Dr Allen Lycka, Edmonton, Interviews Christina Dent on a New Way to TReat Addictions

Christina Dent MP4a

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Joining us today is Christina Dent founder and president of Ended For Good, a conservative nonprofit, advocating a health centered approach to drugs rather than a criminal justice approach. Christina lives in Mississippi and changed her own mind about how to best handle drugs after she became a foster parent. She started Ended For Good several years ago, to invite others to learn and consider changing their minds to so we can live lives, preserve families, and strengthen communities. Welcome, Christina.

Christina Dent 

Thanks so much. I so appreciate being here.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

When did you start being a foster parent and starting to change your ideas about how drugs should be handled?

Christina Dent 

So that journey started about seven years ago for us. I'm born and raised in Mississippi. I've lived here my whole life, was homeschooled kindergarten through high school, went to a Christian liberal arts university and I have a degree in Bible. So, I was kind of always interested in you know, how do you care for vulnerable children that had kind of been on my on my heart for a long time, and never thought we would be involved in fostering that seemed way too messy to me. But that is where we felt led to go and we ended up beginning fostering and through that experience was really the first time that I came close to drug use and addiction in a way that just was so personal to me. And that really was through a woman named Joanne who had been using drugs while she was pregnant and her son was removed from her custody because of that, and he was brought to our house and we became his foster parents. And when I met Joanne, for the first time, at her first visit with Beckham, she came running across the parking lot to meet me at my van, just covering her son with kisses, as she's crying. She's missed him so much over this week of being separated from him. And I had no category for that. How do you understand that I thought a mom who used drugs while she was pregnant, didn't love her child, because I don't understand why you would do that if you did love your child. I just had no concept of what addiction was. And I really kind of believe this cultural teaching that addiction is bad people doing bad things. And so that kind of categorizes her as a bad person. And really, just through her opening herself and being vulnerable, and letting me see how much she loved her son it shook everything I thought I know knew about addiction, everything I thought I knew about the best way to handle that. Because Joanne showed me that she was a mom just like me that she loved her son just as much as I love my three sons. In many ways, we had very similar backgrounds. She was also homeschooled kindergarten through high school, we're both one of four kids, just similar age, similar kind of demographic, we both grew up in Christian homes. So much was so similar and the more I got to know her, the more I realized, this isn't just a similarity of background, we are very, very similar people, we want very similar things in life. And certainly, we feel the exact same way about our children. And for me, that was a really difficult wall to hit. Because I also knew that we were putting people like Joanne in prison every day for the same issue that she was struggling with. And that really forced me to kind of begin a journey of learning, what are we doing? And could we be doing something differently? Because certainly, I could look at Joanne and Beckham and say, you know, her addiction is harmful. But if we put her in prison for 10 years, that's going to destroy this vulnerable family, could we do something differently where we could help simultaneously help children and families that are struggling?

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Yeah. And I think this is where we have to come to a better understanding of things, you know, drugs are bad, they're definitely something that do have some problems with the society. But how we deal with them is a whole different issue than that understanding. And that's where I think we have to come to a better realization of things. And also, to understand what addiction is about. What is your concept of addiction now that it's grown?

Christina Dent 

That's a great question. A lot of people have a lot of different concepts of what addiction is, I try to stay as broad as possible in that I think we are just beginning to learn about addiction. I think in 10,15, 20 years, our understanding of addiction is going to be much deeper and more nuanced than it is today. I think we're just still coming out of this time of thinking; you know, addictions are what happened to morally bankrupt people, rather than addictions are responses that we're all capable of given different circumstances in our lives. And one thing that was really helpful to me on my journey of learning was learning about Dr. Bruce Alexander and his work in the 70s. He did an experiment, so he had seen the experiments done where you put a rat in a cage and you give it a water bottle of water and a water bottle laced with you know, heroin or cocaine, and the rat will compulsively use that heroin or cocaine laced water until it dies. And he looked at that and said, well, that's not that's not an entirely fair experiment, because that's not the kind of conditions a rat would want to be in. They don't want it they're social animals they want to be in a in a cage with friends. And so, he redid the experiment, and he put rats in a cage that he called Rat Park and they had they had anytime they wanted, they could use cocaine or heroin laced water. They could also use plain water, and they had balls and friends and you know, little treadmill things and all the things rats like and what they found is that they never used the laced water compulsively and didn't die from it. Most of them just maybe used it every now and then or didn't use it at all. And what they he has illustrated over 50 years of work after that is that drugs are a mechanism that people use to change the way that they feel. But the way that they feel is what's driving that use, it's not so much the drug is it is sort of the cage that you put people in or the cage that people are in. So, if they've had a lot of trauma that they want to not have to feel or to self-medicate. Trauma is the number one driver of addiction developing. Or if you're in a situation where you're lonely or disconnected. I met a guy once who said, you know, I was doing fine when I lived in one city, I moved to a new city, I had no friends and, you know, my non problematic drug use, moved into problematic addiction, as I dealt with loneliness, and isolation. So, I think for me, that story of Rat Park has been and all the things I've read since then, the most helpful and understanding. We have focused far too much energy on the drugs and far too little energy on why people use them, and what those drugs are doing for them. And if we want to meaningfully address our addiction crisis, we have to be willing to do what I think is a much harder job, which is looking beyond the behavior to what's actually driving that behavior. And then we can start to get to some better solutions, where people don't turn to those substances, to try to change the way that they feel because we're doing a better job as a society, of creating a world where people want to be fully present, rather than a world in which they want to numb themselves.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

It's my understanding that the most recent taking on this whole idea of addictions is the social connection problem, where people have this problem with isolation, this problem that's going on. So, they turn to drugs, to end the pain, it's a way for them of dealing with the pain that they're dealing with. And it's a whole different ball of wax than it's bad people doing bad things. These are normal people doing bad things in situations that they cannot deal with.

Christina Dent 

Yeah, I would absolutely agree. In my own mind, I kind of condensed that down, I would say instead of bad people doing bad things, it's much more about hurting people trying to feel better. And we can all we can all understand that whether or not we have a heroin addiction or not, I certainly know what it is to feel lonely or depressed or isolated or scared or, you know, to have something painful happen in your life and try to figure out how to deal with that. Maybe it's not heroin, but I think all of us have things we go to whether it's processes like gambling, or whether it's or scrolling Facebook, or social media, or whether it's other substances, alcohol, or food, or there's all sorts of things we go to, and yet we've kind of sectioned off and categorized, you know, illegal drugs is sort of the worst of the worst, when in reality, all of us have healthy coping mechanisms and unhealthy coping mechanisms. And for many of us, you know, those unhealthy coping mechanisms, the use of those is stemming from the same things, whether or not it's just that you're overeating, or whether you're using heroin. And we have, I think, heartbreakingly stigmatized people whose substance of choice happens to be something that's illegal. And we have kind of put them in this category of they're not someone like me. And I think that we've done that because it's what you have to do to be able to be okay with the fact that we're putting millions of them in prison every year. If we think about that, truly, as people like us, it's incredibly disturbing. We almost need to think of them as people not like us to be able to sort of handle the moral weight of addressing what I would say is a public health issue in a criminal justice manner. And that weight is what took my personal journey of changing my mind and was the catalyst of me launching a nonprofit where we now have four full time employees. This is what I do professionally now is invite people to reconsider what we're doing. And it's driven by the same heart that drew me to foster care, which is I want to see people thriving. I want to see vulnerable people thriving, I want to see children growing up in healthy homes. And the more that I learned about what we're doing with drugs and addiction, the more I became convinced that I think one of the best ways that I can help in foster care, is to actually address what we're doing with drugs and the core problems that we are seeing, which is, the criminal justice system is not making this better. It's actually making it worse, because it's designed to produce trauma in people's lives, it's designed to be a really painful experience. The problem is that addiction is already a response to really painful experiences and when you add more and more of those, if anything, you get neutral, but typically, it's going to make it even worse, as more difficult thing, you know, it's just the stacking up of these experiences that you don't want to remember, you don't want to feel the pain of. And that really breaks my heart, it breaks my heart that that's what our responses to people who are already hurting already deeply ashamed and yet, we keep hoping that even though it hasn't worked for decades, that just maybe this year, it's going to work if we really kind of crack down a little bit harder. And in the aftermath of that is 1000s and 1000s of families who've been destabilized or destroyed through what I would say is incorrectly using the criminal justice system to handle this public health issue. It's the right tool for a lot of things, it's not the right tool to handle drugs and addiction.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

I guess there would be two elements to that. And one is the people that are using the drugs are the victims, so to speak. But then there's a whole other group of people out there that are pushing these drugs on people that are the victims. And I think that's probably where the criminal justice system still has a role to play in helping to prevent the victims from being victimized.

Christina Dent 

Yeah, so I kind of see this through two lenses. One is sort of the consumers like you've done well, setting this up. One is kind of that consumer piece, and the other the market piece. So, on the consumer side, we've kind of already talked about that. I ended up changing my mind on the market side as well, kind of for different reasons. I don't particularly have lots of compassion for people that are engaged in selling drugs, although I also recognize many people who use drugs, sell them in order to get enough money to buy the drugs that they want to use themselves. But there are certainly like really cruel people that are engaged in this, you can see this on the news, especially if you look in what is happening in Latin America, and the amount of just unbelievable violence that's associated with the underground drug market. For me, I ended up kind of changing my mind about the way that we handle drugs on the market side, by looking into what's causing so much of the harm from crime and violence, cartels, gangs, and all that. And the more that I learned, the more I realized that all of that crime is being driven by forcing those substances into the underground market. So, when a substance can operate in a legal regulated market, like alcohol, or, you know, lots of other substances we have, we don't have the kind of crime and violence associated with that, that we do in any kind of an underground drug market. And so, you know, as I think about how could we get the least amount of harm, so there's the least amount of harm to consumers, but there's also the least amount of harm to communities, and for a lot of communities, crime is a serious issue. The vast majority of crime is caused by the drug market being pushed underground. And so, you know, I definitely wouldn't say we shouldn't punish people that are breaking the law and selling drugs. On the other hand, I would say, I think we need to take a step back and say, are our laws related to making drugs illegal helping, or are they actually creating a lot of additional harm in the same way that our laws against drug users are creating additional harm in their lives are laws against the legality of some substances are creating a lot of crime, and it's creating a lot of contamination because people don't know what they're buying on the street, which is the vast majority of all overdose deaths today are caused by contaminated drugs that people are getting on the street. And that really can only be dealt with meaningfully by allowing people to access in some sort of legal regulated way. Whatever the drug is, that they're using right now on the street. So, there's a there's a lot of moving parts in there. I ended up kind of changing my mind on both sides on the market and the consumer, just because of the amount of harm and particularly death that comes from contamination when you introduce the illegal nature of some drugs, and just for the amount of crime that's created and vulnerable communities feel that crime the most.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

You know, there's a lot of this going on. And you know, there has been some rethinking on the marijuana issue, for example. And many states have now accepted marijuana as being a drug that should be regulated on a state-by-state basis. So, they have taken out the criminality associated with marijuana, and therefore, turned it into something that it doesn't have to be penalized for. It is something that is now accepted as another drug like alcohol that can be controlled. Is this what you're thinking as well?

Christina Dent 

Yeah, I think that's a great move. And it's not because I'm particularly pro marijuana. I've been to states where it's legal. I've never even been in a dispensary. I don't really have any interest in marijuana use. I don't really have any interest in alcohol use either. And yet, I think alcohol is better handled in a legal regulated way. And that would be the same way that I think about marijuana. It’s not am I pro marijuana do I think everyone should be using it and if yes, then I can support it being legal. I look at it as marijuana prohibition is so harmful to people in communities, that I would rather it be legal and regulated, put behind a counter where we can have some age restrictions on it, where people know what they're buying, they're not getting something random on the street, we don't have criminal organizations selling it. To me, I see that the legalization, I think of myself more as a anti prohibition than I do pro legalization. Because I'm not pro drug but I recognize that the best way to handle a potentially harmful substance, whatever that might be, is through having some sort of regulatory control over it, and not just putting it in the free for all of the street, which is where those drugs are right now. So, I see that as a as a positive move and I don't see that as in opposition to my other values, either as a Christian or as someone who's conservative, I think when I look at the value of life, and the value of opportunity, and the potential of thrive, and strong families, all of those values, I think, end up weighing on the side of ending prohibition.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Those are good statements. And I think that is something that I may move towards that, as you know, prohibition for alcohol was in the 1920s, it took years for that to be lifted, and to get to a better understanding of how alcohol could be handled. And still, you know, there are elements of alcohol that we know are dangerous, like people driving under the influence is something that is very dangerous. That is something that we certainly do not want people to do, because of the danger associated towards a society with that. And that's where I think some of the values are still needing to be hashed out and needing to be stated in such a way that no matter what we do, there are still aspects that we still have to realize are dangerous enough that we still have to protect society from them.

Christina Dent 

Right. I think that's getting to, we often say, ending prohibition is not perfect, but it is realistic. And prohibition is kind of an attempt at the sort of, you know, perfect world where there's no harm ever from any substance and if we just ban it, maybe we can force there not to be any harm. But the reality is that you can't do that we couldn't do it with alcohol, we haven't been able to do it with other drugs. Drug use is increasing. It's increased 30% in Mississippi over the last 10 years, illegal drug use. One in 10 Americans has used an illegal drug recently. That stat is from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is the United States like it's their drug control federal office, and that's their stat, that one in 10 adults has used an illegal drug recently. So, we have widespread drug use, even under prohibition. And we also have all of these other harms that prohibition causes all this extra crime, all the extra overdose deaths, and all the extra incarceration. And so, I think if we think about it, like alcohol, that's a much more realistic way of handling it, we allow people to make the choice and we also try to protect the community from any associated harms. And we've handled alcohol through a harm reduction lens and that's what I would love to see us move to doing with other drugs as well.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

That sounds like a realistic approach and it sounds like something that It's not radical. And what would you say if people would say, Oh, you're just a radical person, and those ideas are just too liberal for me.

Christina Dent 

So, there's a lot of people that think this is, you know, sort of a liberal cause and I would say absolutely not. I'm a small government, individual responsibility, pro-family prolife, when you look at what's causing the harm related to drugs, sure, there is some harm that's caused by drugs that you can ingest in your body what it does to you, but the vast majority of harm in all of those areas is caused by prohibition. And we have been, we've been told that those are kind of lumped together and it's actually the drugs, you know, the drugs cause all of this cartel violence. No, they don't, not at all. If we made alcohol illegal, guess who would be selling it gangs and cartels, and they would be making billions of dollars just like they are on other drugs. This is absolutely solid, conservative policy, if we want safe communities, strong families and employed working, providing for themselves and their family citizens. I just think we have, it's part of my mission, to show that this is not just a liberal cause this is solid conservative policy, because it gets us more of the things that people like me really want in the world, and it can be hard. I think the hardest part is getting past that knee jerk reaction. For me, you know, I can talk about this in 15 minutes now and make my case for it. But it was a two-year journey for me of changing my mind, it was really hard. It felt like, Am I losing everything that I've always valued and I it was so helpful for me at the end of that to realize no, my, my values haven't changed, I've just changed my mind about what policies actually get us closer to the best expression of those values. And that for me was really freeing to see this isn't something where I have to, you know, change the core of who I am. This is was a learning journey of realizing, wow, what I really want, what I've always wanted, is just better gotten to with different policies, and I can be okay with that and I can invite other people on that journey to consider that as well. It's a hard journey. But all through history, we have had things we've had to rethink. Things we thought we knew that we've ended up being wrong about. And the best place for us isn't to stick our head in the sand if we want to stop people from dying, and most everybody knows somebody who's died of an overdose. Now, if we want to stop that from happening, we've got to look deeper look at the root causes of what's causing those overdose deaths. See that it's the contamination and pursue policy changes that allow people to use some kind of substance that is not contaminated. That's the way that we're going to save lives and save families. And I think for most of us, that's what we really want and I think that's a deeper value for us than this value that we've just supported a particular kind of drug policy in the past, we can change our minds about that and be in keeping with our values.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

That's important. Now, I'm going to ask you two questions to end up here. One is on a personal level, and one is on a more general level. Christina, with this reshaping of your values and your thinking, how do you live a fantastic life?

Christina Dent 

Such a great question. I think it is amazing to be able to work in something that I'm passionate about and to be able to invite people into that. I would say one of the things I've learned most through this journey, is how life giving it is to pursue something that you're passionate about in a way that allows other people to engage with it with you. So, there's a lot of people who are passionate about things in the world. And it's really difficult not to just sort of want to beat everyone over the head with whatever it is that you're passionate about. And I have just seen in this organization as it has grown, how much people appreciate being engaged with respect and dignity and that is increasingly hard to come by, unfortunately, in our culture. And I would say that has been one of the most life-giving things to me over the last couple of years that I would say is contributed to living a fantastic life is be vulnerable and invite people into a dialogue. Don't just beat everyone over the head with what you think but allow people, give them the respect of coming as equals and saying hey, can we have a conversation about what I think and what you think and talk about that? If we want to live fantastic lives that aren't full of hatred and fear we've got to be able to come to a place of dialogue with people that we do agree with it really is life giving.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Okay, so the flip side of that Christie, I want you to give some advice on how people can live a fantastic life if they are reshaping and rethinking their values.

Christina Dent 

Another thing that has been really helpful to me is just how freeing it is to not feel constricted by something that you've always thought or some something that you've always done and to feel like, somehow, I'm giving up something by changing my mind. We can change our minds and I would encourage people, when you feel the friction of something that you've believed not being congruent anymore with something that you're seeing in the real world, or something like that, to not be afraid to look into it, it is not a weakness to consider whether or not we have been wrong about something, that's a strength, that's the ability to grow. And for people that want to live fantastic lives having a mindset of being willing and open to growth is absolutely key, whether it's on this issue of how we handle drugs and addiction, or lots of other issues. Being open, being a learner and being able to grow is, for me, absolutely crucial to living a fantastic life.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Now, just in summary, can you tell everybody about your nonprofit and what it attempts to do?

Christina Dent 36:26

Yes, so you can find us at enditforgood.com. We're on social media also enditforgoodms. And I'm on social media separately at Christinabdent. And we do things like this, we invite people into this conversation, we invite them to consider approaches to drugs that prioritize life and health and the opportunity for people to thrive. So, we do events all around Mississippi, we just did a drug policy summit in Mississippi, we had 250 people come to that where we were presenting these ideas to them and brought in outside speakers. We do lots of things like that, anything that we can do to reach people who may not have, maybe they haven't even thought about this in 20 years, they've just been voting on something they grew up believing. We invite them into this conversation. We don't want to just circle the wagons with people who already agree and talk about how right we are. We want people to dialogue we want to send me your hard questions [email protected] it will come straight to me. Let's have a conversation. Let's think through the challenges of these problems. That's how we're going to get better solutions is when we come to the table. And that's what End It For Good is 100% solely focused on is bringing this conversation out into the mainstream public so that we can find better ways to save lives and help people.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Thank you, Christina, thank you for being here today.

Christina Dent 

Thank you so much.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

I wish you success in your endeavors.

Christina Dent 

Thank you. It's really an honor to be with you.

Dr. Allen Lycka 

Thank you bye for now.