Dear Father,
I went to confession and mentioned that I like to smoke pot. The priest told me that it’s a serious matter and that I had to get rid of my stash. I told him that it’s legal and that I didn’t understand his problem with it. Is smoking pot a sin now? It’s legal. And people drink alcohol. Get my point?
-Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
Let me see if I get your point. You say that the use of marijuana is legal and seem surprised that a priest called you out on this in the confessional because you were the one who brought it up in the first place. You seem to base the rightness or wrongness of your actions only on the laws of the state. By your standards, if the state legalizes the killing of babies in the womb, then abortion is okay or even good.
You said that you listed smoking pot in your confession of sins. Something about your actions bothered you enough to confess it. That “something,” I suggest, is your conscience telling you that something is wrong with recreational pot smoking. For the sake of responding to your question about the sinfulness of smoking pot, I’m taking for granted that your use of cannabis was not for medical purposes since you mentioned “legality,” seemingly a reference to recreational marijuana.
You compare your use of cannabis to someone drinking alcohol. I don’t think that the comparison necessarily holds. Spirits, such as wine and beer, are age-old beverages. Even our Lord drank wine. True, they may be abused, and we have examples of such abuse in the Sacred Scriptures. If someone abuses alcohol, such as with the intent to get drunk, then that person commits a serious sin.
My question to you is why? Why do you use cannabis? Most non-medical use of cannabis or recreational marijuana is for intoxication. Intentional intoxication is bad because it is an abuse of the body and mind. The word “intoxication” refers to a toxin, a poison, by which we damage ourselves. This is the case for all substance abuse. If your use of marijuana is recreational, i.e., for intoxication, then we have a problem, just as someone abusing alcohol in order to get drunk has a problem.
Modern-day marijuana is not your father’s pot. (I’m not insinuating that your dad actually smoked.) It doesn’t just make you happy and hungry. The THC (the marijuana derivative that causes a high or feeling of pleasure) levels in marijuana have increased over the years, making cannabis much more potent today, The Wall Street Journal reports (January 10, 2024). Schizophrenia or bipolar disorders are on the rise as a result of cannabis use, particularly among young people, according to the same article.
Marijuana is classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as very likely to be abused and has no medical use. Even as a pain killer, a pharmacist recently told me, cannabis does not work well. Moreover, it’s a carcinogen. The side-effects of medical marijuana, he said, are horrible.
This leads me to believe that you are smoking pot for the high it gives. This means that pleasure is the end or purpose of your use. While pleasure is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, when our quest for pleasure has no checks, it often becomes an end in itself. It becomes a god and takes control of our lives. Anyone trying to battle against a sexual addiction will attest to this.
“Drugs,” said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (quoted by Denver Archbishop Sam Aquila in his recently penned: That They May Have Life) “are an attempt to fill … the thirst of the soul.” I highly recommend that everyone read the archbishop’s comprehensive pastoral letter. It’s especially pertinent in Ohio and the 23 other states where voters have made recreational use of marijuana legal.
You can hardly blame the priest for wanting your good so that you can find a true high with God. The confessional is a difficult place to give extended counsel and so priests often need to get to the point of a problem. The priest gave you some tough love. In truncated form, he was saying: This is bad for you, for your body, for your soul, for your eternal salvation.
To answer your question: Was the priest saying that pot smoking is a sin? I wasn’t there, so I can only imagine that, yes, he was saying it’s a sin, based on what I said above about the effects of marijuana. Priests aren’t trying to find sins in the confessional; they’re trying to get you to heaven. Sin prevents us from getting to heaven because by our sins we distance ourselves from God. In the confessional, the priest is trying to remove the obstacle so that you can experience the depths of God’s mercy and love.
In his pastoral letter, Archbishop Aquila spoke about how we are experts in making excuses for our behavior but that we need to wake up and see how the acceptance of drug use in our culture has been devastating in so many ways, especially visible in cities where drug use has been legalized.
With the archbishop, “I pray for those who turn to drugs to escape reality, to avoid pain, to deal with loneliness, rejection, emotional wounds, or … struggle to find meaning in life.” With him, let us all pray that the Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on these brothers and sisters of ours, to turn their hearts from what is below them, toward the real love that only God above can give.
