Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I am John Rustin, president of NC Family. In each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
I'm Mitch Prosser, Vice President of North Carolina Family Policy Council, joined by our Director of Research and Education, Adama Manfra. Welcome to the 11th episode of the Truths We Hold, in honor of America's 250th anniversary and NC Family's 35th anniversary this year. We're taking a deeper look at the foundational values that have shaped our country and continue to shape the work we do here at NC Family. On this episode, we're taking a deeper Look at drugs and crime specifically in regard to the pursuit of happiness. We'll talk about the effect of drugs and crime on the family, human dignity, self-governance, and what that means for us.
Two hundred and fifty years after our signer spoke about these principles, how in the world could you say that drugs and crime fit in the pursuit of happiness?
So just like with last month, we covered gambling, and we started talking about how when we pursue happiness, that should be found in God. Anywhere else, we'll always come up short, and so we'll end up wanting the thing we're pursuing in an excessive way because it can't satisfy. We're made and created for an infinite good, which is God. And once we look for it in pleasure or money or power or fill in the blank, then we find something finite that can't satisfy, and so we pursue it more and more and more, and it becomes a vice. And then you get into The vices, and in this case, in particular, drugs, which kind of ties back to gambling quite neatly for us.
We talked about how gambling is, in many ways, like a drug, right? And then crime, which sort of follows from drugs, and we'll talk about drugs sort of in two aspects. The second will lead us, I think, into crime as such.
So, looking for happiness in all the wrong places.
So, you talked about gambling as being similar to drugs, and drugs being similar to gambling in that they're both. Addictive in nature. Let's walk through that a little bit and then go from there. Sure.
So I mentioned there's sort of two aspects to drugs you might think of from a policy worldview perspective.
So when we think about drugs and gambling as similar, it's the first category.
So the first category being the user itself and their relationship to it, and getting addicted to it, and the impacts that has on their lives. That they'll start compromising other things like their financial health, their relationships, their families, their communities in pursuit of a dependency. Often. Or just pursuit of pleasure if it's not a full on dependency, and so there's those impacts, which is really where we as an organization would look at the impact on the family. The secondary sort of element of drug policy and issues is where you then have the illicit drug business and all of the stuff that comes from that, and so now you're looking at crime as such, not just because in the first set you don't need the drug to be illicit or criminal to have those effects.
Before we get to the criminal activity portion of drug usage, let's talk about the circular concentricity around drug usage. Specifically, let's start with the most narrow circle, the innermost circle, of the person who is consuming these drugs, looking for some sort of happiness. How does this play out in an anthropological type of way? Absolutely.
So when we look at that, so you mentioned the concentric circles, starting at the middle, right?
So the impact there again, in that first look at how we. Would look at drugs is the impact on that individual user.
So drugs impair us in some way. Medicinally, we hope that they repair us in certain ways. Sure, but in general, even sort of the good drugs, even like an ibuprofen, we often are hoping sort of impairs our sensitivity to some kind of pain.
So it is doing a good, but it's in fact inhibiting some functioning. But these illicit drugs they truly affect a person in that most inner ring very significantly. Sure.
So the drugs that We're going to be typically looking at right wouldn't be in those first categories medicinal. It's going to be those addictive opioids, hallucinogens, carcinogens, maybe even but particularly the ones that create those highs and the ones that create those addictions because that does a few things. One, it impairs the intellect and the will, which is key aspects to us being made in the image of God. And then when that becomes an addiction, if it becomes an addiction, you're now sort of short circuiting the will. And people can debate what addiction really means and how serious addiction.
Is and how much willpower is left, but to some degree, your willpower is diminished, or you're at least habituated to not observing your will, and so you have less freedom to say no to the drug, right? Which again is inhibiting the will and your free will, and makes you honestly like less human dignity, but like less human freedom, and so that undermines and and degrades the person to a certain degree, not their value and not their human dignity on that inherent worth, but like things can be degrading that you. Due to a person, well, that's the thing that you degrade to yourself, and then of course, again, the concentric circles. Once you start doing that, that has impacts on your family, whether it's your child doing it and impacts the parents, whether it's the parents impacting the children or a spouse impacting a spouse. All of that then brings burdens onto the family, and then that family can bring burdens onto their neighborhood, community, church, city, and it just starts expanding out from there.
The more of this there is, the more burdens more people are carrying, and the more it compromises the flourishing. Of whatever community and whatever ring of distance you want to look at, I think back to the '80s and '90s anti-drug usage campaign. This is your brain on drugs. The egg in the frying pan. Neurologists tell us there is a neuroplasticity that is completely and totally it rewires the brain.
These neural inhibitors that are changed, and a lot of this is very addictive in nature. And so, not only do they affect us, but as you pointed out wonderfully, they affect family members. I think of parents who have children, and then they. Become addicted to some sort of illicit drug, or maybe even opioids, and now grandparents are taking care of those grandchildren because this person can no longer function as a parent. And so you're right.
And then the tertiary effects on the the community, the church, all of us are affected in some way when one person chooses to consume these drugs and then, in turn, becomes addicted to those drugs. You know, here at North Carolina Family Policy Council, over the years we've challenged. Challenge those who say that you know marijuana is no big deal. You know, medicinal use of marijuana—it's something that's necessary. We need to slow down.
We need to be careful. We need to pay attention to what's happening, and we stood in the way of those things happening for years.
Now it's hemp-derived consumable products, xylazine, kratom, and all these things that are happening, and they're so easy to access. They're in stores across our state. They're right next to elementary schools, and it's significant. How the proliferation of these drugs have continued to make their way in not just to stores but into our homes. It's happening across our state.
So as we kind of make that transition of the addictive nature of these drugs and then the criminal activity that happens as a result of drugs, but not just as a result of drugs, because you know our organization certainly stands against other criminal activity. How do we make that transition? Sure.
So there's that second aspect of drugs when we talk about drugs and crime, which is getting into the criminal enterprise around it.
So illegal drug dealing, drug networks, gangs that rise up, drug cartels, and all of the networks of crime that then, again, in concentric circles, it starts with just. You know the one guy that has to know a guy, and so he kind of becomes the dealer in the dorm or whatever. Sure, not that any of this is good. Then there's somebody outside of that who the guy he knows is probably connected to somebody who is much more gang-like, and it's getting more turf warfare. And so there's there become consequences on the whole society and even the nation and even globally.
Oh yeah, when drugs are crossing borders and and international trade, and so all of this becomes an issue.
Now that in general kind of is outside of what we're really looking at. Sure, but it's it's. That I don't even want to say culture, but it's it's the influence, any impact of having that kind of criminal enterprise and network, not integrated but almost parasitically present in your community, that it creates incentives and temptations and influences and powers and danger. Because now there's competition, now there's threat, now there's debts, now there's all these things that create problems. And so now we're talking about well, how do you deal with that?
And that. Translates directly into, as you said, like all crimes. And when we deal with those things, we have to then think about at the policy level which of these things warrant being a crime. And then beyond that, once things are illegal, and it's it's tempting to just sort of think like, well, that's criminal and that's not. But even the grades of criminality, misdemeanor and the different classes of misdemeanor, felony and the different classes of felony.
When you classify one crime at one level, it affects your judgment of another crime, and it can create incentives and disincentives for people. Perpetrating these crimes to say, like, well, if I committed blank crime and it's the same level as next crime, I might as well also do that or not. And so, the levels of how we adjudicate these things in statutes, in laws, and then how that gets handled by DAs and police on the streets has massive impacts on incentivizing, disincentivizing criminality in our communities. Absolutely.
Well, it's fascinating that you bring that up, and it seems like we're all about to come full circle as we. Look at how laws influence culture, and culture influences our laws, and the criminal nature of these. Or, if we look specifically at criminal law, we talked early on about how all of these laws are moral in nature, maybe not necessarily morally right, but how they all have a moral component and implication.
Now, then, the question is begged: whose morality is being adjudicated? And some would argue that we aren't supposed to bring Our faith into the public square, into that arena, into the policy and politics arena. We would argue the exact opposite of that. I've said it for years: if you're not at the table, you're on the table. You must be present to win.
If Christians want their voice to be heard, if they want the laws to reflect their Christianity, they have to get involved and influence those laws. And so, as we talk about how criminal activity is determined, how does a Christian Then engage that in a way that would not just be profitable for me and concentricity, but my family, and then ultimately my Christian influence in better society. I think that last point is the most important point there, but that could be misconstrued as like almost a competitive thing. Like if I'm not in the negotiations, then I'm gonna I'm gonna get the short end of the stick guaranteed. But but it's more than that.
If we love our neighbors, we should want a society and a culture in which the law. Inculcate good things and motivate good things and disincentivize bad things. Right in Romans, the government promotes the good and deters the evil. Absolutely.
And so that we not only should we not shy away from it for the sake of being at the table, but we shouldn't shy away from it because ultimately, how we decide what's criminally outlawed and and what level it's sort of weighted at, those depend on an anthropology of some kind, and so a different view. Of the person, whether you call it a psychology or an anthropology, if you have sort of a Rousseauian, oh, all men are naturally good; it's just bad situations that make them bad.
Well, then you can't not take those assumptions into how you decide what to do with people that have broken the law. Or if you take a very Marxist sort of oppressor oppressed worldview into that, then again you're going to have a sense of like, well, if it's an impoverished person that commits the crime, then we should respond to it differently because of that. Aladdin, the one who has to steal and. Survive, yeah, but yeah, but all of those things kind of come into there. Whereas if you go in with a a proper worldview, a Christian worldview, where you understand right the line between good and evil goes through the human heart, which is not from Scripture, I think.
Soldier needs some rules, but but there's truth to that, right? It's that it's that we wrestle with sin, and we ourselves need certain guardrails, right? If we were all perfect, we wouldn't need these laws, right? You you don't need a law, don't kill your wife, because you're not tempted to. But there are people out there that apparently need that law.
Unfortunately, not no. Yeah. Right. And so having people at the table, as it were, or in the room at the legislative houses, evaluating these laws and making these decisions, it's absolutely necessary to everyone's benefit, not just to the Christians. It's not that applying Christian morality to these laws will be better for Christians.
It's that having a Christian understanding of how God made man and how man fell and how fallen man behaves, that understanding allows the implementation and the writing and drafting and passing. Of laws and policies that will rightly and bestly, or hopefully bestly, incentivize good and disincentivize evil. Right, and that will benefit everyone. Absolutely.
Well, it's it's fascinating that we draw this distinction, and of course, we know that the sword was meant to protect righteousness, and and of course, the God of the Bible is a God of grace and mercy. But we start at that place of righteousness, and there is a standard, there is a threshold of what is right and wrong, and so then as Christ. Followers, we're meant to take that into the community. It's fascinating that Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, said, you know, and and many people, libertarians, are very famous for using the first part of this quotation: "The government which governs best governs least." And a lot of people like to stop there, but the summation of the quote, him saying, because the people can govern themselves, and the whole importance that he placed, and for that matter, John Adams, his rival of sorts, on Self-governance. When John Adams said our Constitution was meant for a moral people and is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.
In other words, if people cannot govern themselves and/or their families, these small pockets and units, then that's why we need these laws. And so, Christians, yes, must govern ourselves and be a shining city on a hill that's not hid under a bushel. But also, when it comes to the governance of our country, because as you pointed out. Not everyone can govern themselves, so we need a standard of right and wrong, righteousness, and we can talk about mercy later. There has to be a standard, and somebody's standard will be adjudicated.
We prefer that be a Christian, biblical worldview that is adjudicated. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org, and check us out on social media at ncfamilypolicy.
Thanks, and may God bless you and your family.
