How Recreational Cannabis Use Conflicts with Catholic Social Teaching

By David Galbis-Reig, MD,  DFASAM 

Dignity, the Family, and the Common Good

“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1

Catholic social teaching is not a collection of isolated policy preferences, but rather an anthropology: a vision of the human person created in the image of God (Imago Dei), endowed with reason and freedom, ordered to communion, and responsible for the common good. Recreational cannabis use, even when civil law permits it, does not conform with this vision of humanity, and in fact is contrary to it. The Church does not single out cannabis by name in her principal magisterial texts, yet she speaks with clarity about intoxicating substances. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches 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.”[1] That judgment is not a private piety but follows from the same principles that animate Rerum Novarum and the later social magisterium: the dignity of the embodied person, the priority of the family, solidarity with the vulnerable, and the duty of public authority to protect the common good.

The Dignity of the Embodied Person: Temperance and the Stewardship of Life

The Catechism places its teaching on substance use under the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” immediately after its treatment of temperance. “The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine.”[2] Life and physical health are considered “precious gifts entrusted to us by God,” which we are bound to take reasonable care of.[3] Seeking to compromise rational thought through the intentional use of psychoactive substances for this purpose, violates these precepts. More specifically, because recreational cannabis is typically used precisely to alter consciousness – to alter perception or to assuage a hedonistic drive at the expense of rationality; it is a clear violation of these precepts. The fact that the cannabis plant has been specifically bred over decades to increase Delta-9 THC levels while eliminating the modulating effects of CBD, the increasingly prevalent use of high potency Delta-9 THC cannabis extracts in vape form (which only serve to produce greater intoxicating and impairing effects), and the increasing availability of higher potency mind-altering synthetic and semi-synthetic cannabinoids serve to support this statement. Pope Saint John Paul II clearly pronounces that the intention to achieve an altered mental state distinguishes recreational cannabis use from moderate use of a substance like alcohol, which can accompany a meal or friendship without aiming at the loss of rational self-possession. When a person deliberately impairs reason for pleasure or escapism, s/he treats the body and mind as instruments of sensation rather than as a gift to be stewarded.

Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, identified what “makes man man and distinguishes him generically from the brute”: “the mind and reason.”[4] Vatican II repeated the same anthropology: man “is not allowed to despise his bodily life,” and “the very dignity of man postulates that man glorify God in his body.”[5] In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul had already named the body “a temple of the Holy Spirit,” that must be cared for.[6] Pope Saint John Paul II drew the moral conclusion with force: using mind-altering substances for recreational purposes “is always illicit, because it involves an unjustified and irrational renunciation of thinking, willing and acting as free persons.” There is no “right to drugs,” he insisted, because “the human being has no right to harm him/herself, nor the right to abdicate one’s personal dignity, which comes from God.”[7] Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver, writing from a state that pioneered the legalization of cannabis, applied that teaching directly: substances “diminish our self-possession by harming the very faculties that make us human.”[8] Recreational intoxication is therefore not a minor lifestyle choice but rather a practical denial of the rational dignity on which the whole of Catholic social thought rests.

The Priority of the Family: The Family and the Common Good

Furthermore, Catholic social teaching does not treat the person as an isolated consumer, but rather as an individual who lives in communion with others, in the first place as a member of a family. Rerum Novarum calls the family “a true society” older than the State, with rights “prior to those of the community.” A parent’s first duty is to provide for those s/he has begotten and to protect them “from want and misery.”[9] The Catechism therefore assigns the political community a specific duty: “the protection of security and health, especially with respect to dangers like drugs.”[10] The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church places the family at “the centre of social life” as “the first natural society.”[11] The culture of recreational cannabis use undermines that aspect of the social matrix because it normalizes intoxication in the home; models impaired reason and judgment to children; and is associated with risks to adolescent brain development, mental illness, and impaired driving. What the industry markets as private recreation and personal choice becomes a public burden borne first by families.

In 1990 the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) described substance use addiction as “a direct assault on the dignity of the human person, a destructive invasion of the lives of individual users, their families, and their communities.” They called addiction a “new slavery” that perverts God’s plan that each person share “freedom, love, and happiness.”[12] The language used in this document is intentional, for slavery, in the Church’s vocabulary, is the reduction of a person to an instrument. Addiction reduces the individual to an instrument but does so from within by subverting the will. A market that profits from habituation therefore is to be judged under the same moral suspicion that Rerum Novarum directed at any system that treats workers “like chattels to make money by.”

Solidarity, Trafficking, and Public Authority

But the Catechism does not stop at the individual and the family structure stating clearly: “Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law.”[13] Legalization does not dissolve this logic because even where a state licenses dispensaries, the industry still depends on expanding demand, including among the young and the vulnerable. Pope Francis rejected the claim that partial legalization of “soft drugs” solves the problem when he stated, “the problem of drug use is not solved with drugs.”[14] Bishops’ conferences in Minnesota, North Dakota, Florida, and elsewhere have therefore urged Catholics neither to use recreational cannabis nor to profit from it, citing both Church teaching and public-health evidence.[15]

Solidarity requires that the strong not exploit the weak or expose the weak to avoidable harm for the sake of convenience or profit. Pope Leo XIII taught that the State exists to serve the common good and to give special care to the poor, who have fewer resources with which to defend themselves.[16] A commercial cannabis business that concentrates profit while dispersing societal costs such as addiction treatment, workplace accidents, motor vehicle accidents, family breakdown, healthcare costs of side effects (cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, mental health burden, etc); fails that test. The Compendium is explicit: “The whole of the Church’s social doctrine… develops from the principle that affirms the inviolable dignity of the human person.”[17] Policies and personal habits that trade on the denigration of that dignity cannot be reconciled with this primary principle.

Therapeutic Use and the Limits of the Argument

Honesty requires a distinction the Catechism itself makes. Use “on strictly therapeutic grounds” is not the grave offense condemned in paragraph 2291. A medicine whose psychoactive effects are tolerated as side effects of a genuine medical good is morally different from a product consumed to “get high” or to achieve a perceptual disturbance (examples include esketamine for treatment of refractory depression, dronabinol for treatment of chemotherapy associated nausea/vomiting, opioid analgesics for treatment of pain, etc.). Such a distinction does not license “self-medication,” nor does it require Catholics to endorse every commercial “medical cannabis” statute. It does require the Church, and its Pastors, to distinguish between legitimate medical use of a substance and recreational use. The target of the Church’s social teaching is not aimed at one particular substance or its effects, but rather, it addresses the willful surrender of reason, the harm to health, the injury to families, and the markets that live by those harms.

Conclusion

From Rerum Novarum to the Catechism and the American bishops, Catholic social teaching measures every societal practice by how it affects the person, the family, and the common good. Recreational cannabis use fails every measure because it attacks the rational self-possession that constitutes human dignity; it burdens the domestic society that precedes the State; it invites cooperation with an industry that profits from impairment; and it asks public authority to normalize what the Fifth Commandment treats as a grave offense against life. The Church’s alternative is not scorn for those who struggle with substances. It is the claim that human beings were made for communion with God, not for chemical consolation, and that a just society will not sell them the latter in the guise of freedom; but rather offer them an opportunity to embrace the former with unimpaired rational thought.[18]

Dr. David Galbis-Reig is a member of CMA’s Catholic Social Teaching on Justice in Medicine Committee and of the Milwaukee Guild of the CMA. He is board certified and involved in Maintenance of Certification in Internal Medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine and in the sub-specialty of Addiction Medicine by the American Board of Preventive Medicine. He is currently employed as an addiction medicine physician at Ascension Wisconsin. He is a past President of the Wisconsin Society of Addiction Medicine and the Wisconsin Medical Society Foundation and has served on the board of the Wisconsin Medical Society.

Selected References

• Aquila, Samuel J. That They Might Have Life: A Pastoral Letter on the Church’s Teaching on Recreational Drugs, with a Particular Focus on Marijuana. Archdiocese of Denver, 10 November 2023.

• Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Especially nos. 2211, 2288–2291.

• Francis. Address to participants in the 31st International Drug Enforcement Conference. Rome, 20 June 2014.

• John Paul II, To the participants at the VI International Conference on “Drugs and Alcoholism against Life”, op. cit., p. 1251-52, n. 4.; Quoted in Church: Drugs and Drug Addiction. Published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English Translation accessed online at Le Nouvel Esprit, no. 43, at: https://www.lenouvelesprit.com/church-documents-on-drugs/cdda-chapter1.

• Leo XIII. Encyclical letter Rerum Novarum. 15 May 1891.

• Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004.

• Second Vatican Council. Pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes. 7 December 1965.

• United States Catholic Conference. New Slavery, New Freedom: A Pastoral Message on Substance Abuse. Washington, DC, 29 November 1990.

[1]Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2291 (hereafter CCC).

[2]CCC, no. 2290.

[3]CCC, no. 2288.

[4]Leo XIII, encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (15 May 1891), no. 6.

[5]Second Vatican Council, pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes (7 December 1965), no. 14.

[6]1 Corinthians 6:19–20 (RSV).

[7]John Paul II, To the participants at the VI International Conference on “Drugs and Alcoholism against Life”, op. cit., p. 1251-52, n. 4.; Quoted in Church: Drugs and Drug Addiction. Published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English Translation accessed online at Le Nouvel Esprit, no. 43, at: https://www.lenouvelesprit.com/church-documents-on-drugs/cdda-chapter1.

[8]Samuel J. Aquila, That They Might Have Life: A Pastoral Letter on the Church’s Teaching on Recreational Drugs, with a Particular Focus on Marijuana (Archdiocese of Denver, 10 November 2023).

[9]Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, nos. 12–13.

[10]CCC, no. 2211.

[11]Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 209.

[12]United States Catholic Conference, New Slavery, New Freedom: A Pastoral Message on Substance Abuse (Washington, DC: USCC, 29 November 1990).

[13]CCC, no. 2291.

[14]Francis, address to participants in the 31st International Drug Enforcement Conference, Rome, 20 June 2014.

[15]Minnesota Catholic Conference, Living in the Real: A Short Primer on the Risks of Marijuana Usage (St. Paul, 2024); see also North Dakota Catholic Conference, statement on Measure 5, 10 September 2024; Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, statement on Amendment 3, 2024.

[16]Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, no. 32.

[17]Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 107.

[18]Aquila, That They Might Have Life.

The post How Recreational Cannabis Use Conflicts with Catholic Social Teaching appeared first on Catholic Medical Association.

Categorised in: Uncategorized