Higher Immorality?

For Some Religious Groups, Drug Laws Do More Harm Than Drugs Themselves

June 20 -- For Jennifer Wallace, the revelation came four years ago,
after she found out that a friend of hers who she knew came from a
devout Christian family smoked marijuana, and she became worried about
the young woman.

Wallace, a devout Christian herself, started looking into the research
on marijuana and what she found surprised her. She said she found no
evidence to back up the horrible things she had heard about the drug,
and when she searched the Bible for any reference to it she found
nothing at all. So she began to wonder why some religious leaders
seemed to favor stiff penalties for marijuana users.

She even decided to try smoking it, though she had always been afraid
before.

"I was very surprised that I wasn't very different than I was before,"
she said of the experience. "I believe it made me think more, and
thinking more is always good."

Those experiences led the 35-year-old mother of five to start the
Christians for Cannabis Web site, and to begin a campaign of
letter-writing to legislators, religious leaders and newspapers,
urging an end to the marijuana prohibition and more research into
potential uses of the drug, she said.

Christians for Cannabis, which describes part of its mission as "to
provide encouragement, support and prayer for the [Christian cannabis
user] subculture as a whole and those that work on its behalf," may be
the extreme, but it is not the only religious group advocating an end
to the war on drugs.

The Presbyterian Church (USA), the Unitarian Universalist Association
of Congregations, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious
Society of Friends and the Progressive Jewish Alliance are among the
groups that have lent their support to a call by the National
Coalition for Effective Drug Policies to redirect efforts to curtail
drug use.

These organizations all make clear that their opposition to current
drug policy is based not on support for drug use, but out of a belief
that the war on drugs has done more harm than good and that it is
essentially immoral.

"The war on drugs has been an abysmal failure in any practical sense,
and the number of people who are being victimized by the war is fairly
awful," said Thomas Jeavons, the general secretary of the Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, a group of Quakers.

"The war on drugs affects our society in so many negative ways,"
Universal Unitarians for Drug Policy Reform executive director Charles
Thomas said. "We believe underlying it all is an immoral approach to
dealing with a health problem."

An Evolving Process

The thrust of the NCEDP's statement, "Eight Steps to Effectively
Controlling Drug Abuse and the Drug Market," is that criminalizing
drug use has failed to curtail drug use, and that society would be
better served by a "shift to treating drug abuse as a health problem
with social and economic implications."

"It's an evolving process -- reform," NCEDP president Kevin Zeese
said. "We've seen over the last five or six years more denominations
realize that the drug war is hurting their denominations and does more
harm than good. They're seeing in their own experience that their
people are hurting from the drug war."

A broad range of treatment programs should be made available on
request, and should include alternatives to "abstinence-based
treatment," such as methadone and other alternative maintenance drugs,
according to the program. The statement also calls for mental health
treatment and broader social services to deal with "the underlying
causes of addiction."

These programs should be focused on abusers and addicts, not on
everyone who uses drugs, the statement says.

Among other aspects, the statement calls for increased funding for
after-school programs, job training and mentoring programs to keep
young people "interested and involved in life," and a shift in the
focus of law enforcement from prosecution of low-level, nonviolent
drug offenders to those who are the most dangerous and violent.

Conservatives for Drug Policy Reform

The aim, according to Zeese, is to create a drug policy that treats
the problem as a social and public health issue, and deals with
abusers and addicts as human beings who can be more effectively
brought back into society with help rather than punishment.

He said the policy of treating drug abuse as a criminal issue is
responsible for much of the spread of HIV and AIDS, because it bans
needle exchange programs that have been shown to be effective, and for
many overdose deaths, because people are afraid to get help, fearing
the legal consequences of their drug abuse.

"That's what I mean by the immorality of those who support the drug
war," Zeese said. "They let a deadly epidemic spread because of zero
tolerance."

The Philadelphia Quakers, one of the largest groups within the
non-heirarchical denomination, signed on not because they share the
view of Christians for Cannabis that drug use is a neutral issue,
Jeavons said.

"Absolutely not. If you know anything about Quakers, you know we're a
fairly conservative lot," he said. "However, we believe that there
must be a better answer to the problem. We encourage our members to
avoid these substances or use them in moderation."

Consulting Conscience

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting formed a Drug Concerns Working Group
in 1997, and in 1998 drew up a minute, or brief statement in early
1998. He said that the importance of the issue was reinforced when
members took part in the so-called "shadow convention" held in
conjunction with the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in
2000.

The minute makes clear the Philadelphia Quakers' objections both to
current drug policy and to drug abuse, and calls on Friends to do what
they can to change that policy and to help others stop their misuse of
drugs.

The Unitarian Universalists' objection to the treatment of drug abuse
has a long history, dating back to 1970, when the denomination passed
three drug policy reform resolutions, calling for legalization of
marijuana and heroin maintenance programs.

In 2000, the denomination passed a resolution calling for all
congregations to study the issue and develop a comprehensive
"Statement of Conscience," which will be voted on at the General
Assembly to be held on June 24.

The effort is to draw up a statement of "what the ideal drug policy
would look like," Thomas said.

"It is remarkably good, recognizing the distinction between use and
abuse, and calling for removal of criminal penalties for possession,"
he said.

Challenge to 'Hypocrisy'

Assuming the statement passes, Thomas said it will be taken to other
denominations for their consideration. He said that the Unitarian
Universalists for Drug Policy Reform have already worked to spread the
group's message by sending speakers to drug policy conventions and
discussing the issue with representatives of other religious groups.

Part of that campaign will be to engage those Christian leaders who
say they favor the current drug policies in debate over the issue.

"We will challenge people on their position, really start to call
people on their hypocrisy, because that's really what it is,
hypocrisy," Thomas said. "These people are doing the exact opposite of
what Jesus taught."

He said the statement and the Unitarian Universalists draw much of
their inspiration from Jesus' own words.

"People often justify the war on drugs by saying drug use is
inherently immoral," he said. "That's not what Jesus said. He said,
it's not what goes into a person, it's what comes out. If we meet
people with love and respect, we can help them more."