I get the impression thats exactly what the padre is saying; and what should be done is some “Drugs Quality Board” set up by trustworthy people with knowledge of science and cultural awareness (which might well be found amongst modern religious folk in MX).
if the commodity is legal, traded fairly and no one does it to excess or commits violent crime it there is no sin or shame involved; and a precedent set by the Vatican not just tolerating but accepting the behaviour of a remote South American tribe who take all sorts of psychedelics and worship traditional animal gods at the same time as having a full Roman Catholic Mass.
In many Catholic areas of the Netherlands there seem to be more better funded pill testing centres (in any case MDMA comedowns from doing too much too often are the sort of thing that could drive even a secular youth back to some sort of religion).
Also if richer/western countries stopped stirring things up in the poorer countries of the Middle East the young folk would more likely stop with IS and all that other bad shit and supply better commodities instead.
Something I learned whilst studying languages : In the Middle Ages in both Islamic countries and adjacent European ones, a certain amount of cannabis and opium use was always tolerated; often more so than alcohol. The amount used and sold was monitored and taxed either paid in cash or some was taken by the local government (often part of the churches and mosques) to be resold or for their own use.
The officer at the tax office didn’t sit on a chair; but sat on the office desk itself (there are snakes; it is better to be higher up than they are so you can see them) – the whole arrangement was called a divan. They didn’t normally need to do any heavy stuff as the religions taught (and still teach) people to give away a certain amount of what they have earned to be shared with everyone else, but this work could still have got a bit tiring 😉 especially in a hot country.
So he would have taken a nap during the afternoon – it wouldn’t have impacted tax revenues so much as everyone else did that too. Thus the divan became more commonly associated with a type of European bed or a large couch; but even today many European nations call their customs/border control agency the douane.
