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But the most consequential issue of that period was actually the legalization/normalization of marijuana, and I was the only candidate to take a strong stand against it. It featured most prominently in the first debate, held in filled-to-capacity Symphony Hall in Springfield. I got the best laugh of the event when the question came around to me, saying “I’ve probably smoked more pot than anyone else in this room. I smoked mountains of it.” After the laughter subsided, I followed up by saying, “I am therefore the most qualified person here to address the subject,” proceeding to make the case that the “medical” aspect of the legalization (while legitimate in a limited way) was mostly just a pretext for decriminalizing recreational use, and that would have serious negative social consequences.
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In reality, marijuana makes you stupid, not smart. It’s probably the single highest factor in the educational failure of teenagers – especially inner-city black kids who have ready access to it. When Anne and I personally ran our inner-city mission in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 2008-2015, next door to Commerce High School, we witnessed dozens of clusters of teens ducking into alleyways (and behind our church) to smoke weed on their way to school every morning. You can’t learn anything when you’re high, and when you come down from the high you suffer with dull-witted lethargy for the rest of the day or until you smoke some more. As pothead Tom Petty sang in “Learning to Fly,” “coming down is the hardest thing.”
I was one of the first potheads at my high school. At the start of my ninth grade year (1974), there was a small handful of us who would sneak off into the woods to get high each morning before the first bell. By the end of that school year, there were over a hundred. I had been on the honor roll through the eighth grade and even skipped a grade in science, but within the first two weeks of smoking pot, I sank from the very top to the very bottom of my algebra class and a year or so later completely dropped out of school.
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Why? Because habitually smoking pot makes you irrational and self-centered, robs you of initiative and keeps you emotionally immature. In other words, it turns otherwise normal people into weak-minded liberals – the perfect citizens for a dictatorial socialist regime.
So, in your assessment of what has gone in wrong in America – and why so many people have gotten swept up in nonsensical Antifa and BLM delusions and LGBT lunacy, submitted mindlessly to medical tyranny or have dropped out of the workforce to collect welfare and laze around at home – don’t forget “the skunk factor.” That stink you’re smelling in the presence of a pothead isn’t just the dope himself – it’s the toxic stench of deliberate civilization-destroying social engineering by an elite class who wants everyone stoned to better control us.
