use. Don't believe me?
Try waving a joint under a preacher's nose someday; you'd better be
prepared to hear about how warm your eternal lodgings in the great
hereafter will be. On the sin scale of most Christians, doing drugs is
pretty close to doing sheep. WWJD? Not dope.

The problem is that, for most, the position is kneejerk, based upon as
much critical thinking as bumping into a wall. And, like face-planting
the plaster, the results are less than desirable.

Uncritical thinking leads to muddling issues and slipping into sloppy
conclusions. For the Christian and the question of drugs, this
typically involves making no distinction between immoral and illegal
- -- going all gung-ho for escalating the war on drugs, leading the
choir in "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as we rush to jail the junkies,
desolate the dealers and spray defoliant on half of South America to
ruin the coca crop.

This uncritical jiggle of the brain flab is, however, not good enough.
True Christians don't operate on gut feelings, societal impulse,
cultural conditioning or whether Aunt Margaret boxed your ears as a
teen-ager for saying smoking crack was cool. As "People of the Book,"
the overriding question for Christians should be, is smack scriptural?
What, after all, does the Bible say about dope?

The moral question: Is gumming a bong bad? Holy Writ is riddled with
condemnation for drunkenness. Harsh words against getting sloshed are
so plentiful and obvious that even a one-eyed inebriant should be able
to spot a few references on a drunken thumb-through. And prohibitive
and condemnatory statements against elbow tipping and booze bibbing
are just as severe as they are plentiful. A few verses in no
particular order:

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation (Ephesians
5:18)

Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness
(Romans 13:13)

Woe to the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading
flower of its glorious beauty, which is at the head of the fertile
valley of those who are overcome with wine! (Isaiah 28:1)

Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality,
impurity, sensuality ... envyings, drunkenness, carousings, and things
like these ... those who practice such things shall not inherit the
kingdom of God (Galatians 5:19, 21)

Some may object that these passages condemn alcohol, not drugs. Forget
about it. Two principles in Scripture blow a slobbery, wet razzberry in
the direction of this objection. For starters, notice that word
"dissipation" in Ephesians? This falls in the same category of taking
things to excess, about which Christians are continually warned in
Scripture. Dissipative behavior is pursuing indulgences -- like doping
or drinking -- to the point of harm. Many drugs, without doubt, bring
harm upon the user. LSD-induced flashbacks, for instance, are evidence
of lasting mental harm -- not a brain upgrade. Those that don't bugger
your gray matter usually run afoul of the second point: sobriety.

Drugs do funny things to your mind -- why else do you think folks drop
acid, snort lines and tap veins? It sure isn't to feel normal. If so,
it's an extremely expensive way to feel as lame as you did five minutes
before toking that bong. The whole point of drugs is tweak your
perceptions -- and they do.

Drugs can make you feel euphoric (pot), jazzed (meth), invincible
(PCP), mellow (heroin). Much like Dumbo's visions of dancing pink
elephants, drugs can make you hallucinate. Someone I know who suffers
the odd LSD flashback sees walls bend around her. Another woman I know,
sitting doped on morphine, saw large ants the size of 1950s B-movie
horror flick monsters marching around her room.

Likewise, a friend's dad tells the story of when he was big into drugs
during the '60s. Once, while stoned like Gibraltar, he walked into the
bathroom and saw what he described as a demon staring at him from
inside the toilet. A definite spooker if you ask me. The solution was
twofold. First, not having George C. Scott or a suitable exorcist
nearby, he did the next best thing and flushed the john; second, he
cleaned up. (Eventually, he also converted to Christianity and flushed
his wife's herbal pot down the porcelain one, resulting -- as the story
goes -- in his first experience of being persecuted for the faith.)

Perhaps confirming all those stereotypes of being a celestial party-
pooper, God is undeniably concerned with level-headedness. "Wherefore
gird up the loins of your mind, be sober," writes Peter in his first
epistle. Checking my interlinear New Testament, that word "sober" is
"nepho" in the original Greek, which means "self-possessed" and "having
control of your mental faculties."

The Apostle Paul uses the same word, "nepho," in his first letter to
the church at Thessalonica: "... they that be drunken are drunken in
the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the
breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of
salvation."

God doesn't give a hoot how a person gets tweaked -- be it crank, beer,
wine, paint thinner, bourbon, crack, ganja or glue. He doesn't care if
a person is just nursing a gentle buzz or getting flat-out fit-shaced.
For the question of Christian morality, if two tokes on the bong rob
you of your "nepho," that's one toke over the line.

But here's where the issue of puffing skunk bud gets really stinky:
just because something is immoral, does that mean it should be illegal?

The legal question: Should junkies be jailed? Adding new meaning to the
expression "holy smoke," Rev. Oliver Daley of the United Church in
Jamaica recently came out in favor of legalizing marijuana. While
receiving cautious support from fellow Jamaican ministers, if the
nations and persons were switched and it was Billy Graham calling for
legalization, doubtless fellow preachers would be questioning St.
Billy's salvation. For American Christianity, is there any better clue
of a wolf in sheep's clothing?

Because of genuine religious convictions opposing the use of drugs,
Christians fall into the trap of assuming that because dope is bad, it
should therefore be illegal. They get blinded by the blight, so to
speak.

In a discussion of things like prostitution, pornography and drugs,
Christian economist and legal theoretician Gary North (yes, that Gary
North ) argues that there is no such thing as a victimless crime. He
cites fellow economist F.H. Hayek as saying that laws against
victimless crimes are an illegitimate butt-in into people's private
life, "At least where it is not believed that the whole group many be
punished by a supernatural power for the sins of the individual. ..."
Hayek holds to no such being. North, on the other hand, does.

Objecting to Hayek, he writes, "But that's the whole point: such a
community-threatening God does exist."

While North's position is tied to an elaborate and well-detailed
covenant-oriented theology, the Cliff's Notes version of the idea is
this: Snorting coke is sin, and God will punish the community
collectively for it. Basically, everybody gets hammered, in one sense
of the word, because one guy wants to get hammered, in another sense of
the word. As such, North argues that there is biblical justification
for the state to oppose drug use.

North is, however, exposing an interesting prejudice. He is writing in
an attempt to show the relevancy of Old Testament law applied to
modern life. The problem here? While Scripture has clear civil
injunctions against buggery, adultery, getting to "know" the livestock
and other sorts of debauchery, there is no civil injunction against
drunkenness -- or, for our argument, dope.

There is a moral injunction against it if, as I've argued, Scripture's
commands against drunkenness apply to getting blitzed on angel dust.
No doubt getting stupid on tequila as opposed to THC is a distinction
over which God does not split hairs. A fried brain is a fried brain,
not matter what kind of oil you cook it in.

But North takes his moral abhorrence for drug use -- which as a
Christian he should have -- and lumps it, without scriptural
justification, into the same stack of things the state, according to
Christian doctrine, should hate and act against. In short, he lets his
distaste for drugs color his application of what the Bible actually
says about them.

It cannot be said enough that Scripture condemns dope -- to the extent
that it harms the user or inhibits his sobriety. But to say that it
also provides justification for legal sanctions against popping pills
and shooting smack is a stretch. With all the many warnings about
drunkenness scattered throughout the Word, two things are obvious: 1)
that God is concerned with it, and 2) that Israel and the Church have a
real problem with it. But does God ever command civil punishment for
insobriety -- caused by either alcohol or dope? No.

God treats some sins differently from others, and for Christians to
support a measure that even God does not comes close to saying we are
wiser and even more moral than God.

Given the monumental failure of the drug war, its ever-increasing
violations of individual liberty, egregious injustices, and the fact
that there is no biblical mandate to back it up, Christians should
seriously -- and scripturally -- reconsider their support of it.