Now I'm not defending the sale of illegal substances (although I find it fascinating how the morality of the sale of substances is determined by the state, not by any good offered) nor our friend's use of marijuana. Honestly, I find pastorally alcohol much more destructive of human life than marijuana -- though marijuana itself can be adequately destructive of humans, and I wish that neither would be present around us, and that our congregation would accept the asceticism of life without such mind-altering substances.

Yet as I've reflected the past few days on his adventure, something occurred to me. Marijuana is a seditive that helps persons deal with anxiety, anxiety that often leads to depression. Of course, the society that we live within encodes anxiety into our bodies over all sorts of issues, offering its pleasures and remedies as solutions to the problems that it forms. What struck me was that often marijuana serves as the Prozac of the poor. Those who suffer (and it is horrible suffering) from anxiety who have insurance and financial means can afford treatment, medical monitoring, and legal (and thus moral) support for the psychotherapeutics that one takes -- and this is a good thing. Yet for the poor who do not have access to the medical system, either in diagnosis or medicine, marijuana becomes a 'self-prescribed' 'solution' to the situation. In the process, they criminalize themselves, making them vulnerable to arrest and conviction, complicating their lives and the lives around them both in the present and the future.

I don't like marijuana. I've seen the horrible cost it can inflict on human lives. Yet I also don't like the criminalization of the poor for being poor. I wish that I could have an answers. It seems to me that until we can have our bodies de-toxified from the insecurities of which we both are victims and to which we contribute to others, by our full bodily initiation into the true sociality of the kingdom of God -- our entire sanctification, we have to use other toxins to counter-balance the toxins that have become our bodies. Some of these toxins, through proper oversight, becomes means of freedom from sin; others can pull us deeper into sin by masking the symptoms -- and these are often more ambiguous than we think.

Yet we find here in our friend the necessity to travel as the state excommunicates him from us, and the 'therapy of the table' to which God calls us.