Christina Dent Interview: A Curious Approach to the War on Drugs

Christina Dent, founder of End it For Good, shares her transformative journey as a conservative, evangelical Christian to a powerful advocate for ending drug prohibition. Christina's unique perspective emerged from her experiences as a foster parent, particularly her encounter with Joanne, a mother struggling with addiction. Her insights will compel you to rethink your beliefs on drug policy, pushing for a more empathetic approach to those dealing with addiction.

Join us as we further explore the failures of the criminal justice system in addressing drug use and addiction. We also touch on the need for a shift towards health-centered solutions, bringing to light the root causes of drug use, like childhood trauma and mental health issues. As we navigate this polarizing topic, we also debate the contentious notion that eliminating drug laws is akin to disregarding household rules for disobedient children.

 

Transcript 

Grant Callen: Welcome to the Empower Podcast, the show where we talk about Mississippi's big challenges and big opportunities. Each episode, we'll talk with lawmakers, policy experts, and community leaders about how we can break down barriers together to create a Mississippi where everyone can rise.

I'm Grant Callen, founder and CEO of Empower Mississippi, where we put people over divisive politics. And work to give voice, and hope to those most impacted by public policy decisions. Listen in to today's episode so you can learn how we can work together to make Mississippi the best place in America to live, work, and raise a family.

Welcome back. This is Grant Callen, your host today, and I'm here with my friend Christina Dent. She is the founder and president of End It For Good, a nonprofit here in Mississippi that invites people to support approaches to drugs that prioritize life and the opportunity to thrive. She just released a book called Curious, a foster mom's discovery of an unexpected solution to drugs and addiction. And let me tell you, I was privileged to be able to read and review an advanced copy. This book is fantastic. It's a great story, you won't be able to put it down. It's a memoir of sorts where Christina takes you on her journey as she changed her mind about the war on drugs. She was born and raised here in Central Mississippi and continues to make her home here with her husband Thomas and their three sons. Lastly, Christina and I, how we really know each other, we were in the same class at Belle Haven where we did our undergrad and our families have been close friends since. Welcome to the show, Christina.

Christina Dent: Thanks, Grant. It's really great to be here.

Grant Callen: I'm new to this podcasting thing, but I've been told we gotta lead off with a hook, and it's good to kinda hook the audience from the start. So here's my hook. Christina, you're an evangelical Christian. You're conservative politically. You're a foster mom. You've never used an illegal drug in your life, and yet today, you'd like to make every drug in America legal. You'd like to end prohibition. How in the world did you get here?

Christina Dent: Yeah, I'm not the person you would think would be working on this issue, for sure. And certainly, I didn't think I would be working on this issue at all. Like you said, I was just born and raised in Mississippi. I grew up in a wonderful family Christian home, conservative home, I've lived in the Jackson metro area my entire life. And it, I never used drugs while I was in high school. It was not part of my social circles. I never even had the opportunity to, it was just outside of the realm of my experience. And so when I was at Belhaven, we were there together. I got a degree in Bible. I wasn't using drugs there either. And just got into my early 30s, still not using drugs and really never having come close to drug use and addiction in any way that sort of brought it home to me or made me think about it. And so that sort of landed me in my early 30s at just taking in what the culture had told me and acting on that. So for someone just from my cultural perspective, it was drugs are bad and people who use them are bad, people who become addicted to them are particularly bad. It was all just from this sort of moral frame of reference. And that didn't get pushed on until I became a foster parent. And through that experience I met Joanne, the mother of one of our foster sons. And she had struggled with addiction for a long time, she had started using drugs in her early teens. Now, in the book, you'll read Joanne's story and you'll hear her talk about that. You can see lots of parallels in our lives, joanne was homeschooled kindergarten through high school so was I. She's one of four children so was I. There are so many parts of her story that just don't lend themselves to this caricature of what we think about, somebody who would be struggling with an addiction, somebody who's using drugs that they're buying on the street that are illegal. When her son came to our house straight from the hospital after he was born, she had been using for about 20 years and had not been able to beat that addiction during her pregnancy. So her son is removed from her custody because she was using drugs while she was pregnant and he's brought to our house. The only way that I have to understand that is what I've grown up hearing which is just tough on crime, tough on drugs, tough on people who use them.

Grant Callen: Just say no.

Christina Dent: Just say no and move on. And I had just said no, and so it seemed like that was working for me. And it should just work for everyone else too. So I brought Beckham to his first visit with Joanne at the Child Welfare Center, up in Canton and I got his car seat out of the car and I turned around in the parking lot and here comes this woman sprinting towards me and she's weeping, she runs over and starts kissing this tiny little baby that I'm holding, and this is Joanne. It's the first time I've met her and I thought this can't be real, what a sad thing that would be the first thing that would come to my mind but it

Grant Callen: You thought she was faking it.

Christina Dent: Yeah, I think we anytime we come across something that pushes on something that we currently believe, our knee jerk reaction is just to say it's not true, it's not real, we try to just push it away. There's just too much in the world, it's too hard to think through every new idea we come across, every experience we don't understand. And so we just try to shut them down, and I feel like that's what happened there, you want that to be true on the one hand. We want children to be loved by their parents in that sort of just raw way what an incredible expression of love, very vulnerable expression of love, and yet really hard to believe because in my mind I'm thinking this is a mommy who struggles when she was pregnant. I would never do that. How could she really love her child this much if she was going to potentially expose them to something dangerous like that doesn't make any sense. And so I left Beckham for his hour of visit with Joanne, came back and picked him up and brought him back to our house. And she went to inpatient drug treatment and would call me from treatment, we had agreed that she could have my phone number and call me once a day to check on him. And she would call me and we would talk, she'd want to know all the details, about a newborn who doesn't do anything but she wanted to know anything that I could tell her. She wanted to know about his day. And then she would say, can you put me on speakerphone? And I put her on speakerphone and she would sing to him over the phone. I can be standing in my kitchen holding my phone as Beckham is sitting in his little bouncy seat and his mom's just singing Jesus Loves Me to him. And that experience compounded by lots of these experiences shifted my heart because we can only shut out what's true for so long before the truth wins and the more that I got to know Joanne, the more I saw this is true, this is real. She deeply loves her son. She desperately wants to be there for him and to raise him. And she's struggling with this methamphetamine addiction. So these things can be true at the same time, which means something else isn't true because the whole way I had thought about drugs and addiction. Before that point was based on the idea that people who use drugs are bad people. This is why the criminal justice system would be the right tool to try to stop them from using drugs, because they're the type of people that would need to be punished in that way, and so as I began to see who Joanne really is, it peaked to this sort of discomfort in me over, wait a second, she's a mom like me and we're putting people like her in prison every day in Mississippi for the exact same thing she was doing. And if I follow that trail, that means we're putting people like me, moms like me, in prison for something I might not have done, but for something I could clearly see was this really complex health crisis in her life, but was not because she was this inherently criminal person or something like that. And that really started me on a trajectory of learning of, I always tell people you should never advocate for huge changes, certainly to policy based on a personal experience that can be devastating laws apply to everyone. But Joanne did change my heart and opened this door to me that there's more to this story than what we've been told, and that got me on this journey of learning.

Grant Callen: So what I mean, we're going to get into sort of where that journey took you, but what made you even open to reconsidering your biases or the way you thought about our approach to drugs that would give you even the curiosity to think differently about this.

Christina Dent: I think there were a couple of things, so as a Christian I would say, I think God just wouldn't let me go until I had seen the judgment in my own heart. And I would separate that from policy changes, I think Christians can have disagreements on the right approach to policy for a particular issue. But just in my own heart, that judgment, that willingness to discard somebody else just because of the choices that they had made, that needed to be rooted out and brought to the light and I think that was a spiritual journey for me. But, I also knew from foster care that the majority of children in foster care are there for some sort of drug related reason for their parents, which means if we want to solve foster care issues, which my family was deeply involved in, why we were foster parents, then if we can solve issues related to drugs, this could be revolutionary for our foster care system. So I think that was a piece of it for me of realizing the connection points between this issue and what I cared about deeply, which is vulnerable children. And also as I began to crack that door open, it became clear very quickly that how we approach drugs and addiction, it doesn't just impact foster care it impacts almost every area of our lives. It impacts crime, and I grew up in West Jackson in a higher crime area of town, so that was very interesting to me how can we reduce crime? It impacts employment opportunity as somebody who's conservative, wants to see people able to provide for their families, able to have stable homes as someone who's pro life, I wanted to know how can we keep more people alive? How can we help people live into who they were made to be all the potential that they have? All of us benefit when that happens for more people, and it didn't take very much learning at all to realize, oh, there's a whole lot more to this issue than what I was initially interested in, which is, what are we doing with people who use drugs? That opened the door to understanding, oh, what's happening with this underground drug market, and what's happening with contamination issues that are killing so many people with fentanyl contamination right now. So I think I just began to see, this is a tiny tip of a huge iceberg that is permeating all parts of our lives, and if we could change even small things, the impact of that change would be seismic, and there was something really encouraging and exciting and hopeful about that. Realizing, I think. If we could figure out some better solutions, our culture would profoundly benefit from that, and I wanted to be part of it.

Grant Callen: And how very ambitious to even think that we could do this differently when, we've been doing this the same way for 50 plus years and it is just in the DNA as evangelicals that this is the right approach to drugs. And it's certainly in our DNA as politically conservatives to think this is the approach. We're just not doing enough to stop the drug trade, we're not doing enough to get drugs off our streets. So you meet this woman, joanne and she shatters the mold of what you think about addiction that wasn't enough to get you to where you are today on your views. What came next?

Christina Dent: So I started learning. I grew up, like I said, in a homeschooled household. My mom was a avid learner, reader. I grew up in a very unconventional household, I tell some of those stories in the book, Curious. And I think in some ways that was hard, certainly growing up, every kid just wants to fit in and I didn't appreciate necessarily all the ways that my family was different. But I think that it was part of what helped me to be able to step onto sort of an untrodden path and say, I don't know if anybody else is interested in rethinking this at all, but I want to know if there's something better and so I'll credit my parents with that even though, when I was 7, 8, 10, 14 I didn't appreciate all those unconventional experiences and walking to the beat of your own drummer, but I started reading one of the most helpful things I read is a book called Chasing the Scream by Yohan Hari, and it takes us through the last hundred years of what we've done with drugs, what we did before drug prohibition. I didn't even know there was a time before drug prohibition, I thought, the drugs that are illegal today have always been that way they just are realize that's not the case, this is actually a very new development in the history of the world to try to use the criminal justice system and prohibition to try to ban substances. Many of them naturally occurring in the world and try to eradicate, these plant species from the world basically. And so that was interesting and that really opened up this whole different perspective for me. And I read other things and talked to other people too, but that book was so comprehensive, so well researched, and also really gripping, that I felt like it was a great opportunity to see if a few other people were interested in reading it too, and gauging am I just way out on a limb over here? Does this make sense to anybody else? That maybe we've gotten this really wrong, and not wrong, to your point, not wrong in the way of Ah, I've been wrong and now I'm going to switch political parties and I'm going to leave the faith because I'm going to go down this new track with drugs. I really felt like I think we've missed what is most consistent with a politically conservative perspective. I think we've missed what's most consistent with a biblical worldview of people made in the image of God of trying to reduce harm to people. And so I, read that book. This was probably a year and a half learning journey for me before I really felt like, I understand this enough to really feel confident. I've changed my mind and I really think this is the better path forward shifting away from using the criminal justice system, shifting towards health centered solutions for drug use, regulated markets for drug access for adults, which also allows for quality control, which is this contamination issue that we have right now with so many people dying from contaminated drugs.

So I invited some people to get together. There were 12 of us that got together at this very first book discussion. And they were mostly just people who had commented on any social media post that I had done about this issue. Because I really had no idea who would be interested in it. And I thought, I don't want to make this awkward for my best friends by asking them, do y'all want to get together and talk about drugs and addiction and, that sounds

Grant Callen: Sounds like a great Friday night.

Christina Dent: So I just put it out on Facebook and anybody who had commented, I just invited them to get together for this discussion. So there were 12 of us and it really was this kind of spark of, wow, there's people from all these different walks of life. Most of them, people of faith, most of them conservative, there were people who had different experiences, there was one of them was a social worker, one of them was a former prosecutor who had prosecuted a lot of drug crimes. I've been part of putting a lot of people in jail for drug use, and it was just really interesting, and so I hosted another one, and some of them invited friends, and there was 25 people at the next one. The next one, there was 50. Not the same people, they were all standalone events, and by the time there was 50, most of the people I did not know, they were hearing about it from somebody who had come to one of the first two, and they were interested in it. And that became what is now the non profit End It For Good. It just started as book discussions and realizing there is appetite across political spectrum, faith spectrum, all these different backgrounds. People in Mississippi are hungry for better solutions. And I wanted to continue to provide that opportunity for people to learn. Like I said, this was a year and a half learning process for me. I didn't expect it then, I don't expect now for people to hear something new and say, Oh, I agree with you today. This is an invitation into a journey of learning, asking questions, wrestling through what all of us have grown up under. And considering a pretty significant shift in the way we approach drugs and addiction.

Grant Callen: So what would you say, I'm thinking about you and I are both parents. And if our kids continued to disobey, we wouldn't approach that as a, since they can't seem to figure out how to do what we tell them, they can't seem to keep the laws of the house. Let's eliminate those laws and let them do whatever. What would you say to somebody who says that's what you're doing with drugs and our criminal justice system? Like just because we haven't figured out how to get it off the streets and our law enforcement hasn't figured out how to root it out. The last thing we should do is just get rid of those laws. How would you respond to that?

Christina Dent: Yes, I think it's the difference between, what the root cause of the harm is. So when we talk about criminalizing people who are using drugs and we say if they're still using, let's just arrest more of them or put them in jail for longer. We could continue down that track. It is notable that illegal drug use has doubled in the last 20 years. So we've had decades and decades of putting people in jail and prison for lengthy periods of time. Illegal drug use has doubled in the last 20 years. That's true nationally, it's also true here in Mississippi. So We have that, we should definitely ask ourselves, why hasn't it worked? And then I think what made so much sense to me was understanding the shift from focusing on the drugs to focusing on why people want to use them. And when you look at the research on why are people using drugs and particularly what causes people to become addicted to them, we grew up on there, this idea that the drugs have a life of their own. You use them and they're just going to take you away. And really the research shows for most people who use drugs, they don't become addicted to them. But for the people who do, it is much more related to the experiences they've had in their childhoods or the experiences they're having right now. So if you had a lot of trauma in your childhood, your risk factors go through the roof to experiment with drugs and to become addicted to them. Not because you're a particularly bad kid. It's because you're a hurting kid who's grown up into a hurting adult and who is trying to find a way to cope with the experiences of your life.

It may not be that you had a terrible childhood. You might be someone who struggles with a mental health issue, someone who's lonely, someone who has been isolated, who has, there are so many different issues, for me as a Christian, this is where I would say this theology of just the broken world that we live in, it comes and sinks into the deepest parts of us and depending on, whether or not you feel like you have other coping mechanisms to deal with the hurt and the suffering in your life or not, some people end up self medicating that with drugs. So when you put that together with arresting someone and putting them in an incarceration environment for a short or long period of time, that experience is meant to be a traumatic experience in a person's life. There's just no way around that, it's meant to separate you from the community, separate you from your life, and it's supposed to be painful enough that you would not recommit that same offense. So for somebody who's arrested for drug possession, we want you to stop that so we're going to give you a jolt. But when you put that together with what we know about why people use drugs. What that means is we are using trauma to try to solve a problem that's made worse by trauma. And this cycle of trauma and more trauma and harm and trauma and arresting the same people over and over again just continues, and that's the thing that we hear most from law enforcement when they come to the events that we host all over the state, they are frustrated because they see that, every now and then there is somebody who says, you know what, this really changed my life, I was arrested and it just woke me up. The vast majority of their experience is arresting the same people over and over again, in and out. It does not solve their addiction, it makes life incredibly hard for them, they have a criminal record, they can't get a job. Now, what are they going to do? One way you can make money is by illegally selling drugs if you can't get a job in the legal economy. We're making it harder for people to live the life we want them to live, a thriving life, and making it easier for them to live the life we don't want them to live, doing something like selling drugs, just to make ends meet, just to have a roof over their heads. On that issue, that root cause helps us to see sure, we can continue to just arrest people and continue to cycle them through the criminal justice system. But when you understand the root cause of why people are using drugs and what makes them higher risk for addiction, we are creating more risk for addiction with them, with their children, it is the wrong approach and so we're going to continue to get that same approach because we're not dealing with the root causes of drug use and addiction in a way that actually matches the right tool to the problem.

Grant Callen: There's this misunderstanding that I certainly had growing up that, if we lock people up, at least they'll dry out, they will be separated from the substances and they'll come out sobered up, ready to rebuild their lives. And what I've discovered as, at Empower, we do a lot of work in criminal justice reform, I've learned there are more substances and there are more access to drugs in prison rather than out. And so people come out, instead of being a system, we call corrections, where you're going to somehow rehabilitate and help people rebuild, that doesn't happen a lot of times, they come out more addicted, more traumatized, more broken then they went in.

Christina Dent: Yeah, and that is a great point and I'll segue that to the bigger question. So it tends to be a lot of people are open to the idea of not arresting people just for drug possession, certainly lots of people don't agree with that but that is something people often can relate to their own families. They can say, my nephew who's using I can see how it probably wouldn't help him to spend five years in prison, but this idea of markets and bringing other substances back into legal markets is really tough, it still makes me uncomfortable even though I'm out there advocating for this approach, I still. I'm uncomfortable with it because I don't want people using drugs, I don't want my kids using them, I don't want to use them, I don't want a culture in a society that celebrates using drugs and yet, when you look at why is there drugs in prison? Why can't we keep drugs out of a maximum security prison with guards, with razor wire? This is the approach we're trying to take worldwide, keeping drugs out of people's hands worldwide. We can't even keep them out of prisons. Why is that? It's because there's supply and demand. There are people in prison who want drugs anytime you have people that are willing to pay, you are going to have people that are willing to supply them. So every time, we prohibit a drug every time we set a new place where it can't be legally sold, we are moving that into an underground market. And what are underground markets governed by? Nothing, they're outside the criminal justice system, so they are only participated in by people willing to break the law. And they end up creating crime and violence because of that. Because there's this huge pot of cash. We look at the underground drug market globally, it's about 500 billion dollars a year. So think of this massive pile of cash, 500 billion dollars a year and what we're doing right now is saying, nobody should want that, nobody should go after that, you just need to obey the law. And we know humans are motivated by cash, somebody is going to want 500 billion dollars a year and it turns out lots of people do, so many people, that no matter how many people we arrest for drug dealing, drug trafficking, kingpins of cartels, somebody else takes their place two hours later. Why? Because that massive pile of cash is still there, and there's always going to be somebody that wants part of that piece of the pie. And so the more drugs we prohibit, the bigger that underground drug market gets, the more lucrative it gets, and we end up funding gangs, cartels, and terrorist organizations by prohibition. Very similar to what happened during alcohol prohibition. You've got Al Capone, he's making millions of dollars. Prohibition ends, why isn't Al Capone and people like him? Why don't we have this massive underground alcohol market? Why don't we have people killing each other in the streets over alcohol deals gone bad? Because alcohol operates in a legal, law abiding economy where people can go to the store and purchase it if you're an adult. We can have age restrictions on purchasing. And people who sell it are just regular business people. They are not toting a gun, the head of Budweiser's not toting his gun over to the head of Miller Lite and taking everybody out. That's exactly what happened during alcohol prohibition, doesn't happen today because that market is legal and regulated. Still problems with alcohol? There will still be problems with other drugs, but if we want to meaningfully address the crime that is associated with the underground drug market, we have to address the profit incentive. And the only way to do that is to allow those profits to come back into legally regulated economies. And it's what will solve the overdose crisis for us by giving us quality control with legally regulated drugs instead of people buying this contaminated mishmash on the street.

Grant Callen: So I could talk to you for a couple hours, but I want to try to bring this plane into a landing. And that's a perfect segue. So what is the world you would like to see? What would it look like if you could have your way and you could help write policy and maybe a state could experiment with an appropriate, just way to view drug policy? What would you like to see happen?

Christina Dent: I think first it would be having people in health care at the table. A lot of times, even today. We have people in law enforcement that are dictating the policies that impact people in health care, that's true of doctors. How many opioid prescriptions can they write? Who can they write them to? How many pills are involved in that? They are having to take those orders from law enforcement who is giving those at the federal level and so that creates this It's a challenge because you have doctors who have trained for years to know how to appropriately take care of a patient, but they're not necessarily able to do that and so I think having healthcare people at the table is really important. The kind of world that I hope we move towards is the one we have begun moving towards where things like cannabis are coming back into legal regulation. That doesn't mean there's not problems. Some states have done it well. Some states have done it poorly. There's going to be a bumpy ride on this path to undoing policies that have not worked because it's not because we haven't tried hard enough. They don't work because at the core, they are the wrong solution to the problem we're trying to solve with these drugs. And so I would love to see us continue to move those substances back into that. That's going to mean testing, which is perfect for what states can do. One state can try a particular type of cannabis market. Another state can try a different kind, different things are going to work in different states. That's true now of psychedelics. The next phase of rolling back these failed policies is the psychedelic sphere particularly for medical use. We have so many challenges with mental health across the United States right now. And yet, psychedelics are showing more promise to treat mental health conditions like PTSD, anxiety, depression, even trauma, childhood trauma, that I think we need to be open to embracing that and saying not only is it less harmful to markets and to people for substances to be legally regulated, but what if we missed that might be actually helpful in helping us solve some of these other crises? And I think that next step would be with psychedelics. Other drugs, a lot harder. Opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine. How is it that we think about that? And I would say, take a step back instead of thinking, are you talking about crystal meth in the pharmacy? Think about Methamphetamine is a stimulant. How could we allow people to access stimulants? We're talking adults, be age restricted, behind counters, maybe only with a prescription, maybe only at a pharmacy without a prescription, but there's certain caps on how much they can have it a time, but they've got to have maybe some counseling with a pharmacist before they purchase that. There are all these different regulatory structures we use already with things like tobacco, with alcohol, with opioids we have gotten it wrong over the last few years. We have had lots of opioid prescriptions, then we have cut them back to very few and what we've seen is that, actually people are just using underground market opioids and so we've got to have viable legal markets. They can be regulated, they can be carefully done, this is not heroin in the candy aisle sort of thing. But if we have viable legal markets, we have the opportunity to keep adults safe, and to keep kids safe because there won't be so many contaminated drugs that they can order right now with three clicks on Snapchat. We've got to think about how to keep our kids safe.

Grant Callen: And it's remarkable to me that it's easier for kids to get completely illegal substances than it is to get things like alcohol.

Christina Dent: Yep.

Grant Callen: And it's because you can get drugs on the street. Alcohol, you actually have to go in and show your ID somewhere.

Christina Dent: Yeah, or find somebody's older brother or do whatever. Right now. 13, you can buy whatever you want on the internet and it's right there so for those of us like you and me who don't have personal experience with that, it's easy to make ourselves believe it's not true like drugs really aren't out there for the taking for anybody, are they? And yet they are, so if we want to see people cared for, if we want to take care of our own children and the rest of our community shifting towards health centered solutions is going to be the path that's going to get us there.

Grant Callen: The book is called Curious. It's going to be available where?

Christina Dent: Buy it on Amazon.

Grant Callen: Going to be available on Amazon, Lemuria, it's going to be available all over. It is worth the read. Even if you're not interested in the topic, but you love a great memoir, this is going to be a book you're going to want to read. Your organization is End It For Good. You have a website. How can people get involved if they want to learn more or get involved in this movement?

Christina Dent: Yeah, come join us enditforgood. com. We've also got some free copies of curious for your podcast listeners they can email curious at enditforgood. com the first five people to do that we'll send a free copy of curious to them. This is not a money making endeavor for us although 75 percent of the proceeds of curious do go to support the movement. So buying a book you're supporting End it for Good. We really want to spark this conversation for people, so you can do that by joining us at enditforgood. com, but also I'm going to just give you an opportunity maybe drugs and addiction is not your issue, but you're curious about how to have good conversations on tough topics like how do we approach drugs? And we have found that there's a few things that can really help push against that polarization and help you communicate what you're passionate about in a way that draws other people in, and you can get that resource you can text the word talk to 601 299 4372 and it'll just shoot you right back a PDF that's five keys to productive conversations on polarizing topics. We'd love for you to have that. We want a world where people can talk about hard things in respectful ways. This is our particular issue, but we think that just makes for a healthy society if we all work towards having good conversations. And I want to invite you into this one. Read the book. It's not a book that's beating you over the head with a particular thing that you have to agree with, that's not what we do. We want to invite people on a journey. We want to find ways to keep more people alive, to promote public safety, to have more stable families that's the journey we're on.

Grant Callen: Respectful dialogue. It's such a big part of our mission at empower. It's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation. It is sorely needed in today's world. Christina Dent, thank you for being with me.

Christina Dent: Thanks Grant.

Grant Callen: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of the empower podcast to learn more about how you can get involved and we can work together to make Mississippi a place where everyone can rise. Go to our website at empowerms. org. Please or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you'll be notified of future episodes.