Recently, I sat down with Sean Speer of Canadian outlet The Hub to talk about Late Admissions. It’s an expansive conversation that covers some of the high and low points of my life. One of the strange things about promoting the book over the last four or five months has been the disparate experiences of writing and talking about it. Writing it was a long, arduous process in which I had to reckon with things I’d avoided thinking about for years. One reason the book took so long to write was that I did not want to confront the disreputable things I had done, though I’m now glad that I did confront them. Talking about those painful memories now that the writing is done, though, is relatively easy, even if it isn’t always pleasant. Perhaps the writing process was a form of therapy that allowed me to deal with those things I had pushed to the back of my mind for all that time.
You can listen to the whole conversation with Sean, but I wanted to call your attention to the part of the conversation where we discuss recovery and spirituality. For me, each of those experiences required the other. When I was trying to overcome crack addiction and barely hanging on, I found that Christianity offered refuge from the isolation and despair I had lived in since starting to use hard drugs. If you want the full story of my “conversion” experience—I was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal church but had fallen away from it—you’ll have to read the book. But here I describe how part of my personal salvation from addiction and reinitiation into Christianity was aided by two unlikely figures: a hulking, profane ex-cop named Bob Brown and the convicted Watergate conspirator Charles Colson.
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SEAN SPEER: Within about four years of your appointment at Harvard, you were arrested for drug possession. The book documents your challenges with drug addiction, which you describe as essentially living a double life.
Right now, Glenn, Canadians are having a big debate about the proper aim and form of drug policy. It can be pitted in simple terms as between harm reduction—which involves, in some cases, the distribution of safe supply to addicts—and a tough on drugs approach—which involves recovery, but also a crackdown on the public use and sale of drugs.
Based on your experiences, do you have views on the best public policy response to addiction?
GLENN LOURY: I find that Sean to be a difficult question, because I'd be loath to base my views about public policy upon my own experience. It's a hard problem. My friend, Mark Kleiman, who is now deceased, was a greats student of drug policy, and he was a fervent advocate of harm reduction as the right philosophical principle. I'm not sure what he would say about every program, about needle distribution and drug legalization and whatnot, but the right principle is that we have various tools at our disposal to respond to the situation. Our goal should be to minimize the amount of harm that's done at the end, taking all of those factors into account.
What that cuts against is the expressive dimension of policy, where you've got a value that you're trying to uphold. So If I hand out condoms to kids when they're 12 years old, it's like I'm inviting them to have sex. And that's not the message that you might want to give to 12-year-olds in a healthy society, even though some of them could probably use the condoms because some of those girls get pregnant and some of them get STDs. Fourteen year olds, 16 year olds, it gets to be a little bit different kind of a problem every two years. Eighteen-year-olds, now we probably ought to let them do what they want to do.
But it's difficult. And I feel that way about some of this stuff about making it easy for people to make use of substances, which are really soul-destroying. I want to nurture them and help them to not use the substance.
My own experience was traumatic. I should explain. I was leading a double life. I was, messing around on my wife. I was running the streets. I was picking up girls. I was going to housing projects looking for action. I was smoking weed. I was going into crack houses. I ended up getting into a very difficult problem with cocaine. I could try to explain how this happened. I do attempt to try to explain it in the book. But it's one of those things like we were talking about at the beginning, with the problem of self-regard. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. I don't know who that guy was and what was going on with him, not really.
I do know that he eventually, after many hard knocks, after being robbed at gunpoint on more than one occasion, after doing career-destroying, mad things like consuming the drug in his office at Harvard University, where if he had been caught, he would have been fired and probably brought up on charges.
Crazy things. Motel rooms at two o'clock in the morning, ATMs that are completely exhausted for the third day in a row because I'm spending every penny I can get my hands on on this drug. A wife who loves me sitting at home, wondering, fretting, wringing her hands, “Is this the end of our marriage?” et cetera, et cetera.
I finally realized at 11 o'clock one morning, sitting in a Burger King parking lot after I had spent every penny I had chasing the high all night long, that I was tired, that I needed help, and [called] the outpatient program that I had been referred to after I had gotten caught the first time with illicit substances by the Boston police, which I had blown off because I was “too clever.” Those other people were addicted. I was just having a good time. I didn't need this shit. This is something I had to do because the court ordered me, that I don't really have to go to the, take this stuff seriously, go to these meetings. It's bullshit. It's what I thought. Wrongly.
And I'm in this moment of desperation at 11 a.m., where I'm coming down from this hyper-high, intense stimulant thing, and I can't get any more because I don't have any more money. And I call my wife and I tell her and she says, “Call the program and tell them.” And I call the program, and they say, “Come in right now. Don't go home. Do not cross ‘Go.’ Do not collect $200. Report immediately to the inpatient clinic, and we will have your insurance coverage, we'll take you in as a patient and enroll you in treatment.” And that's how I got into treatment. And that was in January of 1988. And it wasn't until Thanksgiving of 1988 that I finally emerged from institutional treatment.
I went to the inpatient treatment at the hospital. I went to an outpatient residential thing that kind of didn't work. I relapsed, and I ended up in a halfway house with a bunch of ex-cons and homeless guys that had tried to get themselves to get their acts together. [I was] under the tutelage of a stern taskmaster called Bob Brown, a former Boston cop and Irishman who was grizzled and tough and took no nonsense from anybody and called a spade and he didn't care whether they liked it or not. He stood 6'3 weighed 280 pounds, and he was a tough dude. He got me sober, man. I wanted to give in. He kept me from wanting to give in to these impulses. He got me going to AA meetings three or four nights a week, got me reading the recovery book and actually taking the 12 Steps to heart. He brought a Christian dimension into it, a religious strain into it, when I realized it's a spiritual problem.
And I learned how to meditate. I learned how to be still, how to slow down, how to simply get through this day without using. That's all I had to do. All I had to do was not use today a day at a time. And I put together a month and then three months and then six months. I came out of the halfway house. My son, Linda and my first son, Glenn II, was born in January of 1989. I haven't looked back, and I haven't used cocaine since.
That's an admirable story, Glenn. You mentioned Christianity. You, of course, become a Christian and in so doing become quite close with Chuck Colson. Talk about your conversion into faith, your relationship with Colson, and how becoming a Christian has changed you.
It's one of the things that I took the most pleasure in writing about in the book, but also that I felt the most sadness in writing about, because I'm no longer a professing Christian. I go through my journey and try to analyze it—the cover stories, the real stories—in my memoir.
As a kid growing up, we went to church. I start the book describing a ritual that my aunt, my mother's sister in whose household I grew up for the formative years from of 10 to 18 years old. I lived in her house. We had a small apartment upstairs in the back of a grand house, but it was like an au pair suite. My mother, my sister, and I were basically living with her sister. And she would have [my sister and me] report, every Sunday after Sunday school, which we were obliged to attend, on the sermon. “What went on?” It was something of a test. She was trying to check to see whether you had been paying attention and whether you followed the lesson.
And this was a part of my life. I wasn't especially religious in terms of doctrine or holding the Bible or anything like that, but it was a cultural mainstay. Church was just a part of the environment. But I fell away from that as a teen. As I got older and it was up to me whether I got out of bed on Sunday morning and made it to church, I went less and less frequently.
But it was the rhythms, the hymns, the prayers, the ritual, the community, the devotion, the worship, drama, expressive ecstasy of people in states of spiritual ecstasy. These were all a part of my cultural apparatus that I was operating within, but I wasn't an active believer.
In the course of dealing with the cocaine addiction, I came into contact with people who were, and I was urged to make spirituality a part of the religious thing in Alcoholics Anonymous. They talk about a higher power. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand Him. That's the third step. I admitted that I was an alcoholic. I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity, and I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God, the power greater than myself. This is all part of the doctrine of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement, and it got me thinking about God.
Linda and I happened to have friends, and we had met separately in our role as college teachers. These were African American physicians who were also very devout Christian practitioners. They ended up founding a church, and Linda and I were attracted to them and their role as leaders in the community as well as to the comforts of the religious conversation and experiences that they were ushering into this community with their new church. And we joined the church. We were among its first members. Glenn, our son, born in January of 1989, was the first newborn in that congregation, which was 20 or 30 people when it started out and has grown over the decades to be one of the most influential Protestant congregations in the greater Boston area—Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
We joined that church, and it was under the tutelage of Ray Hammond, the pastor, and his co-pastor and wife, Gloria White Hammond, both of them MDs who left their medical practices in order to pursue a life of mentorship and stewardship and pastoring of a congregation. Under their wing I grew in my Christian faith and became a deacon, a stalwart senior member of that congregation and was with them for over a decade.
Now, you mentioned Colson. I became aware of Chuck Colson, the former Richard Nixon aide who was in prison for crimes committed during the Watergate scandal, and who, after serving some time in prison, converted to Christianity and became an evangelist and became a leading educator and a Christian leader who founded a ministry called the Prison Fellowship Ministries, which continues to this day to serve, on a global scale, thousands upon thousands of incarcerated people throughout the world with Christian ministry and work inside prisons to bring the Word of God, in the Christian understanding of it, to the attention of people who are incarcerated and to advocate for their families and to support their families, their wives and children, their loved ones. It is, I think, a very noble and admirable initiative.
Chuck Colson didn't stop being a Republican after he became a Christian. He was culturally conservative, pro-life, a strong Republican political advocate, and that's not everybody's cup of tea. But his sincere commitment to expanding opportunity and vision and life for people who have made mistakes, but who, in the spirit of Christian charity, deserve, in respect for their humanity, the opportunity to show themselves to be other than the worst moment of their lives. This kind of thing it appealed to me.
And quite independently, not knowing Charles Colson at all but knowing his book, Born Again, his testimony, decided that in a class I was teaching on ethics at Harvard University, I was going to bring Charles Colson's book to the attention of my colleagues and my students. I tell the story in the book. The bottom line of it is, though, that I thought while I would not try to persuade anybody to become a Christian, I would call to their attention that whatever religious traditions they might embrace, whether it be Islam or Judaism or Baha'i or Hinduism or whatever, within that faith there are resources that you can marshal to enable you to do the things that you know are right when you are tempted by the things that are wrong, but that are very tempting because they help you to achieve your objectives.
We were at the Kennedy School of Government, training future leaders and policy makers who would, some of them, run for office or occupy administrative positions where they had a lot of discretion. And we were in an ethics course trying to bring to their attention the questions of right and wrong.
And I thought knowing the difference between right and wrong is great. That's certainly something that we should do. But doing the right thing when you are tempted by the wrong thing is a different order of problem. It's not knowing, it's doing. And the doing, the hewing to what you know to be right and turning your back on temptation, might be facilitated by reference to spiritual conviction. I'm not supplying that conviction, but if you happen to have some, I'm hoping that I can encourage you to make use of it on behalf of the project of ethical and justifiable public action, something like that.
And I thought Colson's book was relevant. I brought it to the attention of my colleagues, and that went over like a lead balloon. This was Harvard. This was the Kennedy School. And Colson was a Nixon henchman. He was a bad guy. Nobody wanted to hear anything about Charles Colson that was good.
But I think word got to Chuck Colson that a Harvard professor had photocopied his book and passed around a chapter of it, and he reached out to me and invited me to serve on his board of directors at Prison Fellowship Ministries. I went through the vetting process—they don't just let anybody come on their board—but I passed. I served for years as a director of the prison fellowship and board of the Prison Fellowship Ministries. I knew Chuck Colson, and I knew Jesus Christ. Until I didn’t.
Excellent excerpt. As a Christian, I know God's still at work in your life, Glenn.
So why did you stop being a believer? It seems that it was not ‘temptation’ but rather so sort of need for logical or intellectual ‘proof’, of God. In other words, your brain got in the way. You are the reincarnation of Dr. Faustus and you want ‘knowledge’ and fame more than morality. Beware such a bargain with satan. . God thinks that his creation speaks for itself. He doesn’t feel a need to prove himself to us mere mortals.