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On Drugs, Homiletics, and an Urban Legend

On Drugs, Homiletics, and an Urban Legend

Last updated on: June 17, 2026 at 12:17 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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On Drugs, Homiletics, and an Urban Legend 2026-06-17T12:17:59-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Brownies with powdered sugar on a plate. I highly doubt they are LSD-laced cannabis brownies like the ones mentioned in the homily.

image via Pixabay

I heard a homily the other day, that I’ve been puzzling about ever since.

The priest in question wanted to illustrate God’s compassion and forgiveness. To do this, he told us a story of “a family I know on the East Coast, but I won’t say any names to protect their privacy.” He acted as though these were people he’d really met. He explained that the mother was a devout Catholic, but the son had fallen away from the faith and was doing drugs, “all the different drugs you can imagine, and he hid them all over his mother’s house.” In fact, he happened to be hiding a stash of pot brownies in the freezer. The mother, knowing her son was an addict but not knowing about the stash in the freezer, reached to get one of her homemade normal brownies for a treat, and accidentally got the pot brownie. Sadly for her, the pot brownie was also laced with LSD. She ate the entire brownie instead of just a bite. This caused her to experience a terrible overdose. She had to be hospitalized and nearly died. While she was recovering in the hospital, her son tearfully asked her how she could still love him. She said “I love you even more when you hurt me.” The son got right with the Lord and was saved from his drug habit, because of the loving forgiveness of his mother.

This story confused me. Whoever heard of an LSD brownie?

Actually, let’s go back a bit further. Why didn’t the mother, who knew her son was an addict who hid drugs all over the house, notice that there were more brownies in the freezer than she’d baked? And how did she get through the whole brownie without tasting the difference? Pot brownies are made with cannabis butter, which has a strong taste. Did she not question why the brownies she thought were her own recipe tasted like a nasty burnt rope? But again: whoever heard of an LSD brownie?

After church, I Googled my suspicions. It took awhile to scroll past the AI’s answer and fine some human-written articles, but I got there eventually. I found exactly one case of somebody ingesting LSD along with a brownie, in 2012, but that was a teenager, and even in that case I don’t know if her poisoning was proved in a court of law or just alleged. And then I got into the chemistry itself.

According to my research, you can’t bake LSD into a brownie. Heat does nothing to the naturally occurring CBD and THC in cannabis, but LSD is a fussy man-made chemical that breaks down when you heat it. Yes, LSD is often stored in the freezer, which keeps it from breaking down faster. It isn’t impossible that somebody put drops of LSD ON TOP OF a brownie and then put it in the freezer instead of putting the substance on the usual paper or sugar cubes. But why would a junkie, who knew the effects of drugs, do that to their brownies? The reason cannabis is baked into brownies is that brownies are high in fat, and THC and CBD are fat-soluble, so it’s a better way to get the psychoactive effects. THC and CBD absorb into your body more quickly if you eat them with fat. Eating fat slows the effects of LSD. Not to mention, LSD is completely ruined by contact with tap water so I can’t imagine it’s economical to just throw some on top of baked goods in the kitchen like that. Yes, that’s just my amateur research as someone who isn’t a medical professional. But if pot brownies laced with LSD were common enough that the priest’s story was plausible, I have found no evidence of it.

Not to mention, of course, neither of these drugs is deadly even if you take a large dose. Ingesting a brownie with cannabis and LSD in it when you thought you were just having a snack would certainly be terrifying, especially if you’d never taken drugs before. But neither one would put you in the hospital. You could call 911 THINKING you were having a medical emergency, and I hope the medics would be very kind to you while explaining that you were stoned, but they wouldn’t humor you by admitting you for a long stay so you could tell your good-for-nothing son you forgive him from your hospital bed. What happened to this poor woman? What inept drug dealer prepared these brownies for the prodigal son?

I described the story to my friends, which is when it unraveled completely. The ones who had gone to Catholic school in the 60s and 70s recognized that tale at once. In the 60s, at Catholic schools in America, students were lectured about the dangers of cannabis and LSD which could supposedly kill you dead. It was always those two drugs, in that order: first weed, then LSD. “Marijuana is a gateway drug,” the nuns would lecture. “If you smoke even one joint, next thing you know, you’ll take LSD and jump out a window.” Weed-and-LSD stories were, for their generation, what “strangers putting razor blades in the Halloween candy” stories are for Millennials.

The story of the mother who overdosed on a pot brownie, was an urban myth.

I wasn’t upset that the priest told a fictional story in his sermon. After all, Jesus spoke in parables. Repeating a myth to illustrate a concept in the Gospel is a very normal homiletic technique. But why had the priest claimed he knew those fictional people?

Why couldn’t he just say “I once heard a story…” and leave it at that?

Why did he have to lie?

Is lying in a homily something seminarians are encouraged to do? Why?

Isn’t the Gospel good enough? Isn’t Christ interesting enough? Can’t you wow your congregation with the power and majesty of our faith? Why do you have to make up or repeat kooky stories from the war on drugs that don’t actually add anything to the lesson you’re trying to teach?

How do you expect to be a trustworthy witness to the Gospel, if you try to pass off a cutesy fiction as the truth?

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind today.

I strongly encourage my readers to never use illegal drugs. And whatever drugs are legal in your jurisdiction, remember: they’re still drugs, and drugs are dangerous. If you partake, please use them in moderation, only to the point of hilarity as Thomas Aquinas advised. And double check your brownies when you open the freezer. Save some gluten free ones for me.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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