LAFAYETTE, Ga. (BP)–Ryan Drennon, a Southern Baptist layman, can testify to the dangers of marijuana from firsthand experience, and now he is warning youth to stay away from the destructive drug and to make commitments to purity despite peer pressure.
Drennon, Sunday School director at Harbor Lights Baptist Church in LaFayette, Ga., said his long battle with drug use began in 1983 when he was in middle school.
“I began listening to rock and roll music and smoking pot and drinking some,” he recounted to Baptist Press. “That went on, and around 1986 or so when I got in high school, I really started drinking every day, smoking weed every day, taking pills three or four times a week. And also when I was in ninth grade I started using cocaine.”
A couple of years after he graduated from high school, Drennon began intravenous drug use, and two years after that he started using heroin.
“I used heroin for probably eight of those 14 years that I was intravenously using drugs, and a lot of people when they get on that thing they quit drinking and smoking pot but I never quit anything,” he said.
Drennon, 35, got married on Sept. 2, 2006, and two days later he went with his wife to a community-wide Labor Day event hosted by Harbor Lights Baptist Church. By that time, God was drawing him toward salvation.
“I was tired, disgusted, frustrated and ashamed at the life I was living,” Drennon said. “I was disgusted with myself. I had never given anything back to society. I had just taken and taken and taken, and I had been tired for several years. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept doing what I was doing.”
It turned out that Drennon knew the pastor of Harbor Lights, Jim Powell, because the two had been acquaintances in high school. Powell came from a similar drug background, and he reached out to Drennon at the community event.
“We had a pretty good conversation and he invited me to church. I said, ‘I don’t know,’ but I went,” Drennon said. “Morphine was one of my drugs of choice. I did morphine for probably 10 years. I loved morphine. Before I went to church, I said, ‘I’m going to start my daily dosage.’ I did a shot of about 120 mg of morphine before I went to church that morning and I thought that might make me forget.”
Powell preached about sin the day Drennon attended church, and although Drennon wasn’t exactly glad to hear it, the message moved him toward a sense of conviction.
“The Lord just came to me and He spoke and said, ‘Now’s the time. I can use you. You have something that I can use. Other people can learn from you.’ I realized then I had tried to quit before and I couldn’t do it on my own,” Drennon said. “That Sept. 10, 2006, I gave it to the Lord and I’ve been clean and sober now about a year and a half.”
Drennon said his stance is clear in the debate over whether marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to harsher substances.
“It is a gateway drug. I’m proof of that,” he said. “I had drank some and drinking was OK, but when I smoked marijuana, it is one of those mild hallucinogens and it does expand your mind and it makes you too open-minded. It definitely is a gateway drug. I never thought I’d be saying these words, but marijuana is dangerous. It is really dangerous.”
In order to help steer the next generation away from what he experienced, Drennon directs Harbor Lights’ Truth & Training Club as part of the national AWANA program for kids. He also leads an anti-marijuana group at the church and has seen several teenagers make decisions for Christ. Two parents even accepted Jesus through their teenagers because of what God is doing with the marijuana program, he said.
“The best thing I’ve just recently found is the True Love Waits commitments that teenagers are asked to make,” Drennon said, referring to the Southern Baptist-initiated abstinence movement. “That is something great to get involved with, and if young people are saved and being influenced by the world around them, one of those commitments is something that can stick in your mind and you know that before your church and peers you have made a commitment to God to live your life right, meaning no drugs, no premarital sex.”
Drennon said he hopes that with the remainder of his life he can give back half as much good as the bad he has done. If he can, it will be “a tremendous working of the Lord,” he said.
“I saw so much of the United States and God’s beauty from coast to coast, yet I barely remember it because I was so intoxicated all the time,” he said, referring to his days on drugs. “People are always coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey, do you remember so and so and we did such and such?’ And I have to say, ‘No, I don’t remember.'”
His advice to anyone contemplating the road he has walked is simple.
“Don’t do drugs. Stay away. Don’t listen to your friends because you may think that you’re cool, but that’s not cool,” Drennon said. “What’s cool is helping those around you, your fellow man and the world around you.
“Choose life, not death. Drugs are death. Drugs destroy. Jesus restores.”
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Erin Roach is a staff writer for Baptist Press.
