What if the relationship between Christianity and mind-altering substances is far more complicated than we've been taught?
For much of modern Christian history, drugs and spirituality have been presented as fundamentally opposing forces. But is that opposition as ancient as we assume? And what happens when we begin examining the historical relationship between religious ritual, altered states of consciousness, and the human desire to encounter the divine?
In Part One of our conversation, we're joined by Timothy McMahan King, Episcopal deacon and author of What Are Drugs For? An Exploration of Stolen Fire, for a fascinating exploration of drugs, religion, and the history of human consciousness.
Together, we examine the surprising intersections of ancient religious practices, sacred anointing oils, and the possibility that psychoactive substances played a role in certain spiritual traditions. We also explore how religious institutions have shaped our understanding of which experiences are considered sacred and which are dismissed as dangerous or illegitimate.
Along the way, we wrestle with some important questions:
- What role have mind-altering substances played in humanity's religious history?
- Is there historical evidence connecting psychoactive substances to ancient religious rituals?
- How did Christianity develop its modern attitudes toward drugs and altered consciousness?
- Who gets to determine whether a spiritual experience is authentic?
- And what might we discover when we approach these questions with curiosity rather than fear?
It's a conversation that challenges easy answers and invites us to reconsider the boundaries we've drawn between the sacred and the profane.
About Our Guest
Timothy McMahan King is an author, Episcopal deacon, and advocate whose work explores the intersection of spirituality, addiction, drug policy, and human flourishing. His book What Are Drugs For? An Exploration of Stolen Fire challenges conventional narratives about drugs and invites readers to consider their place in human culture, history, and spiritual experience.
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00:00 --> 00:16 [SPEAKER_01]: You think about any reason that someone gives for going to church, you've also made a complete list of every reason why people use drugs to experience that sense of connection, to experience a sense of transcendence.
00:17 --> 00:34 [SPEAKER_01]: to forget about your worries and your cares for a moment and to feel that sense of transcending and creating those places of community, you see that throughout Scripture of when it's not just that wine is considered a gift from God, right?
00:34 --> 00:36 [SPEAKER_01]: It is supposed to be drunk at different festivals.
00:42 --> 00:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the deconstructionist podcast on your host John Williams and today we are joined by Timothy McMahon King and Episcopal Deacon and author of what are drugs for an exploration of stolen fire.
00:55 --> 01:02 [SPEAKER_00]: When we think about drugs and Christianity, we tend to imagine two worlds that have always been fundamentally opposed to one another.
01:02 --> 01:05 [SPEAKER_00]: But what if the history is considerably more complicated?
01:06 --> 01:19 [SPEAKER_00]: What if substances capable of altering human consciousness played a role in ancient religious practices, including some of the earliest traditions surrounding anointing oils, healing, and encounters with the divine?
01:20 --> 01:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Tim's work invites us to reconsider the relationship between drugs, religion, and human experience.
01:27 --> 01:29 [SPEAKER_00]: We explore the history of ancient anointing oils,
01:30 --> 01:32 [SPEAKER_00]: And there are potentially psychoactive ingredients.
01:33 --> 01:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The ways religious communities have understood altered states of consciousness.
01:37 --> 01:41 [SPEAKER_00]: And the complicated questions surrounding healing, harm, and the sacred.
01:42 --> 01:48 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a fascinating conversation that challenges some of our assumptions about Christian D's relationship with these substances.
01:49 --> 01:53 [SPEAKER_00]: But before we get to our conversation with Tim, I quick update.
01:53 --> 01:59 [SPEAKER_00]: As many of you know, we are beginning to wind down the deconstructions after more than a decade of conversations.
02:00 --> 02:02 [SPEAKER_00]: But that does not mean I'm stepping away from podcasting.
02:02 --> 02:07 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I'm incredibly excited about my new podcast, this is who we become.
02:08 --> 02:14 [SPEAKER_00]: We've pushed the launch to December because we've had an opportunity to add a few more extraordinary guests to our first season.
02:15 --> 02:25 [SPEAKER_00]: We are talking about people like Dr. Evan Alexander, Jacqueline Bussey, Louis J. Rodriguez and many others whose lives have been transformed by extraordinary experiences.
02:26 --> 02:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The premise is very simple.
02:28 --> 02:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Every life has a before, every life has an after.
02:31 --> 02:38 [SPEAKER_00]: We're exploring those moments that fundamentally change who we are, what we believe, and how we understand the world around us.
02:39 --> 02:41 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'd love for you to be a part of this new journey.
02:42 --> 02:52 [SPEAKER_00]: So head on over to this is who we become.com and sign up for our mailing list so you'll be among the first to know when we launch and get a sneak peek at some of the guests that are coming.
02:52 --> 02:56 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm really proud of the conversations we've been recording and I cannot wait to share them with you.
02:57 --> 03:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And now, here's our conversation with Timothy McMahon, King.
03:09 --> 03:11 [SPEAKER_00]: All right, welcome to the Deconstructionist podcast.
03:11 --> 03:13 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm super excited to have Timothy King.
03:13 --> 03:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Do you go by Timothy or Tim?
03:15 --> 03:16 [SPEAKER_00]: I meant to ask you that.
03:16 --> 03:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Tim is fine during the interview.
03:18 --> 03:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, perfect.
03:19 --> 03:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, welcome.
03:20 --> 03:22 [SPEAKER_00]: You've got a very interesting book.
03:22 --> 03:25 [SPEAKER_00]: This is definitely a topic that we have not touched on before.
03:25 --> 03:27 [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very excited to get into it with you.
03:28 --> 03:39 [SPEAKER_00]: Before we do that though, for listeners out there, give us a little bit about your background, who you are, what you do, and sort of how you got into the topic that we're about to discuss.
03:40 --> 03:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I'm a deacon in the Episcopal Church and I have my primary focus is drugs.
03:48 --> 03:58 [SPEAKER_01]: And so this was a journey I started on the addiction side, wrote a book a few years back about the overdose crisis, and also shared my own struggle with opioids.
03:58 --> 04:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I grew up in a hometown that was really hard hit by the overdose crisis, moved back at the height of that, and had this moment of there, but for the grace of God, go I.
04:11 --> 04:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And that just gave me a passion of seeing kids that I'd played T-ball with who were dead, wanting to address this issue.
04:21 --> 04:31 [SPEAKER_01]: And after writing that first book, one of the things that I became very convicted about is that drugs just aren't misunderstood because of the damage that they cause.
04:32 --> 04:37 [SPEAKER_01]: They're often misunderstood so they cause more damage.
04:37 --> 04:49 [SPEAKER_01]: And so I wanted to ask not just about addiction and why things go wrong, but take a larger step back and say, do we even know what drugs are for?
04:49 --> 05:11 [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's part of my personal passion, but that's also now a ministry of mine, both working with people who are in those difficult spots, but also helping the church and Christians think deeply and thoughtfully about a rapidly changing landscape where suddenly cannabis is now has more daily users than alcohol.
05:11 --> 05:14 [SPEAKER_01]: There's a huge resurgence in interest in psychedelics.
05:15 --> 05:30 [SPEAKER_01]: GOP One Drugs, now I think it's one in five adults maybe now are on it, it's rapidly shifting society and yet we don't often have the deeper conversation about how we relate to substances more broadly.
05:32 --> 05:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's, it's interesting you say that because, you know, as a, as someone who grew up in the, in the height of dare, you know, growing up in the late 80s early 90s, going through the dare program, it was pretty blanket statement and it's interesting now as an adult to reflect back on just what we were taught, you know, in the sense that.
05:53 --> 05:54 [SPEAKER_00]: things like cannabis.
05:55 --> 06:04 [SPEAKER_00]: We're put on the same sort of plane as cocaine or heroin or very different drugs that vary different effects on your body on your mind.
06:05 --> 06:17 [SPEAKER_00]: And yet we kind of all put them on the same sort of level and realizing later in life that these are very different things and some of them have some medicinal uses that we weren't told about.
06:18 --> 06:18 [SPEAKER_00]: And
06:22 --> 06:45 [SPEAKER_00]: But like there are obviously huge benefits to cannabis, and we can talk about, and you mentioned Psychedelics too, I mentioned before we started recording, Ohio State University, which is just down the road for me, has a fairly decent sized department that is literally running concurrent studies on a number of Psychedelics for a number of different uses.
06:45 --> 07:02 [SPEAKER_00]: So talk about culturally, you know, like when we talk about drugs, what do we really mean by drugs and how did it get so sort of twisted, you know, back back in those days and how do we kind of better understand that maybe now?
07:03 --> 07:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the fascinating thing with drugs is it's not so much a substance as it is a relationship.
07:11 --> 07:18 [SPEAKER_01]: So the only reason why a drug is a drug is because it's internet interacting with a living organism.
07:19 --> 07:29 [SPEAKER_01]: So, a specific drug might end up being an allergen or an intoxicant, depending upon your physiology.
07:30 --> 07:32 [SPEAKER_01]: So alcohol was not always a drug.
07:32 --> 07:45 [SPEAKER_01]: It became a drug for our pre-human ancestors around 10 million years ago when there was a slight shift in our liver enzymes that allowed us to rapidly process the ethanol that was found
07:48 --> 07:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And so it became an intoxicant with this switch.
07:52 --> 07:59 [SPEAKER_01]: And so even something like math, no, I don't recommend taking it, but it's a derivative of the effedra plant.
08:00 --> 08:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's what you would use for cold medicine, if you want to get what's behind the counter.
08:05 --> 08:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Various forms of amphedemines in that whole family are what we use to treat things like ADHD.
08:13 --> 08:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And so anything that you see that is a drug has something that humans find beneficial and what's important is there's always a correlate in our natural body inner systems.
08:29 --> 08:35 [SPEAKER_01]: that allows that drug to interact with it or engage with a specific receptor.
08:35 --> 08:54 [SPEAKER_01]: So in my case of having a problem with opioids, one of the reasons why they are so addictive is they act on our opioid receptors, which are the same receptors that receive our endorphins, which is the naturally occurring molecules of a motion of our connection with one another.
08:55 --> 09:03 [SPEAKER_01]: And so it's the same thing that bonds us to a partner or bonds us to our kids, we're now receiving from the outside.
09:04 --> 09:21 [SPEAKER_01]: So those experiences become incredibly similar, and that's why it can be so challenging to use, because our brains have a difficult time distinguishing between that kind of relationship that produces those chemical releases
09:26 --> 09:51 [SPEAKER_00]: that's really interesting and yeah so talk a little bit more about maybe we should start with kind of the history behind quote unquote drugs you know as you said you know a lot of progress has been made in a short period of time you know a higher where I live is one of the states who have legalized recreational cannabis you know i've seen wonders with it i don't know
09:54 --> 10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: I saw him line and it's two people with Parkinson's and one of the guys it shakes so bad he can't even oddly speak and he's laying on a couch and the other guy lives in a state where cannabis is legal and he gives him a presumo vape kind of some kind and he said don't you know don't do too much but you know couple couple hits
10:16 --> 10:21 [SPEAKER_00]: The guy with Parkinson's, he literally cannot even sit up or talk, communicate.
10:21 --> 10:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Does this and they have a little clock in the corner?
10:24 --> 10:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Counts down, like a minute or so, and all of a sudden he sits up and he looks to the guy he goes, you want to go grab lunch?
10:30 --> 10:33 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, and I'm watching this, I'm just like, oh my god!
10:34 --> 10:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, you think about people, you know, previously, who passed away from things like Parkinson's or at least had it to the extent where they could not even function as society anymore, could not live their normal lives.
10:47 --> 11:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And here's the thing that was called a drug, like, this was a gate, you know, remember back in the 80s, 90s, it was a gateway drug to heroin, you know, like, what, you know, now you think about that, you're like, that's insane, like, you know, like, so,
11:02 --> 11:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Like what point did that sort of shift in like how do we change that mindset?
11:09 --> 11:29 [SPEAKER_01]: So you know something like cannabis it's fascinating to see because again we have our endocannabinoid system So there is a system in our body that's naturally producing Substances a lot like what you're getting from the cannabis plant So what we've discovered inside was named after what we already knew about the plant
11:29 --> 11:36 [SPEAKER_01]: and that engages directly our immune system, and it can have amazing anti-inflammatory properties.
11:36 --> 11:47 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there's all of these new ways that people are suddenly discovering, oh wait, this had been a part of our medical portfolio.
11:48 --> 12:05 [SPEAKER_01]: since time immemorial and only later did it end up having the specific connotations, and at the same time, anything that is powerful enough to deliver a positive result is powerful enough to harm you in some way.
12:06 --> 12:10 [SPEAKER_01]: This is where the primary symbolism for the book that I'm trying to
12:17 --> 12:21 [SPEAKER_01]: that can warm or burn, harm or help.
12:22 --> 12:25 [SPEAKER_01]: And so now we're having these conversations with psychedelics.
12:25 --> 12:30 [SPEAKER_01]: It's come back to these questions about the intersection of drugs and spirituality.
12:31 --> 12:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, what's amazing is that this sounds like this was a counterculture thing that popped up in the 60s.
12:38 --> 12:43 [SPEAKER_01]: And man, we're just rehashing what happened a few decades ago when in reality,
12:44 --> 13:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Right, the primary language humans have used to describe drug experiences has always been spiritual, has been theological since we've had that term, and it was only with the rise of prohibition, did we start to separate these things?
13:04 --> 13:07 [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you think back to early humans,
13:08 --> 13:12 [SPEAKER_01]: What would they have thought the first time they open up an opium poppy?
13:12 --> 13:21 [SPEAKER_01]: And they taste the sticky sap inside, and suddenly they feel differently inside, and they begin to see the world in a new way.
13:21 --> 13:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, they likely would have said the spirit of this plant is in me.
13:26 --> 13:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Or it's upon me, or it has possessed me, or it has given me new divine attributes, or the things that I am now seeing,
13:36 --> 13:43 [SPEAKER_01]: our hidden realities and hidden truths, not normally accessible to our average waking consciousness.
13:44 --> 13:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And so while we remember the egg getting cracked on a pan, this is your brain and this is your brain on drugs.
13:53 --> 14:12 [SPEAKER_01]: For much of human history, these different forms of drugs, yes, humans of understood they could be abused and harmed, they've also been seen as pathways to new kinds of knowledge or insight that isn't always accessible to us in our day-to-day, how we survive in the world.
14:14 --> 14:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so, you know, I've read a lot about that as well, and and obviously there's a turning point somewhere in history where suddenly they become demonized substances, you know, you write about John Wesley condemning a substance is dangerous, addictive, expensive, spiritually compromising, even invoking Paul's warning about being mastered by anything, and then you reveal that the whole time the substance he's talking about is tea, you know, that evil Earl Grey, you know.
14:44 --> 15:04 [SPEAKER_00]: So, at what point, you know, obviously, you know, I would make a guess that it's as we started to shift towards this puritanical sort of spirituality that, you know, anything that was determined to be something that could influence one personality or body, you know, then therefore that is bad.
15:14 --> 15:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's a few different shifts.
15:17 --> 15:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And one is, we have to go way back in history to think about one of these shifts.
15:23 --> 15:31 [SPEAKER_01]: And previously, kind of your evolutionary biologists always talked about drugs as an evolutionary hijack.
15:32 --> 15:47 [SPEAKER_01]: And the idea was that humans evolved in relatively drug-free environments, and you have the rise of the agricultural revolution, and for the first time, we can make lots of alcohol, and we start to create more potent versions of plants and fungi that alter consciousness.
15:48 --> 15:53 [SPEAKER_01]: And now, the best thinking is that humans evolved in drug-rich environments.
15:55 --> 16:04 [SPEAKER_01]: and that it wasn't that we only made lots of alcohol after the agricultural revolution, but that we started making beer.
16:05 --> 16:26 [SPEAKER_01]: and collaborating together on large construction projects, things like GoBluckyTepay, huge monolithic stone structures, previously assumed impossible before the agricultural revolution, turns out we were doing that well beforehand, and they have these large vats that some of the best archaeological evidence is that they were for making beer.
16:27 --> 16:31 [SPEAKER_01]: And so you have drugs as central to human evolution,
16:32 --> 16:41 [SPEAKER_01]: But you would also have then instinctual fear about new substances that you have not tried before or seem foreign to you.
16:42 --> 16:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And so typically you have different societies that have their drugs and approved list of intoxicants that you just kind of shrug.
16:53 --> 17:01 [SPEAKER_01]: And then the foreign drugs that are associated with other people, dangerous people, and dangerous use.
17:02 --> 17:21 [SPEAKER_01]: So you even have Charles Spurgeon, giving a sermon in the mid-19th century, citing that Christian, Christian life is not like taking opium because it brings you up and tosses you down, but it is like taking henbane, which stirs you up and gives you great visions.
17:22 --> 17:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Henry bains a hallucinogen, but it was a hallucinogen that Charles Spurgeon was familiar with.
17:29 --> 17:45 [SPEAKER_01]: So you go back into the 19th century and a preacher who's nobody is accusing of being liberal is talking about why the Christian life is like taking a hallucinogen because it was just a part of their pharmacological economy.
17:46 --> 18:04 [SPEAKER_01]: But then you do see a big shift where if you are a 19th or early 20th century Christian and you've got cocaine in your community, you've got cannabis, you've got morphine and you've got all these different drugs, what are you most worried about?
18:05 --> 18:07 [SPEAKER_01]: You're worried about alcohol.
18:08 --> 18:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Because what you've seen shift is alcohol has been a part right, like the Puritans coming over into the United States could not understand why the tribes they met were not drinkers.
18:20 --> 18:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Because they did not think you could live without drinking alcohol.
18:25 --> 18:30 [SPEAKER_01]: There was deep concerns about people who drank water because water in Europe had been so impure.
18:31 --> 18:42 [SPEAKER_01]: So you even have like we use Puritan as a shorthand, but your Puritans were drinking at levels that your doctor would talk to you today about getting treatment for.
18:44 --> 18:53 [SPEAKER_01]: But with the rise of distillation, you see a rapid increase in the potency of alcohol and how cheap it is.
18:54 --> 19:04 [SPEAKER_01]: and you start to have increasing size of large corporations and businesses that are profiting off of people who are drinking their lives away.
19:05 --> 19:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So you do see the shift in Christian thought of an increased concern not about all these other drugs that we worry about today, but about alcohol in particular.
19:17 --> 19:41 [SPEAKER_01]: then by the early 20th century, right, and it was clear at the time that the federal government had no power to control this for what people would take into their bodies to alter their own consciousness, you would need an actual constitutional amendment, which is why prohibition had to occur through the arduous process of putting forward a constitutional amendment.
19:41 --> 20:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Now the argument I put forward in my book is because that failed so publicly, and it happened at a time around World War I, where sobriety became associated with patriotism and fighting the Germans, because again the Germans were associated with beer, they were the evil ones.
20:02 --> 20:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Because of that, you ended up with a few Supreme Court decisions that made all of these other drugs illegal and one of the things that illegality does is it makes drugs more dangerous because while we had alcohol under prohibition,
20:19 --> 20:19 [SPEAKER_01]: right?
20:20 --> 20:22 [SPEAKER_01]: You could have one drink and maybe go blind.
20:23 --> 20:41 [SPEAKER_01]: You have a few too many drinks of the wrong alcohol and you're dead and that is what happens to any drug when it's prohibited is you might have a decrease in usage but those who do use it are in a far more danger of various kinds of harm overdose and physical injury.
20:42 --> 21:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the theme I'm sort of noticing is that this fear and maybe rightfully so of things that are not in moderation, you know, like when we are using these types of drugs at a level that would not be healthy for anyone, you know, anything, you know, in excess, you know, typically is going to cause ill effects, but.
21:06 --> 21:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Seems like what you're sort of saying is like the fear maybe came from a place that made sense, logical sense.
21:14 --> 21:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you shouldn't go out drinking all day long and expect to be a productive citizen and society.
21:21 --> 21:25 [SPEAKER_00]: But the alcohol in and of itself is not an evil thing.
21:25 --> 21:30 [SPEAKER_00]: You can have two beers when you go out tonight for dinner and be fine.
21:30 --> 21:31 [SPEAKER_00]: And have a lovely evening.
21:32 --> 21:39 [SPEAKER_00]: And it won't, you know, cause liver damage, but you drink excessively over a long period of time, you know, it's probably going to cause some adverse effects on your life.
21:42 --> 21:54 [SPEAKER_01]: And you look at some of the earliest warnings in Hebrew scripture, and over consumption of wine is typically associated with the elites, because it becomes an issue of the
22:01 --> 22:03 [SPEAKER_01]: with thinking how deep this goes in our past.
22:04 --> 22:10 [SPEAKER_01]: For millions of years, most of the alcohol that would have been consumed would have been through over-ripe and rotting fruit.
22:11 --> 22:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you see one of your group that's drunk and you're not, it's not just that they're hurting themselves or they're inebriated and they can't participate in the rest of productive society, they're probably also hoarding resources that you're not getting.
22:29 --> 22:30 [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the negative side.
22:31 --> 22:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And at the same time, what else does alcohol do?
22:34 --> 22:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it rapidly forms trust.
22:38 --> 22:54 [SPEAKER_01]: In ways that happens if you go out for a couple of beers with your partner, well you're going to be able to let go of the worries of the day, you're going to rekindle that sense of connection and that doesn't just end when the drinks end, right?
22:54 --> 23:02 [SPEAKER_01]: The next day you had a great time, you had these good memories that allows for a better relationship moving forward.
23:02 --> 23:24 [SPEAKER_01]: and really in our evolution, that kind of trust, cooperation, information sharing, and even expansion of creativity would have been essential to our survival, which is why we know that it was essential to our survival because it was that genetic which 10 million years ago, and it stayed with most of humanity.
23:24 --> 23:27 [SPEAKER_01]: There are some pockets of populations of people who can't
23:28 --> 23:34 [SPEAKER_01]: but that never spread widely because the benefits have tended to outweigh the negatives.
23:36 --> 23:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's interesting.
23:37 --> 23:47 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's a reason they call it the social lubricant, you know, it, it, you know, often times like I've been fortunate to go over to the UK a couple of times.
23:47 --> 23:53 [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, the pub is really sort of the communal activity, you go, there are whole families go there.
23:53 --> 23:58 [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like in the U.S. where you go to a, you would never take your kids to the bar, at least I hope not.
23:58 --> 23:59 [SPEAKER_00]: But, um,
24:00 --> 24:12 [SPEAKER_00]: But in the UK, the pub is that that's the cornerstone of the community, and everyone goes there and has a meal, has a pint, you know, and it's this social gathering that connects all of the community together.
24:12 --> 24:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and you think about any reason that someone gives for going to church.
24:23 --> 24:28 [SPEAKER_01]: You've also made a complete list of every reason why people use drugs.
24:30 --> 24:55 [SPEAKER_01]: to experience that sense of connection, to experience a sense of transcendence, to forget about your worries and your cares for a moment, and to feel that sense of transcending your day-to-day life, and creating those places of community, you see that throughout scripture of, well, it's not just that wine is considered a gift from God, right?
24:56 --> 24:58 [SPEAKER_01]: It is supposed to be drunk at different festivals.
24:59 --> 25:19 [SPEAKER_01]: But the part that scripture also gives us guidance around that I think we can easily forget in today's society is there were real big limitations on how much you could consume in an ancient agrarian or nomadic society because you didn't have that much you could use.
25:20 --> 25:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Today, we are in a culture in which everything is encouraged to use more, to take more, to do more.
25:28 --> 25:45 [SPEAKER_01]: We know that these large corporations that sell addictive substances, whether that's high-processed foods like Oreos and Doritos or alcohol companies, and now cannabis companies, they are making on average 80% of their profits from 20% of their consumers.
25:46 --> 26:02 [SPEAKER_01]: And so the business model we have today and the challenges we all face is that we are constantly bombarded with messages and with enticements to consume far more than we should.
26:02 --> 26:08 [SPEAKER_01]: So at the same time I ever say anything's good things that we could use drugs for.
26:08 --> 26:11 [SPEAKER_01]: I always try to pair it with and be cautious.
26:12 --> 26:19 [SPEAKER_01]: because everything in our society is pushing us towards not a healthy, moderate use of these things.
26:20 --> 26:26 [SPEAKER_01]: But how do we reduce a human person to a consumer that will maximize profit for a corporation?
26:28 --> 26:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
26:28 --> 26:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
26:30 --> 26:33 [SPEAKER_00]: I think we can think of a lot of different examples that would apply there.
26:33 --> 26:43 [SPEAKER_00]: I do want to talk about, you know, the personal side of the book, you know, you open the book literally with about the most raw personal experience you can possibly describe.
26:43 --> 26:53 [SPEAKER_00]: You start the book with a needle going into your vein and describe the opioid entering your body almost sacramentally as mercy comfort even a kind of homecoming.
26:54 --> 26:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Why did you want the reader to
27:00 --> 27:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So, there are so many assumptions that people make about drugs and drug use, and I wanted to be able to illustrate for folks that a lot of these moral judgments are pre-programmed in our brains.
27:17 --> 27:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Like you and I who went to dare, we have been propagandized to have instinctual reactions around specific forms of drug use.
27:28 --> 27:38 [SPEAKER_01]: but the next part of the book is to open up that lens and to demonstrate that this was a substance that was being administered by a medical professional.
27:39 --> 27:41 [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that I had to overcome
27:42 --> 27:46 [SPEAKER_01]: is the fact that one of the drugs I received was Hydra Morphone.
27:47 --> 27:54 [SPEAKER_01]: And initially, even when I started sharing people with other people in my story, I would always be like, yeah, I was on Hydra Morphone.
27:55 --> 27:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry, I wasn't on anything crazy like Heroin.
27:59 --> 28:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And only to discover, as I did my research, oh,
28:10 --> 28:10 [SPEAKER_01]: right?
28:10 --> 28:13 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just a slight derivation on the morphine molecule.
28:13 --> 28:16 [SPEAKER_01]: If you go over to the UK, it's entirely possible.
28:16 --> 28:22 [SPEAKER_01]: You can be prescribed it because the benefit is it has fewer side effects than morphine.
28:22 --> 28:34 [SPEAKER_01]: It just also happens to be a little bit more potent, but the drug that I was on in clinical studies is nearly indistinguishable from heroin and just significantly more potent than
28:40 --> 29:02 [SPEAKER_01]: The fact that we do always because drugs aren't just a thing but a relationship, we need to consider all these different nodes of context in order to fully understand a drug and its potential uses, and its potential harms, and as soon as we try to extract it from those situations, we've actually made it more dangerous.
29:05 --> 29:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Pills just started washing through and they were available at high school parties and they were cheap.
29:12 --> 29:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And the idea that everyone bought into is, well, these can't be dangerous like heroin because they came from a doctor.
29:22 --> 29:26 [SPEAKER_01]: And so exactly because we made heroin so scary,
29:29 --> 29:33 [SPEAKER_01]: We had the opposite effect with other things that we should be concerned about.
29:34 --> 29:38 [SPEAKER_01]: So by trying to scare people into this as a demon drug don't ever touch it.
29:39 --> 29:50 [SPEAKER_01]: You then lose moral authority to give the cautions that people should really have about any kind of psychoactive substance they might be interested in trying.
29:51 --> 30:00 [SPEAKER_01]: If it's powerful enough for you to like it, it's powerful enough to have negative effects across the board, whether it's prescribed by a doctor.
30:16 --> 30:45 [SPEAKER_03]: He's gone, even here, but as she carried it, I don't, as she carried it, I feel something To me, God will survive, so take a breath, breathe it in,
30:52 --> 31:09 [SPEAKER_02]: As we don't know you, I think a true face If God has a face, His face must look like yours
31:19 --> 31:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Did God kill his kin?
31:25 --> 31:30 [SPEAKER_03]: Did he have to have blood before he would forget?
31:30 --> 31:30 [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe we
31:46 --> 31:53 [SPEAKER_03]: Is the aching my soldiers confined to my brain, even so?
31:54 --> 31:59 [SPEAKER_03]: Does that mean it's not real?
31:59 --> 32:04 [SPEAKER_02]: So take a breath of breathing, the mystery that...
32:28 --> 32:34 [SPEAKER_03]: If God has a face, her face must look like you.
32:45 --> 33:06 [SPEAKER_03]: A face like a teenager, and I'm at a milled red A rock sent his husband, got sent their children Vays like a Kim, a TED or Tyrone A little sea born with an extra chromosome
33:07 --> 33:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Powerful with legs, he can't move by himself A girl born a Daniel, who now is then now A pillaging Eve and white guy's name died If you have a heartbeat, you are the face
33:45 --> 34:01 [SPEAKER_02]: To take a breath, breathe in, a mystery that is there.
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