When Faith Meets the Streets: A Personal Reflection on Love and Drug Policy

There’s been a hit song: “Messy in Heaven” by Venbee and Goddard. It imagines Jesus caught up in the chaos of modern life, in clubs, on drugs, wrestling with expectations.

It’s not theology; it’s art. But it struck me because it asks a powerful question: What would love actually look like if it walked amongst us in our mess?

Liberation Theology and the Call to Action

Colombian Bishop Torres taught about Amor Eficaz, effective love. He argued that genuine love cannot ignore social and structural inequality.

Love means seeking what’s best for someone or their community. When you find someone badly injured, do you just pray for them, or do you bind their wounds?

This revolutionary insight didn’t begin in Latin America. The English Dissenters of the 17th century understood it too. Their core message was clear: everyone is made in the image of God.

To love God means to love your neighbour. To love your neighbour means wanting the best for them and working to create a world where people can flourish.

Many were murdered for this conviction, while others escaped to North America on boats such as the Mayflower. They followed the path of loving those most in need.

Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, by William Halsall

Politics and religion are messy bedfellows. I don’t believe the Church should draft government policy, but it absolutely must hold governments accountable when their policies harm the most vulnerable.

When I trained as a Baptist Minister in the late eighties, I watched Christianity retreat into personal salvation. I felt the message became about individual feelings and private faith.

This ignores Jesus’s call to build his Kingdom of equality here on earth. Christianity’s great tragedy is its selective absolutism. We’re rigid about personal salvation but ignore Jesus’s two fundamental commandments: love God and love your neighbour.

Effective Love in Practice

Apply the principle of effective love to people who use drugs, and you become a harm reductionist. If you love someone, you want to protect them from unnecessary harm and danger.

You recognise that prohibition amplifies the dangers they face. You see the inequality and fight against it.

Consider the policy of criminalising mothers who use drugs and tearing families apart in the name of abstinence. What could be crueller?

A mother struggling with substance use needs support, treatment, and hope. She needs her children to motivate her recovery and her children need their mother’s love, however imperfect.

When the state separates them, it destroys the very relationships that could heal both. This isn’t protecting children; it’s creating orphans while their parents are still alive.

Spirituality is not mindfulness.

For me, spirituality is about engaging in the real world. It is about looking outside of yourself and applying your sense of justice and love to the world you are part of.

For those of us running services, we should seek to create empowering spaces offering a place for people to talk and explore. What I’m truly committed to is offering people a map for rediscovering themselves.

Effective love always wants the best for someone. In relationships, it opens new horizons rather than closing them down. The same principle applies to how we treat people who use drugs.

The Reality of Poverty and Structural Inequality

Problematic drug and alcohol use devastates communities already struggling with social deprivation. If we’re serious about reducing drug deaths, we must address poverty.

Poverty isn’t just about money. It’s about being made to feel insignificant, invisible.

We’re watching record numbers of people die from drug-related deaths, yet our government responds with indifference. Every statistic represents someone’s child, parent, or partner lost to a system that punishes rather than heals.

Drug-related deaths, Office of National Statistics

As Kaleidoscope has grown, so has our understanding of our responsibility. We oppose structural inequality because we’ve witnessed its devastating effects firsthand.

When it comes to people who use drugs, taking away their liberty is fundamentally wrong. Problematic drug use rarely stems from free choice. It usually results from family breakdown or system failures.

Many people we support have survived significant childhood trauma that damaged their mental health. Seeking comfort in drugs becomes their coping mechanism, made more likely by social care systems that fail to provide meaningful support.

The Path of Resistance

Liberation theology has always faced violent opposition. Its core conviction that God has a preferential option for the poor is deeply threatening to unjust systems.

Camilo Torres and countless unnamed Catholics were murdered because of their faith and for speaking truth to power in Latin America. The early Church, too, was born in resistance, beaten, jailed, and martyred for their refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice.

The Cross is not just a symbol of salvation, but of costly solidarity. To love God and to love people, especially the poor and marginalised, is to walk a path of risk.

Martin Blakebrough preaching in John Bunyan Baptist Church, where Kaleidoscope was founded

The message of loving your neighbour and valuing every person has never been popular with those in power. That’s why changing drug policy has taken decades of struggle.

But Jesus’s story gives me hope because he led as someone who faced all of life’s doubts and temptations. Even in the mess, he maintained a heart for change shaped by love.

This is what effective love looks like when it walks amongst us in our chaos: it binds wounds instead of inflicting them, it keeps families together instead of tearing them apart, and it offers hope instead of punishment.

That’s not just good theology. It’s good policy.