We know you will enjoy reading the story of a woman who holds to her values no matter what, even if they take her somewhere entirely unexpected.      

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Independent Women’s Forum is pleased to announce that Christina Dent, a conservative Christian in Mississippi who works to decriminalize now-illegal drugs, is the latest in our popular series of Champion Women profiles ([link removed]) .

“I used to subscribe to a typical, very conservative view of drugs as bad and drug use as bad,” Dent tells IWF. “I was for outlawing drugs. It was the right thing to do. I never really thought about it anymore than that.”

Yet Dent is the founder and president of End It for Good, a nonprofit devoted to ending prison time for drug offenders. It was an experience with a foster child that began Dent’s journey to a different opinion.

When Dent took the baby to see his birth mother, the woman who ran towards them to cover her son in kisses was not at all who Christina expected. She was impressed with the mother’s love for her child. That began Dent’s journey of reading, studying, and pondering drug policy.

Dent has described this experience as “the catalyst for months of reading, questionings, and listening” and she “tried to reconcile her beliefs as a Christian with the pain and suffering she was seeing first-hand,” as she learned more about her foster son’s mother. She changed her mind about punishment for drug offenses.

“I would say that the three things that changed my mind,”
Dent tells IWF, “are: How drug prohibition increases crime; how it increases overdoses; and, how it increases the destabilization of families through the incarceration of consumers. And those three points are really the key cornerstones of the message that we have now been talking about through End It for Good for the last couple of years.”

Dent believes that individuals, communities, and churches are better than the criminal justice system when it comes to addressing addiction, and she is very persuasive on the subject.

We know you will enjoy reading the story of a delightfully serious woman who holds to her values no matter what, even if they take her somewhere entirely unexpected.
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Sincerely,

Charlotte Hays
Cultural Director
Independent Women's Forum

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