"And furthermore, Susan, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn all four of them habitually smoke marijuana cigarettes. Reefers!" It really can't get enough attention that Fox & Friends, perhaps the president's number-one source for information, is a hotbed of paranoid Boomer fantasy and anti-science propaganda. In the Year of Our Lord 2018, the favorite teevee show of Donald Trump, American President, hosted a Florida sheriff named Grady Judd this Monday morning for a made-for-TV remake of Reefer Madness.

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Fox & Friends goes full Reefer Madness, claiming that cannabis is:



-"addicting"

-"not a minor, non-violent felony"

-"killing people every day across the United States"

-"a gateway drug"

-used by meth addicts to help "kill themselves, or overdose, or kill someone else" pic.twitter.com/euvjB4h3Dr — Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) December 3, 2018

Your first thought might be that maybe the show should host a doctor or scientist to discuss the actual effects of marijuana. What are you, stupid? We want to hear from a guy who's been fighting The War on Drugs for decades, with nothing to show for it but millions of (disproportionately black and brown) non-violent drug offenders locked up and now-record numbers of overdose deaths. One-in-five people in jail are there for a non-violent drug offense, helping to make the United States the world's number-one jailer by percentage, yet 70,000 Americans died last year due to drug overdoses. That's higher than deaths due to HIV, car crashes, or even gun violence—another current national epidemic—at their peaks.

To someone like the sheriff, though, these results are a sign drug prohibition is effective. Perhaps it's effective if your goal is something other than saving and bettering people's lives. When you've come to a conclusion—that criminalization and crackdowns are the solution—and are looking for evidence to support it, you end up in some unfortunate places. That's why Judd has to insist marijuana is addictive (this is extremely rare), that it's a gateway drug (this is not supported by the evidence, and overdoses fell in areas where it was legalized), and somehow conflate marijuana and meth use. No honest person who has used marijuana would put it on the same continent as meth, or heroin, or cocaine. The science indicates it is safer than tobacco or alcohol. There are zero recorded cases of someone dying from a marijuana overdose. In 1988, a DEA judge suggested a user would have to ingest around 1,500 pounds of marijuana within 15 minutes to reach toxic levels.

Willie Nelson demonstrates an attitude more in line with the science. Hulton Archive Getty Images

The key word up there is "honest," though. It's hardly a surprise to hear this line of inquiry prompted by Brian Kilmeade, who once defended separating children from their parents at the border on the basis that immigrants come to his neighborhood in Massapequa, Long Island—median household income $122,000—and "turn into MS-13." That Kilmeade "knows so many people" who got addicted to weed means exactly squat. Even if you think marijuana can lead to a less productive lifestyle, there is no reasonable argument that it is particularly dangerous, or that its criminalization has been a net positive. It's nonsense in defense of yet another policy—like the Cuba embargo, or tax cuts for rich people—that the United States has pursued for decades with nothing to show for it.

(It goes without saying that the case that prompted this outbreak of Reefer Madness—a 12-year-old giving edibles to his classmates—is not acceptable, and is not legal anywhere. States that have legalized the substance set the age to buy at 21, the same as booze. That also goes for operating a motor vehicle or heavy machinery under the influence. But it's no surprise to see Fox News seize on the worst possible example as representative of the whole, as they do with immigrants.)

The worrying part is that the United States president gets his news from three geniuses on a couch whose goal each morning is to get the aging white Baby Boomers watching hopped up on enough fear and resentment that they stay tuned into Fox News throughout the day. Unfortunately for all of us, Donald Trump is one of those people. He pumps at least four hours of cable news television into his brain each and every day.

Maybe that's why he thinks The Wall will stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States—it will not—and will halt the spike in opioid deaths nearly 2,000 miles away in New Hampshire. Maybe it's why he and many others largely ignore the role of prescription painkillers in the epidemic. Or maybe it's because drug manufacturers drop big money on advertising and political campaigns. It just so happens that opioid manufacturers oppose legalizing weed, probably because they fear it could replace their extremely powerful and addictive drugs as a treatment in some cases.

Anyway, the motion picture you are about to witness may startle you.

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MARIHUANA!



Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post referred to Grady Judd as a "former" sheriff. He's currently sheriff of Polk County, Florida.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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