I recently returned from visiting friends and family in Southern California over the Christmas period. While there I strolled with my children down Venice Beach. What prompted shocked reactions from my kids was neither the legions of homeless nor the deft moves of the skateboarders (both of which they had seen before) but the shops openly selling marijuana for "medicinal" purposes.

While in California, we heard that marijuana is now available for sale in Colorado. Alongside Colorado and Washington State, pro-recreational marijuana initiatives are expected in six other states in 2016: Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana and Nevada. Nineteen states already allow the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

What are Christians to make of such developments? This is a question that has long concerned me. The neighbourhood I grew up in during the 1970s and 80s had a deep association with recreational drug use of one kind or another. Its major cultural event (the Notting Hill Carnival), famous local bands (The Clash), noted landmarks (the death place of Jimi Hendrix) and most visible religious group (Rastafarians) were all deeply entwined with one drug scene or another. I came of age amid the Acid House, raves and the advent of Ecstasy when fashion (Heroin chic) and film (Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction) were replete with drug references. In my social milieu at school, university and beyond, I was frequently the only one not off my face due to my being a good son of the church. And now, in middle age, conversation frequently turns to the drug taking habits of the teenage sons and daughters of my friends and colleagues.

Drug use was and is a glaring backdrop against which my life has been lived. Yet when I enquired what the Christian take on the use of marijuana and other parallel substances was, I was told it was illegal - as if that settled the matter.

When I drifted into the strange field of professional Christian ethics, I hoped I would find some more satisfying responses. Turns out theologians generally don't get out much, as trying to find anything at all written on the ethics of drug use was like trying to find an unprofitable drug dealer. There is material written on addiction and ways to pastorally care for drug users but, as so often happens with Christian responses to moral problems, there was a systemic failure to ask Marvin Gaye's question - "What's going on?" - before asking Lenin's question - "What is to be done?" And so the substantive issues were never even named, let alone addressed.

This sad dereliction of duty on the part of Christian leaders and the field of Christian ethics is germane to the current situation, as the church cannot now use the "it's illegal" argument as a response. Instead, it must make some kind of moral judgment about the legalization of marijuana, and in the United States it is required to make such a judgment amid the disastrous social, political and legal legacy of the "war on drugs" and the ways in which the use of drugs like marijuana are a brick bat in the culture wars. These are not promising conditions for making faithful, rational and insightful judgments.

What are "drugs"?

Let me suggest some opening pointers that might help in the discernment process. First, we need to actually define what we are talking about. Our efforts to ask what is going on will prove futile if we try to resolve the ambiguity of the human relationship with drugs by either emphasising one aspect (they are bad or they are good) or by claiming they are neutral. Drugs are never neutral: they have concrete effects upon us, effects which may promote or diminish human flourishing or do both simultaneously. Thus, we must heed the musings of the Friar in Romeo and Juliet (a play in which the dramatic device turns on the ambiguous nature of a drug) when he states: "Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence, and medicine power." We must also avoid the tendency to scapegoat drugs users or any particular section of society, including doctors, pharmaceutical companies, or "drug barons" for the problems drugs can cause.

We must also avoid imbuing drugs with a malevolent agency. When "drugs" become an omnipotent demon with the power to curtail free will and drag the unsuspecting victim into addiction, crime and death, it becomes rational to "wage war" on the demon. The metaphor of a "war on drugs" in itself comes to justify the massive use of actual military force to combat the imagined threat to civilisation. Instead of resorting to making a scapegoat of drugs or any particular section of society, we must analyse how and why contemporary patterns of drugs use are a symptom of, rather than alien to, the shape of Western, late-modern society.

Bearing all this in mind, we can, for purposes of clarity, define the term "drugs" heuristically, as referring to chemical substances that, when taken into the human body through ingestion, injection or some other means, modify one or more of the capacities of the body for either ampliative or therapeutic purposes and not for feeding or nourishing the body.

Drugs must be distinguished from a warm bed in that the physiological changes affected in the body is accomplished through becoming part of the body's chemistry rather than external stimulation. For example, in contrast to the actions of a pumice stone, a non-cosmetic skin cream - such as an eczema cream - works through being absorbed into the body. Furthermore, drugs are to be distinguished from changes brought about by ascetic practices - for example, fasting - in that drugs are an external substance added to the body rather than simply a somatic exercise. And although certain substances may also be used as food, such use is distinct from their use as drugs, although the use of a chemical substance as drugs and as physical nourishment may be simultaneous - for example, drinking beer.

The use of a substance as drugs is identified by particular kinds of usage:

• The first kind of use is "ampliative drug use" - that is, use that seeks to extend, or augment, or enhance, or literally amplify an inherent capacity of the body for recreational or religious purposes (and not primarily for medicinal purposes). Ampliative drug use ranges from steroids to enhance muscle performance to alcohol to enhance conviviality. Such use might or might not be "good" depending on the particular end such enhancement seeks and the vision of the human good such enhancement is being measured by.

• The second kind of use is what can be called "therapeutic drug use" - that is, drug use that seeks to cure or prevent or fix a real or perceived ailment of the body. Therapeutic drug use ranges from using antibiotics to prevent or heal an infection to using morphine as an analgesic. Again, there can be therapeutic use and misuse of drugs: for example, over-prescription of antibiotics leading to the development of iotragenic diseases.

Most moral concern about the use of hemp and its derivatives is focused on its ampliative use.

Drugs may be used both therapeutically and in an ampliative way to enable personal presence, either through healing the body, or enhancing personal relations. For example, the use of alcohol to promote conviviality is good in the light of the end of human being as communion with God and each other. Indeed, the use of wine to foreshadow the messianic banquet lies at the heart of Jesus's actions at the wedding feast at Cana. Conversely, when drugs militate against greater personal presence and a deepening of communal relations, then a line has been crossed between proper use and abuse. The line between the use of alcohol (or cannabis) to enable conviviality and being drunk (or stoned) is drawn at the point at which alienation and the sundering of personal relations sets in. We must always ask, when someone is using alcohol (or cannabis), whether that person is more or less physically, spiritually, emotionally and rationally present to others, and if they are, at what point does the drug in use inhibit both an individual's present ability, and their future capacity, for personal presence to God and others.

Drugs and modernity: A brief history

As well as finding some kind of definition for what we are talking about, asking what's going on requires locating current debates in a broader historical context. Contemporary patterns of drug use cannot be understood outside of their relationship to the processes of modernisation, notably: the development of technology (especially chemical technology), of global trade (initially through colonialism), of industrialisation and mass consumerism, and of bureaucratic control and the expansion of the nation-state.

For example, the introduction, into early modern Europe, of coffee and tea - the most commonly used drugs - was inextricably bound up with the growth of colonialisation and the beginnings of mass consumption. Likewise, cannabis, largely unknown in Europe before the eighteenth century, was introduced into Europe through colonial expansion into Algeria, Egypt and India.

Alongside the increasing range of plants available for use from the early modern period onwards, was the application of the scientific method to medical practice and the study of plants. This application led to the isolation of alkaloids and the creation of synthetic and semi-synthetic drugs for medicinal use. Such developments were then combined with industrialized means of production. For example, cocaine, the psychoactive alkaloid in coca leaves, was identified in 1860 and its industrial production was begun in 1862.

The introduction of cannabis into Europe provides a case study in the pattern of this expansion. The effects of cannabis were known about in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards as a result of French and British colonial expansion and trade. Introduction was followed by a period of medical and recreational experimentation. Dr William Brooke O'Shaughnessy first began medical experiments with cannabis in the 1830s while around the same time Parisian bohemians, such as Flaubert, were experimenting with its more hedonistic potential. This experimentation led to its commercial exploitation.

Under O'Shaughnessy's direction, a London pharmacist, Peter Squire, developed an extract and tincture of cannabis. By 1887 cannabis cigarettes were sold by pharmacists for the "immediate relief in all cases of Asthma, Nervous Coughs, Hoarseness, Loss of Voice, Facial Neuralgia and Sleeplessness." Inevitably, much of its use was not directly therapeutic. Concern about the effects of its use, both in Europe and its colonies, led to campaigns for greater restrictions on its use and control over its production. Official investigations were established in order to respond to the concerns being raised. For example, in 1893 theIndian Hemp Drug Commission was established to investigate the impact of the drug in India. From World War I onwards, a policy of prohibition and severely restricted control was introduced. A similar sequence of introduction and experimentation, commercialisation, taxation and/or legal regulation can be traced for virtually all other drugs.

Attitudes towards psychotropic drugs such as cannabis or opium underwent a marked shift from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. In general terms, the shift was marked by a change from taxation to prohibition and the criminalization of their use and distribution. This shift had a variety of causes, these included: geo-political shifts, notably the rise of America as a world power and shifts in British Imperial policy; economic developments, particularly what was needed from workers within industrial processes of production as against what was required of an agricultural labourer; social anxieties about how drug use sapped the fitness of a country for war (related to this were racist fears about "foreigners" corrupting young people); greater understanding of the toxic and habit-forming properties of drugs resulting from scientific research; and the campaigns by Evangelicals, Socialists and other social reformers who were concerned about how drug use was morally corrosive and a pauperizer.

Drugs, consumerism and control

In many ways, the debate about drug use in Western societies has changed very little since the beginning of the twentieth century. A theological response to contemporary patterns of drug use needs to both understand the above historical background, but also to stand back from it in order to develop critical theological perspectives on it.

In order to develop a critical perspective on drug use it is necessary to discern how drug use conforms to central discourses within contemporary culture. My contention is that drugs are a form of technology and used as a means to "progress" out of what is viewed as the tyrannous imposition of nature. As such, drugs are a symptom of modern, technocratic approaches to nature. In short, drugs - as a technology - are central to Western society, and the way we approach drugs is characterized by seeing them as a means by which to manipulate the body according to our will.

The use of drugs as a technology by which we make ourselves free becomes especially apparent when we look at the anxieties surrounding the spectral figure of the "addict." The state of being an addict - whether of heroin or nicotine or caffeine - is feared and socially proscribed because it is seen as being out of control, dependent on something, in a state wherein the body is not subject to the will. To be dependent on a drug is to deny the modern conception of freedom by making oneself subject to necessity. Such dependence constitutes a betrayal of deeply held modern beliefs about freedom and a retrenchment to barbarity.

The fixation with a particular kind of dependence masks the ways in which society as a whole has become entirely dependent on drugs to maintain a particular conception and experience of normality or homeostasis characterised by comfort orgemuetlichkeit. We deploy great vats of syrups, cart loads of pills and reservoirs of lotions in order to liberate ourselves from the everyday tyranny of the body's aches, pains, tiredness, allergies and the general affects of aging. And we are increasingly employing yet more kinds of drugs to tailor our personality and physical abilities to fulfil our desires or alleviate our anxieties about our sense of who we should be or what we should be able to achieve.

The drive to maintain physical comfort, or, as is increasingly the case, to maintain a sense of self-fulfilment, ignores how physical or psychological pain is part of the way in which we may order our lives properly in response to the world around us. For example, if I am tired and have a headache, the body does not need a coffee and an aspirin, but a rest. Yet, under the logic of contemporary modern life, bodily pain does not serve to alert me to my social, economic or political conditions - namely, why am I having to work late - but rather, bodily pain is a provocation to tighten up our regimes of control "over" the body (I need to exercise more, eat better, buy a more comfortable chair, I need to buy a stronger brand of headache pill and so on), and thus treat the body as an object of manipulation.

We see the same dynamic when it comes to recreational use of ampliative drugs such as LSD, cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy. Much of the rhetoric that surrounds use of these drugs is of liberation - "free your mind." Moreover, they are seen as ampoules of rebellion and social non-conformity - "turn on, tune in, drop out." Yet, such use is in actuality conformity to the heart of contemporary Western culture.

The ways in which drugs such as LSD and ecstasy are used reflects the desire to engineer an experience: more often than not, a "high" or a good time. Why risk not enjoying yourself when you can chemically ensure that you will like your friends, appreciate the music and won't get tired after a stressful week at work. Yet such engineering of experience imperils what it means to be human, for it deprives human existence itself of certain spontaneities of being and doing which depend upon the reality of a world which we have not made or imagined, but which simply confronts us to evoke our fear, love, and delight. A personal, spontaneous response to music and dancing are entirely different in kind from those resulting from a chemically manufactured response.

Far from freeing their minds, most clubbers and weekend party animals are bureaucrats of fun, administrating their enjoyment like a corporate manager organising her schedule. So beyond the rhetoric, taking drugs is deeply conformist and conservative: drug taking conforms to the technocratic logic of modernity and conserves those patterns of life that are shaped by a modern vision of the good life (whether hedonistic or otherwise). Taking drugs, whether for ampliative or therapeutic use, is a moral imperative within contemporary Western cultures: they are a valuable technology through which we can manage and manufacture a better, more fulfilling life.

Drugs themselves - whether used for ampliative or therapeutic effect - are perhaps the ultimate consumer product. In a society in which all cultural products are calculated for maximal impact and instant obsolescence, drugs give an instant, maximally intense hit and, unlike sunglasses or iPhones, they are used up in one go. In a society of experience collectors, ampliative drug use bypasses the equipment and preparation needed for a parachute jump or sailing trip and do not require the spatial and temporal investment of an adventure holiday or visit to Disneyland. Instead, they deliver a hit of pure experience without the need for training, travel or time. And apart from anything else, there is a huge commercial investment in our continued use of drugs of all kinds.

In short, in a consumer culture, it is entirely rational to take drugs for ampliative purposes. Drugs may poison and consume or use up our bodies, just as cars consume and use up our environment, but they powerfully satisfy the desires, albeit fleetingly, of persons whose hearts and minds are conditioned to consume.

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We must own that the legalization of marijuana is not an aberration but is of a piece and entirely consistent with the social mores and habits of contemporary culture. The real problem is not marijuana but how we go about trying to fulfil the American dream and what it does to our souls and bodies. Any response to debates about the pros and cons of legalization must begin with this more fundamental question.

Luke Bretherton is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University Divinity School. He is the author of Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness, which won the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing.