By Bill Maher

As Chairman of the Presidential Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, Chris Christie has identified the real villain in the opioid crisis: Weed.

No, I’m not kidding. In a letter submitted along with the commission’s final report, Christie warned that marijuana legalization could make the opioid problem worse. He complained that there’s a “lack of sophisticated outcome data on dose, potency, and abuse potential for marijuana,” so the commission urges that we not “put another drug legally on the market in the midst of an overdose epidemic.” It’s the old “gateway drug” argument, as Ben Carson articulated during the commission’s final meeting, and dragging it out when you should be focusing on opioids has a lot of expert puzzled.

Now the facts. As Dr. Chinazo Cunningham of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine told CNN, “Research that examines pain and marijuana shows that… marijuana use is associated with less opioid use and less opioid-related deaths.” In addition, in states where medical marijuana is legal, there are 25 percent fewer opioid deaths than in states without medical marijuana.

And yet, here’s the Trump administration, tossing big pharma money to help develop drugs that fight opioid addiction while inexplicably maintaining we should ban one that actually does.