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What transforms a tough-on-crime conservative Christian from Mississippi into a powerful advocate for drug policy reform? For Christina Dent, it was her experience as a foster mom. That launched her on a path to found End It For Good, an organization fighting to revolutionize America’s approach to drugs. From sharing her personal story to working with lawmakers, Christina challenges us to question our assumptions about drugs and addiction and imagine a different path forward.

To learn more about Christina’s story and how to get involved, check out her book, Curious: A Foster Mom’s Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction, and visit enditforgood.com

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Ana Zamora, Christina Dent

Ana Zamora  00:32

When I was nine years old, I heard a knock on my family’s door. It was late at night, definitely past my bedtime. From my little pink bedroom upstairs, I remember seeing police officers enter our home. I watched as they led my older brother Jorge away in handcuffs. That night is burned into my memory. It’s the night my parents, at their wit’s end, felt that they had no other choice but to have their son arrested. He’d been stealing and had a warrant out by this point, he had been in and out of jail before, and eventually found himself in prison. My parents did the only thing our society offers people who need help, and for years, they shielded me from what happened. But my brother’s story didn’t end there. Today, after a lot of hard work, he’s thriving, and he gave me his blessing to share this story. He told me, sis, if telling it can help others and change how the justice system works, share it loud and far. Welcome to When It Clicked, I’m your host, Ana Zamora, founder and CEO of The Just Trust, an organization fighting for a criminal justice system that works better for all of us. In this series, I’m talking to people from all walks of life to ask why they’re working to transform our justice system. We may come to this issue for very different reasons, but ultimately, we all want the same thing, to create safety and opportunities for all. Some of my guests have made mistakes in the past and have been to prison. Some have a family member who has been to prison like I do, and others are driven by human rights, racial justice, faith or economics, whatever their reason, all are welcome at this table today, we’re talking to Christina Dent, a proud conservative Christian from Mississippi and a leading advocate for drug policy reform in the US. She’s the founder of End it For Good, a nonprofit that’s rethinking our approach to drugs and addiction to reduce crime and empower families. End it For Good is all about using education to elevate solutions, whether that’s through events, research reports or engaging with policy makers. I first met Christina a few years ago when we were both speaking at a conference in Colorado Springs. I remember sitting in on her session, hanging onto her every word, her experience as a foster mom made her rethink everything she thought she knew about drugs and addiction, and hearing it really changed how I thought about drug policy, too. Okay, here’s my conversation with Christina. All right, so I want to take it to your beginning. We’re going to talk a lot about your current work at end it for good, but I want to start with how you got here. Can you talk a little bit growing up in Mississippi and how your experience as a young person really shaped your perspectives on crime, on justice, on drugs, on addiction, on all those issues.

 

Christina Dent  05:12

Yeah, so I grew up in a wonderful family. I had a very happy childhood. Grew up in a conservative Christian home, conservative Christian community that was my world growing up, so I carried that as my family and kind of faith community and friend community context. And I also grew up in West Jackson, which is higher crime part of town, so my memories of laying in my bed at night before I would fall asleep, are gunshots, police sirens and loud music coming. We lived like just one house off of a main thoroughfare going through West Jackson. And so I grew up with this very safe sense within my family and a lot of anxiety about safety outside of it. And so when I saw advertisements on TV, you know, for political candidates who were talking about tough on crime, and I was born in 83 So I’m coming up right in the middle of this kind of 90s, you know, tough on crime era, that sounded amazing to me. Who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t want fewer police sirens and fewer gunshots in my neighborhood, who wouldn’t want to feel safer than I did. I didn’t have any personal connection to the criminal justice system at all, and even my family did not have a history of substance misuse or, really, substance use. Hardly at all. I only was able to kind of take in what I heard from the community, which is, you know, people out there are the ones using drugs, people out there are the ones committing crime, and in order for us to feel safe, we need a strong criminal justice response to all of those things.

 

Ana Zamora  06:54

Absolutely I mean, I totally resonate with that. I was born in 1982 and, you know, was raised that especially drugs and substance use like those are bad and the people that use them are bad. I know you had at some point in your journey, a moment that really questioned all of these beliefs that you had been raised with and been inundated with as a young person. You talk about it in your TEDx talk, you know, in that you share a really powerful story about meeting your foster son’s mother and how that really changed your perspective. Can you tell us about that moment and what that felt like to have that realization?

 

Christina Dent  07:36

Yeah, so my husband and I became foster parents. I was in my early 30s. By this point, we had two children already, my two older sons, and decided, hey, we’re going to go down this path and kind of see where it leads. We’re open to adoption, but we’re not we’re also open to just, you know, fostering short term. And so we started down this path, nothing in the foster parent training that we got from the state had any education about addiction issues, what’s really going on with addiction? Nothing, even though the majority of children who are removed and put in foster care are there for some sort of drug related reason with their parents. So I came into this with no context for what addiction is other than what I had grown up with, which is bad people use drugs. And in my mind, you know, the worst people become addicted to them like it was kind of this hierarchy of badness was kind of how deep your addiction might be. So I brought that into this context of fostering. And the second child that we fostered was a little baby who came to us straight from the hospital after he had been born. When he was discharged, the social worker got him, brought him to our home, and we became his foster family, and he had a mom who immediately wanted to connect with me, and I felt very uncertain about that. That felt really awkward to me, scary to me, but we were committed to reunification, if that was possible, so we set up a visit for her to visit him just a couple of days after he came to our house. So I took him, and I had my other kids with me in the car, and went to the child welfare office and popped his car seat out of the car and turned around in the parking lot to go bring him inside. And here comes this woman running across the parking lot crying, and she runs over, and I can hear her talking like I can hear her speaking as she’s coming, but she’s not talking to me. She’s not looking at me. She’s running over, and I can hear as soon as she gets close enough, she’s talking to Beckham. She’s talking to her son, and he’s this tiny little five pound, nine ounce preemie, and she runs over and just starts kissing him. And I honestly Ana. I really felt suspicious. I felt like that. This cannot be real. If you loved him this much, this like this, doesn’t make any sense, you wouldn’t have been using while you were pregnant, and that’s why he had been removed. She was not able to beat a 20 year addiction by the time that that she was pregnant, and so she has him for her one hour of visitation, and I come back to pick him up after that. I will never forget the picture of walking into that tiny little visitation room and she’s sitting in the corner of that couch, and Beckham is sleeping on her shoulder, and she’s just sitting there with her eyes closed, like just drinking him in. She just is taking every last minute that she has with him before he has to come home with me, and so he comes home with me and she goes for inpatient drug treatment. All of these experiences are building up for me in this realization that there’s a decision point of, is this real, and if it is, it means I have dramatically misunderstood something about what’s going on with addiction, because my paradigm is that she is a bad person who doesn’t care about her child. What I’m seeing is so many markers that are a mom like me, and if she is, then I’ve got some work to do, and I’m so thankful that she helped me to see what was true, which is she is a mom like me, and she was also struggling with a really complex health crisis. And that was the beginning for me of this journey of asking those deeper questions of Wait a second, if this is a really complex health crisis, what would we have done to this family if we had put her in prison to try to deal with this health crisis, what price would we be paying, not just now, but for the rest of their lives?

 

Ana Zamora  11:49

I can’t imagine how powerful that moment must have been for you, and I do think that more and more people in our country are having similar experiences, and they’re asking those exact questions. But you took that moment and you turned it into something quite amazing. You took it upon yourself to do something about it, and you founded and currently serve as the president of a nonprofit organization called end it for good. Can you tell me about how you went from that transformative moment with Joanna and and thought that you should start a nonprofit and tackle this massive issue yourself? How did that happen?

 

Christina Dent  12:33

Huh, that’s been a journey.  I went through this kind of year and a half of learning like really trying to go down to, like, ground zero of okay, what are all the things I don’t know about drugs and addiction and how we handle this, and it really was driven by the same heart that was behind our introduction into foster care, because I started thinking, wait a second, if so many kids are in foster care because of drug related causes, then if we’re doing anything wrong related to how we approach drugs and addiction, that might be the most significant thing we could do to impact foster care and kids in foster care. So I started kind of going up the river on that so it turned into this massive learning journey that took about a year and a half, and at that point, I had not just changed my own mind. I thought, I think that what we are doing is creating so much harm that people don’t recognize. I didn’t realize that the policies that I was supporting were actually creating a lot of the problems that I was seeing. I thought the drugs are the problem, and I didn’t recognize that they are operating in a system that is compounding harm at almost every level. And so I wanted to offer people an opportunity to understand that, and I started hosting book discussions on Johan Hari’s book, chasing the screen. It’s fantastic. Highly recommend it, and it was really powerful. It was incredible to be in Jackson, Mississippi. We’re in the heart of the Deep South, with a room full of mostly conservative people, mostly people of faith, and discussing massive changes to how we approach drugs and addiction. And so it was really powerful that first one grew into a bunch of them, and then all over the state. And this started in 2017 and 2019 it had grown to the point where it felt like there’s a movement here. People are interested in this, and I don’t want to not give more people an opportunity to join it. So end it for good. Became a nonprofit five years ago.

 

Ana Zamora  14:39

So it sounds like you’re really engaging a lot with folks that are also conservative Christians like yourself. How have you approached those conversations around these issues with other conservative folks that may not see eye to eye with you? Like what does that conversation look like?

 

Christina Dent  14:57

So for me, I think part of the reason that I wanted to start. End it for good is I felt like there was a lack of conservative voices talking about this, and it wasn’t because I felt like it’s not consistent with conservative principles I lay out in my book in story form, but also in just thought and value form. Why I think these shifts are actually more consistent with conservative values than the ones that we have taken in the past. And I really wanted to provide that because I wanted people to see that sometimes you come across policy that’s just good policy. It’s good for everyone. There are many things that we all agree on that you shouldn’t be able to drive 1000 miles an hour down the interstate. That’s not a left or right issue. There are just some things that we have all agreed this is just good policy. It makes sense for all of us. And I think certainly there’s different angles to the way you approach drugs and addiction that might be more conservative or more progressive, but the core issues of how we are approaching drugs and addiction, no one is winning. It doesn’t really matter what side of the political spectrum you’re coming from. Everyone is living with the harm of lots of overdose, lots of family destabilization, lots of family harm from addiction. And it helps all of us, whether it’s personal to us or whether it’s just in the community around us. It helps all of us if we get better outcomes, and we have more people that are living lives, that are have the best opportunity to thrive.

 

Ana Zamora  17:13

Christina, I want to kind of step out a little bit and talk about some of the current drug policy issues that you in particular have written a lot about, and I’ve just been kind of devouring them lately. And one theme that you are really pulling on lately that is really important to me as a woman, as a stepmother, very proud stepmother is the hidden toll of incarcerating mothers who have substance use disorder and just incarcerating mothers period. Can you share a little bit about some of the insights and you know how some of our current drug policies in particular are affecting families, communities and mothers?

 

Christina Dent  18:21

Yeah, I did some work recently really kind of digging into that impact of women. How many women we are arresting for drug crimes? How many of those women are mothers? How many of those women are sole breadwinners in their homes? And, you know, I think so I’m gonna, I’m gonna put my hat back on from Christina 20 years ago and tell you what that sounds like to me when I say that. What I would have said 20 years ago is, then, don’t commit a crime. You know, if you don’t want to go to jail, if you want to be there for your kids, don’t do anything illegal, and then it will all be solved. So if we can take a step back from that, because that’s true. Yes, you can not commit a crime. So there is responsibility for someone for what they choose to do. There’s also responsibility for us as we respond to people’s choices. Just because someone makes a choice that is wrong or unhealthy or whatever it might be doesn’t mean that we can just respond without any sort of accountability ourselves. So I think that’s where we gotta we have to look at that and say, is the response number one, is it even helpful? Like, is this actually correcting anything that’s gonna be helpful? What is the broader cost of this response? So sure, we might feel good because we put someone in jail for three months on a drug possession charge who was a mom of young kids. What’s the cost to that of society? What is the cost to the things that most of us hold very dear, family structures, the public safety we know children who have parents who are incarcerated are more. Likely to struggle with a substance use disorder themselves. They’re more likely to be criminal justice involved later on. They’re more likely to have trouble in school, all of these different kinds of things. It’s not because they’re bad kids.

 

Ana Zamora  20:13

I want to pause for a second here to say that what Christine is saying is spot on. I think there’s this false idea that we have to hold people with substance use disorders accountable through punishment like incarceration, and I saw that firsthand with my brother’s experience. But you know what really works providing real opportunities for quality treatment, that’s the best form of accountability possible, because it actually stops the harm separating kids from their parents through incarceration actually increases their risk of substance abuse disorders and criminal justice involvement later on. And it’s not just incarceration. The foster care system is also linked to higher chances of justice involvement when families stay together during treatment and recovery, we create better outcomes for everyone.

 

Christina Dent  21:10

When you traumatize a family in a way that a criminal justice involvement does for a parent and for their whole family unit, you feel those impacts for decades to come, so we can arrest a mom and put her in jail for three months on a drug possession charge, but we’re going to pay the price for that for years and years to come, and we’re going to continue to feel that down through generations, until we can begin to address the core issue in a way that is actually helpful, instead of just a way that makes us maybe feel good, it might help us feel like we are, you know, keeping everyone we know we made a point. She knows she shouldn’t have done that well. But what’s the cost? And are we willing to continue living with this level of cost to society.

 

Ana Zamora  21:59

And what’s the outcome? So let’s say we put a mother who has a substance use disorder and was caught with drugs for personal use. Let’s say we put her in jail for a couple of months. Yes, there’s a massive cost to her child and so many other consequences, as you have talked about, but like, then what? So then she’s in jail for a couple of months. Then what happens? There’s just no there’s no good outcome with that as an intervention. I also just want to kind of rattle off some things that you have mentioned in some of your writings that I think a lot of people don’t know, related to women and incarceration. Number one, women are the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population growing more than 500% between 1980 and 2020. 500% another one that really gets me is, you know, America incarcerates more women per capita than any other country in the world. And then finally, you know, children whose mothers have been incarcerated are at much higher risk of behavioral health issues, mental health issues, and of course, being incarcerated at some point in their life themselves, not to mention the development of substance use disorder. So these are just some things that I wish more people knew, because I think it will help people again, move past that fear and have have realizations and dig into the information in in the way that you have, yeah?

 

Christina Dent  23:28

And I want to say one thing about that real quick, because there might be somebody listening that goes, Yeah, but what? It’s probably like saving her children from her, because she was probably a, you know, an unsafe mother, and that’s so it’s a good thing that we sort of protected her children from her you can protect children from unsafe behavior without arresting that parent. That’s what the foster care system is for. So if there is abuse or neglect happening, the foster care system can come in and remove a child if there’s evidence of that. But part of the cultural messaging has been that everyone using drugs is out of control. Abusive can’t be trusted. It’s just crazy town for everyone all the time, and that is statistically not true at all. Even you look at the the US government’s own kind of drug control group, their own statistics say the vast majority of people who use drugs, they’re not addicted to them. They’re not harming anyone by that. And so just because a parent is using a substance, whether it’s legal or not, does not mean that they are harming their children or doing anything that that would mean that their children are not safe with them. So this blanket approach to it is incredibly harmful, because it lumps everyone in together and can create a lot of destruction.

 

Ana Zamora  24:47

That’s right. I want to go back a little bit to your southern roots. The United States has made quite a bit of progress on drug law issues, right? We’ve seen a. Uh, you know, decriminalization and legalization of cannabis in many states and other really important policy reforms related to drug possession and whatnot. But we often hear about these things in states like California or coastal states or northern states. There’s not much of a kind of common conversation around this work in the south, I happen to believe that there is a pathway to address these issues in southern states. Can you give our listeners a different perspective? What is the pathway forward in advancing these issues in the south?

 

Christina Dent  25:35

So I think there’s great pathways forward, and part of it is because I get to be here and I get to talk with people about it, and I get to hear the openness that people have. Let’s take a concrete example, fentanyl testing strips. They’ve been legal in some states for a long time. They have not been legal in Mississippi until last year. So fentanyl testing strips allow someone who’s using a drug to test it to see if it has fentanyl in it before they use it. So there was a bill in the Mississippi Legislature two years ago, or three sessions ago, I guess that would have legalized that. Well, the thinking at the time was, no, this is going to encourage people to use drugs. This is not going to be a positive thing. This is going to be all negative, and there’s no, no way that we need to do that. And last year, a bill came up, and there was a lot of work done and a lot of advocacy, in part by law enforcement in Mississippi. There was a police chief in one of our college towns that said, we’ve we need these. We’re already giving them out, and we’re already, you know, not prosecuting people for possessing them, even though they could be considered drug paraphernalia, because we don’t want people to die from overdoses that could have been prevented. And so just one year later, fentanyl testing strips Passes unanimously in the Mississippi Legislature and is now available. And you know, organizations, recovery houses, all kinds of people can have them, stock them, give them out in Mississippi. So change absolutely can happen. A big part of that is, you know, for me, what convinced me of these policy changes is a different thing than it’s going to convince someone else. And I think sometimes we get so stuck on that we want people to see and value the exact same thing that we do, instead of listening to them and wondering, I wonder what it is that animates them. I wonder what it is they’re most concerned about. And if I can keep my mouth shut long enough to listen to someone else and understand their concerns and why it is that they don’t want to move forward. Maybe I can help alleviate some of those concerns, just with some education.

 

Ana Zamora  27:46

That’s right.

 

Christina Dent  27:47

And this is key point here. If I could get this across to everyone, there are people that we work with that say we do not agree with you on legalizing drug markets. We think you’re crazy on that, but we think you’re not crazy on some of this other stuff related to, you know, fentanyl testing strips, or how we approach addiction or that. And so we can work with you there.

 

Ana Zamora  28:06

And it turns out some of the places where we do agree, will save people’s lives and help people get into treatment, help people get their children back and lead productive, healthy lives, like that is where we need to come together. We focus so much on all the things to your point that we disagree on, but there’s so much good work to do when we focus on meeting people where they’re at and coming together on the things that we do. And a big part of meeting people where they’re at is figuring out treatment that works for them. That’s the thing about treatment that works. It’s not one size fits all. What works for one person might not work for another. Plus, we know that the most successful programs are evidence based and culturally appropriate. Think about it if we push people into low quality treatment and blame them when they don’t succeed. What are we really accomplishing? Real recovery requires the right program and a willingness to do the work that’s when accountability can really happen.

 

Ana Zamora  30:48

Christina, I can’t believe it, but our time is running out, so as we start to wrap up, I’m really curious, what is one myth that you want to bust? If there’s one myth that you could just blow out of the water and make it disappear forever. About the work of criminal justice reform? What would that be? And then, what is one hope that you have for the future?

 

Christina Dent  31:11

So many myths to bust. I know so many. I think the main myth to bust, I think that is harming so many people, is that there’s only one pathway to recovery, and the people have to hit bottom, it’s got to be painful. I think we are killing people by continuing to perpetuate that. That’s not true. There are many pathways to recovery. Medication is one of the most effective ones. People don’t have to hit a bottom. People really can see that their substance use is getting out of control and take that step back. That does not have to mean that their life is destroyed and they lose their job and they lose their family before they are able to come out of that. So really want people to see this part of that is this belief that a criminal justice involvement is going to be that bottom for them. That’s what they need, a painful experience trauma doesn’t solve trauma. Trauma does not lead to healing, and healing is what people struggling with addiction need. So that would be my my myth buster. What gives me hope? Oh, man, so much gives me hope. But I think people who are alive right now, we have not lived in a world where this is not the way of life that we know. And I think, can we, can we think about the last 500 years and think about all the things that have changed in human history over the last 500 years that people would have thought, never, are going to change like never. The arc of history is towards justice, and the arc of history is that destructive policies do change over time. We learn more, we grow. It takes a long time, and it takes a lot of people, but they do change, and they can change, and this is going to change. I think this is going to be one of those issues that we look back on in 50 years, and our grandkids and great grandkids are gonna be going grandma. I mean, what on earth you guys thought that, like arresting people for addiction was gonna solve their addictions? That’s crazy. You already had the research that said trauma is a main driver of addiction. Why did you think traumatizing people even more was gonna help? And how we get those changes is regular people taking it upon themselves to be part of that change.

 

Ana Zamora  33:26

That’s right. I mean, regular people like you and me.

 

Christina Dent  33:29

Yeah, we’re regular people. We go home, we eat avocado toast for breakfast, and then we, you know, go to work.

 

Ana Zamora  33:36

And we are regular people, just like so many who thought one way, experienced a moment in our life that made us change the way we thought, and then we got activated. So I just want to as a final, final bit here, I want to pull on that thread a little bit. What can we do to make sure that more people have these transformational moments like you and I have me with my older brother, you with your experience as a foster mom. How can we facilitate a national awakening around these issues.

 

Christina Dent  34:13

Really encouraging people to start talking about it? That’s how culture change happens. It doesn’t happen by people changing their minds and keeping that to themselves. It happens by them being willing to offer that in other environments. And what I love about something like a book or a podcast like this is that you can sort of send it to someone and say, hey, I listened to this interesting podcast. I’d love to talk about it with you. Do you have 30 minutes to listen to it and then, like, maybe we could get together for a cup of coffee? That’s look, this is the way society changes. This is the way movements spread. It spreads relationally. It spreads through storytelling. And I think storytelling is such a key part of what people can do is lifting up the. Stories of other people, and yeah, don’t underestimate the power you have to create change, even in just your own family, in your own community and a couple of friend relationships, and you have no idea how that’s going to impact that mom, who’s going to go meet her son and get him and bring him home from drug treatment, and she’s going to come in instead of maybe coming in with that anger and shame, she’s going to come in with, I love you, and I’m here for you no matter what, that’s incredible.

 

Ana Zamora  35:29

Oh, Christina, thank you so much for showing a pathway to how our stories and our experiences and vulnerability is so powerful in this work and all work, really, and for being a safe place for people to come talk to and explore these issues. So thank you so much for coming on and having a conversation with me.

 

Christina Dent  35:51

Thanks so much, Anna. I appreciate it.

 

CREDITS  36:00

Thanks for listening to When It Clicked. To learn more about Christina’s story, check out her book, Curious, a foster mom’s discovery of an unexpected solution to drugs and addiction. You can find out more about End it For Good at enditforgood.com.  When It Clicked is a production of Lemonada Media and the Just Trust. I’m your host, Ana Zamora, Hannah Boomershine is our producer. Muna Danish is our senior producer. Ivan Kuraev is our audio engineer, with additional engineering support from Johnny Vince Evans. Music is from APM. Jackie Danziger is our VP of partnerships and production. Executive Producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs.  Follow When It Clicked wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.