American Christians in general, and American Catholics in particular, have based their moral condemnation of marijuana largely on the legal prohibition against it. But those prohibitions are going up in smoke, and the change in legislation might not seem to leave our moral intuitions against pot smoking or marijuana brownies much rational basis. After all, we don’t as a rule ban moderate consumption of alcohol, even though it’s a psychoactive substance. And we all likely know someone on an antidepressant or antianxiety medication—we may even be taking one ourselves. So, if we’re okay with synthetic psychopharmaceuticals, why would we draw the line at ingesting something plant-based to alter our mood?
Before going any further, I’d like to frame what follows by suggesting that it’s a mistake to focus only on the material substances in question. Chemicals and plants, metals and synthetics are all morally neutral in themselves. What determines their morality is how they are used.
For instance, the Church has condemned as an intrinsic evil the use of a progestogen pill to contracept. However, it is not immoral for a woman to use the same pill to regulate her menstrual cycle (whether it’s a prudent decision depends on other factors). It’s the same pill in both cases, but in one case its use is necessarily immoral, and in the other it isn’t.
With psychoactive substances, the central moral question isn’t that substance’s chemical makeup or even its likely side effects. The central moral question is: what are you trying to accomplish by ingesting that substance?
When it comes to mood-altering substances, their basic uses can be generally classified under three headings:
- Recreational use: the substance is ingested to produce an experience.
- Therapeutic use: the substance is ingested to reduce an experience.
- Appreciative enjoyment: the substance is ingested to celebrate the goodness of the substance.
Let’s consider these three uses, and along the way we’ll see how they provide a moral context for knowing what to do about the different drugs we—or our kids or our friends—come across.
Recreational drug use: morally impermissible
Our psychological faculties—our intellect, our senses, our feelings—are all designed to respond to reality. That’s why we have them, so we can register the real world and respond appropriately. More specifically, human beings are made for objective truth and objective goodness, and our minds and bodies are multifaceted creations designed to pursue truth and goodness in this life and ultimately in the beatific encounter with God. But whenever we manipulate our human faculties to produce an experience, not responding to the appropriate correlate in the real world, it’s a perversion of our humanity.
For instance, it’s appropriate for a person to experience delight in sexual union with one’s spouse, but it’s not appropriate for a person to manipulate themselves so that they experience sexual pleasure apart from that union. The experience of sexual pleasure in masturbation isn’t responding to the appropriate real-world correlate for which it’s designed, and so pursuing that pleasure in that way constitutes a serious violation of one’s own humanity.
That same kind of self-manipulation away from reality happens all the time with drugs. In such cases, people use a drug to stimulate an experience that should be a response to the real world.
To take an obvious example, drug-induced hallucinations are bad because our visual faculties aren’t responding to the reality of the visual world. They’ve been manipulated away from their true end. But there can be hallucinatory emotions too, drug-induced feelings that we know are deceptive because they’re not a response to the real world. One such experience is the common phenomenon of marijuana-induced anxiety when the anxiety is clearly disproportionate to reality.
Another hallucinatory experience is marijuana-induced pleasure.
Suppose a man said to a woman, “I don’t take pleasure in your appearance now, but wait until I’ve smoked this joint. Then I’ll find you very attractive.” Would she be flattered if after he smoked weed he did indeed find her pretty?
Suppose two people meet at a party, and the first one says to the second one there, “I find you annoying, but wait until they pass the bong around and I’ve had a hit or two. Then I’ll enjoy your company.” Would the second man feel much pride in the first man’s friendliness afterward?
In both scenarios, the person who hasn’t ingested marijuana knows that the other person’s pleasure is not really a response to the first person’s goodness but rather an effect of the drug’s impact on the brain.
Here’s the principle: if someone is ingesting a substance to manipulate himself neurologically to produce a pleasurable sensation independently of the external world, that’s a perverse pleasure, and it’s immoral. It’s a rejection of reality and a warping of the purpose of pleasure itself.
Pleasure or delight is a natural response to some external good. Delight is meant to motivate us to rest in a good, to appreciate its presence. When we manipulate delight independent of its corresponding good, we lose our motivation to pursue and rest in real goods, and we twist pleasure in on itself instead of it pointing us out toward reality.
That’s why the Pontifical Council for Health and Pastoral Care states, “Pleasure that is sought for itself becomes unwholesome.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes it clear that “the use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense” (2291).
So drug-use that isn’t therapeutic—i.e., recreational drug use, including recreational use of marijuana—is a grave moral offense.
Then is therapeutic drug use always okay?
Therapeutic drug use: morally permissible
If we define therapeutic drug use as the ingestion of a substance to reduce an experience, we can find analogies on the medical level. That’s because humans have physiological systems that are designed to respond helpfully to threats, and in some cases these systems can overreact in counterproductive ways.
For instance, once when my young son got sick, he had a dangerously high fever, and one of the first things the hospital staff worked to do was bring the fever down. But the doctor told us that having some fever was good, since it was the body’s natural way of burning out the infection. The worry was that this helpful response system was overreacting counterproductively, and our son needed medication to bring it under control.
The same thing happens when I get poison ivy. My immune system produces rashes, which exist to help defend against toxins that come in contact with the skin. But my system goes overboard—it produces rashes everywhere and won’t stop until I get a shot to calm it down. A good system can get out of control.
Finally, take the case of physical pain. Pain exists to alert us to some physical problem and prompt us to take action toward a remedy. If my mouth hurts terribly, and I go to the dentist, I don’t want him to just prescribe a painkiller—I want him to fix what’s wrong. The pain has a meaning, an important one, and shouldn’t be ignored.
But after the dentist has found the problem, he may well have to give me an anesthetic so he can fix the problem, since if he doesn’t my pain might get in the way of him being able to perform the necessary procedure. Here again, a response system that’s healthy in itself—physical pain—may have to be reduced with drugs so it doesn’t prevent fixing the problem it prompted us to identify in the first place.
Well, psychological suffering is a response system too. It’s the proper and appropriate response to something that’s wrong in your life or the life of someone you care about. It’s indispensable to all kinds of natural and supernatural virtues: repentance, compassion, a search for ultimate answers, the quest for God, and even offering up one’s suffering to share in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice.
But that response system can become counterproductive, particularly in the case of depression. It sometimes happens that psychological suffering, instead of prompting a reexamination of one’s intellectual framework, or a deeper pursuit of union with Christ, or more virtuous living, or service to others, can instead lock a person within himself, immobilizing him and preventing any kind of mental or moral progress.
Medication can be used morally as part of the process of reducing such counterproductive sorrow. But a person must be careful not to simply dismiss one’s suffering as merely a chemical problem to be solved by merely chemical means. One must also be careful not to form a dependency on drugs that could make things worse overall, especially if the negative side effects of the drug outweigh the potential benefits.
St. John Paul II stated that “recourse to tranquilizing substances on medical advice in order alleviate—in well-defined cases—physical and psychological suffering should be governed by very prudent criteria in order to offset dangerous forms of addiction and dependence.”
Therefore, the use of therapeutic, mood-altering drugs can be legitimate—but make sure not to ignore the meaning and the importance of human suffering.
Appreciative enjoyment: morally permissible
What about alcohol? That’s a psychoactive substance—a drug—too, right?
Well, it can be. Remember, a substance is a substance—only a certain use of a substance qualifies as considering it a drug. And alcohol definitely can be used as a drug. It can be used to produce an experience. If you slam a couple shots to “get the party started,” that’s clearly using alcohol as a recreational drug, and it’s immoral for all the reasons we’ve seen.
On the other hand, if you take a stiff drink right after you’ve been in a car accident to settle your nerves, that’s therapeutic drug use. It’s trying to reduce the surging adrenaline after a startling incident. That use isn’t morally off-limits, but it is technically self-medicating, and you wouldn’t want it to become a habit.
But alcohol can also be treated as simply a good, healthy, nutritious drink. Alcohol is a digestible substance and is still believed to have health benefits. That’s why the Catechism classifies alcohol as food (2290) and not as a drug.
The Pontifical Council for Health and Pastoral Care points out, “In many societies, wine and alcohol form part of dining; obviously, since these products are not completely free from dangers, they can become drugs, provoking serious illnesses and very high rates of mortality.”
Pope St. John Paul II stated, “There exists, certainly, a definite difference between the use of drugs and the use of alcohol: while the moderate use of the latter as a drink does not violate moral norms, and hence only its abuse is to be condemned, the use of drugs, on the contrary, is always illicit.”
So how do you know if you’re using alcohol as a drug or as a good drink?
One easy way to tell is to ask yourself what you’re going for and if you’d be disappointed if you didn’t get.
When someone offers me a bottle of beer or a glass of wine or whisky, I’m looking for a good drink. I want to be able to take one sip and then say, truthfully, “This is good.” I’d be disappointed if it tasted nasty—if the wine was too fruity or the beer was flat or my drink didn’t have that good burn going down the throat (which is, by the way, why a lot of people don’t want to drink nonalcoholic imitations of beer, wine, and whisky).
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is quite a mistake to suppose that, when a man desires an alcoholic drink, he necessarily desires alcohol.” That’s certainly true for me. I don’t drink to get buzzed, and I don’t think you should either. It should be enough to appreciate the good things of life around you, including the drink in your hand. Take delight in those. Don’t try to neurologically short-circuit yourself into feeling delight for no reason.
The same applies to recreational pot smokers. Put down the joint or the edible. You may be relishing the taste of the smoke or the gummy, but you know you’re also going for the chemical effect, and you’d be disappointed if you didn’t get it.
Don’t settle for hallucinatory pleasure. You were made for more. The real world is delightful; learn to see its goodness. The next world is beatific; purge your mind of perverted pleasures so you can delight forever in the infinite perfection of God.