For God So Loved the Stoner

an apology from a Christian mother who seriously misjudged weed

For the first half of my life, my perception of weed was solely informed by the media. I remember being somewhat perplexed about pot, and whether it was just some silly little substance or an excessively dangerous drug. It was the 90s, and Hollywood was cranking out comedies with white kids who were clearly stoned out of their minds, spitting out buzzwords and three sentence punchlines between squirts from a can of cheese whiz.

But then again, I also watched Cops.

During this time in California, the Three Strike Law was introduced. It stated that people with 3 felony convictions could be sentenced to life in prison. This law was meant to address violent crime, but it didn't work. 85% of those sentenced were convicted of non-violent offenses like marijuana possession. Adding to this miscarriage of justice, a study recently revealed that Black men were incarcerated at a rate of 13 times higher than their white counterparts.

Life in prison for Black stoners.

Cheese whiz if you were white.

I was a DARE kid. I made my promise, and I was 100% intent in keeping it. I understood weed users were pretty much gang lords who terrorized neighborhoods with machine guns, and slit the throats of anyone who challenged their customer base of the local high school football team. For many Millennials, weed was something associated with criminals, not responsible adults enjoying recreational use. 

I wish I were kidding, but this was my exact understanding of the pot situation, which meant the first time I saw it at a college house party, at the ripe old age of 21, I sobbed and asked if we should call the police. 

There were DRUGS in that house, after all.

For years, I was proud that I didn’t try pot. Like it was a shiny little star on my Christian poster. I kinda stopped judging people who did it, but also…kinda not. Because if I’m being honest, I felt like I was better than people who used it, even my friends. Even my family.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before my uninformed, pious attitude came up against some cold hard science, and I forced to reconsider my position. Unfortunately, this lesson came in the form of watching a loved one die. He had a draw-out, horrible, painful death. And he found relief in marijuana.

I’d given my kidney to Uncle Mikey sometime around 2008. It felt like a miracle, that a piece of my body could fix the problem with his. We didn’t know it at the time, but Mikey’s disease was an incredibly rare terminal illness that would later be classified as cancer. Last I checked, there were 40-something people in the entire world who were living with a diagnosis. When the disease returned, it showed up with a vengeance. It ravaged my uncle’s body. 

A couple of years before his death, I drove across Florida for a hug. I gasped when I saw Mikey sitting in his chair. My uncle–once a bright eyed football coach with an incredible sense of humor, had morphed into a frail, empty shell of the man I’d known my whole life. His ribs protruded, his muscles atrophied, his eyes were dull and empty. There was not a laugh left to cross his lips. A hug might break him in half. But I thought it might be the last one I got, so I hugged him the way I would hug a cactus, then went to my car and sobbed.

A little about my Aunt Cindy. She’s a brave woman with a brain and an attitude, so obviously she’s my kind of fabulous. She is a nurse and an educator, who before retirement spent decades in Florida public schools. In fact, a good bit of Mikey’s nurses were Cindy’s former students. They always squealed with excitement when they saw her in the hospital. It was beautiful, but I imagine it had to be hard playing Teacher at her dying husband’s bedside. That’s the blessing and the curse of being a great teacher. You have thousands of thousands of children for life, and at any point, they might appear.

Still, she responded with unfettered enthusiasm to every single “OH! MRS. LIVINGS!” 

The year Mikey died, in 2016, Florida proposed a bill that would legalize the use of medical marijuana. It was a hotly debated topic, but being the badass woman she is, Cindy gave her students an assignment to research the bill, and the science behind it, and come up with a personal conclusion. To this day, she says it was high school students who changed her mind about weed.

It wasn’t too long before Mikey died, that I got a familiar phone call.

“Hello?”

“Well, hello. It’s your favorite uncle!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. This was an ongoing joke between Mikey and me, starting when I was 8 years old. He called, and said “it’s your favorite uncle” and I incorrectly, and hilariously, guessed “MATT!”

And ever since then, it was kinda our thing. But this time, I switched up the game.

“MIKEY!” I squealed. And we talked for ten minutes. 

Life had returned to his voice. 

Marijuana improved his pain and his appetite. He’d even started going for walks. 

For a while at least, we had Mikey back.

And he had himself back, too.

In that moment, laughing on the phone, the final domino fell. 

Whether or not I realized it then, I’d deconstructed weed. 

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick”. 

• Jesus (Matthew 9:12)

A couple of weeks ago, I called my friend Nathan Monk and asked him to define sin. He’s a brilliant writer and a former priest with an extensive understanding of scripture, so I call him randomly with these sorts of questions.

He taught me something that changed my perspective on what sin actually is.

You see, the word is derived from an archery term, which means “to miss the mark.” 

You can miss it big time or miss it a little, but as my grandfather Doodle used to say, “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

In the end, a miss is a miss. And Christians, a sin is a sin.

For too long, the Church has stigmatized (and even demonized) the use of THC. We fought against science, the recommendation of doctors, and the possibility of medical progress. We shamed the dying, the traumatized, and the troubled. We offered judgment instead of compassion. We sniffed down at the stoners from our very high horses, as if Jesus himself was a Narc.

It’s been said that you shouldn’t throw stones in glass houses. 

But, let me tell you about getting stoned in the glass church called Christianity.

We’d sooner drag a prostitute into the street than allow a deacon some relief from arthritis.

Brothers and sisters, when it comes to weed, we have seriously missed the mark. 

We have no basis at all to feel high and mighty. 

Might I recommend…picking just one?