This is a tale of Pat Robertson, Tom Tancredo and … me.
Something is seriously wrong with that construct, I know. What I can’t figure out is whether it’s them (Pat and Tom) or me (me).
But if we’re all on the same page — and it looks like we are — I have to start worrying that I’ve been reading from the wrong book. After all, when your life is based on the compass school of ideology — for example, I’m happiest when standing 180 degrees from Tancredo — you can see the chance for misdirection.
It all began when I saw this shocking headline in The New York Times: “Pat Robertson Says Marijuana Use Should Be Legal.”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if the headline had said: “Pat Robertson Says He Plays Bob Marley on his iPod.”
Pat Robertson, pro-doper? Sure, and Hunter Thompson was a televangelist.
I’m not exactly a huge legalize-marijuana guy, maybe because I haven’t smoked any for many years. I take so many medicines now — this is what happens in old age, folks — that I’m lucky if I can sneak the occasional beer.
But if you grew up when adults made you watch “Reefer Madness,” as I did, you pretty much know the war on drugs — particularly on pot — is a silly obsession, which I had always assumed would give way when my generation grew up.
Then a strange then happened. When my generation did grow up, they became like all previous grown-ups, particularly those who entered politics and either claimed they had never inhaled or said they’d “experimented” — as if a Bunsen burner were involved — and then found they didn’t like it.
But now, it looked like the original grown-ups — if the headline about 81-year-old Robertson was true — had become us.
The first thing I did was check to make sure they were talking about that Pat Robertson, the one who last made headlines when he blamed the recent tornado victims for not being sufficiently prayerful. This didn’t surprise anyone who remembers that Robertson blamed the Haiti earthquake on a pact with the devil.
A pact with the devil is one thing. But Robertson in a pact with devil weed?
I knew about Tancredo. My colleague Vincent Carroll wrote a column awhile ago about this being Tancredo’s new issue. It didn’t shock me, because Tancredo loves to be shockingly sensational, which is why he doesn’t need to be high to talk about bombing Islamic holy sites. It’s just who he is.
But this was, in fact, that Pat Robertson, and as I read the story, I got even more worried. He was making actual sense.
He was talking about how the war on drugs had been a disaster and how California spent more on its prisons than on its schools and how we lock up more people than any country in the world.
“I mean, the whole thing is crazy,” Robertson said on his “700 Club” show. “We’ve said, ‘Well, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime.’ That’s baloney. It’s costing us billions and billions of dollars … .”
According to The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen, Robertson then veered off course and blamed the problem on “liberals” who had been intent on writing all these punitive anti-drug laws.
Was he hallucinating? Were our parents right: Did just thinking about drugs make you hallucinatory?
The hallucination thing is an old story. I wrote about it in a column 10 years ago in the Rocky Mountain News during a medical marijuana fight. I cited a speech by law professor Charles H. Whitebread, who co-authored a book about the history of marijuana laws called “The Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Knowledge.”
The anti-pot law, he wrote, first passed Congress in 1937 after a hearing in which marijuana was said to cause “insanity, criminality and death.” Some people, he said, took this literally, and before you knew it, there were marijuana-insanity pleas cropping up everywhere. In a 1938 murder trial in Newark, N.J., an expert witness (who had apparently inhaled) said that “after two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat.”
The anti-pot laws took hold here in the mountain states, in which there was — surprise — an anti-immigrant element to the debate. For example, one Montana legislator said: “Give one of these Mexican beet field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he is in the bullring at Barcelona.”
OK, geography may not have been this guy’s strong suit. But maybe we’ve come a long way if Robertson, of all people, is now speaking in support of a legalization initiative on the ballot here in Colorado.
Unfortunately, he told The New York Times that he wouldn’t actively campaign.
“I’m not a crusader,” he explained.
Too bad, because it’s high time for this fight.
Follow Mike Littwin on Twitter @mike_littwin.
