Word of Wisdom

The Word of Wisdom is a revelation canonized as Section 89 of The Doctrine and Covenants, prescribing abstention from tobacco, strong drink, and other perceived vices. In the book, the rule appears both as a broadly observed standard of Mormon conduct and as an unexpectedly flexible text: Dan Lafferty first read its language about wholesome herbs as a reason to investigate marijuana, then later used that same scriptural framework to understand getting high as a spiritual experience.

Revelation and Religious Practice

The Word of Wisdom originated in a revelation Joseph Smith received in 1833. The book describes the present-day strictures associated with it as largely traceable to a severe late-twentieth-century interpretation of that confusing revelation. Its injunction against tobacco and strong drink became familiar markers of Mormon discipline, while the language about wholesome herbs offered a different point of emphasis for Dan.

The rule is not presented as a marginal concern. The text says Mormons are expected to adhere to its strictures, locating it within a religious culture in which revelations and authoritative interpretations guide conduct. Its wording, however, does not simply close off interpretation: the same scripture that restricts some substances could, in Dan’s reading, make another substance seem permissible or even significant.

Dan Lafferty’s Early Encounters

Dan’s curiosity about marijuana began roughly fifteen years before his 1984 encounter with Ricky Knapp. The initial prompt was not a rejection of the Word of Wisdom but a close reading of it: Dan focused on its reference to wholesome herbs and wondered whether marijuana belonged in that category.

In 1969, after returning from his mission, Dan took a construction job in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where coworkers used marijuana. He watched and questioned them but initially declined to try it. Their accounts and practices led him to doubt what he understood to be the prevailing claims about the drug. A girl he was attracted to eventually persuaded him to sample it, beginning an experience he later remembered as mentally expansive.

Dan used marijuana a few more times during that period, but worried that he was sinning. After moving from Colorado back to Utah County, he repented and recommitted himself to Mormon practice. The Word of Wisdom thus helped shape both sides of this early sequence: it stimulated his curiosity, and his sense that he had violated religious expectations prompted him to stop.

Return to Marijuana and New Interpretation

Dan did not smoke marijuana again until the summer of 1984, when he met Ricky Knapp. By then he was no longer under the authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as he had previously experienced it, and he felt able to use the drug without the same burden of religious guilt. He described the renewed experience as opening his mind to something mysterious and serious, and began to connect it with the scriptural language about herbs in Joseph Smith’s revelations.

The change was more than a return to a past habit. Dan came to believe that Joseph Smith might himself have encountered mind-expanding herbs. He also reread familiar religious passages through this new lens, treating accounts of becoming like a child and of Moses seeing God through a burning bush as possible concealed references to intoxication. These were Dan’s interpretations, not teachings established by the Word of Wisdom itself.

Ron Lafferty and the Rule’s Reversal

Ron Lafferty had never tried marijuana before joining Dan and Knapp in Wichita. Dan persuaded him to sample the low-grade cannabis Knapp had obtained, and Ron experienced a mild high. When the brothers later had stronger cannabis, Ron tended toward paranoia, but he nevertheless adopted Dan’s view that marijuana could enhance spiritual enlightenment.

The Word of Wisdom therefore carries an irony in the Lafferty brothers’ story. A revelation commonly treated as a code of abstinence first drew Dan’s attention to marijuana through its reference to herbs; after years of religious recommitment, he returned to the substance and recast it as a source of spiritual insight. Ron entered that interpretation through Dan and Knapp, turning a personal experiment into a shared framework for understanding their experiences.