Part of my personally curated collection of the best political TV debates ever aired, this one is a gem anyone can admire.
On the anti-legalization side: Mediocre Actor Stephen Baldwin
In the pro-legalization corner: US Republican Congressman from Texas, Ron Paul
Moderating the whole debate, American comedian and actress Joy Behar
This aired on 3/13/2009 on Larry King Live. What followed will surely be recorded in TV history. In a true example of truth being stranger than fiction, a hollywood actor is advocating against pot being legal while a conservative texas republican is arguing for it being legal. Can someone pinch me to wake me from this bizarre dream? In this short interview, these paradoxes are brought to the forefront for the viewer to think about.
Here are the key quotes from this interview, in my summary:
First segment - Introduction
Ron Paul: "I think we're getting carried away with the whole war on drugs ... drugs are very dangerous but there's a lot of things that are very dangerous - the question is who should regulate danger? Should we assume responsibility for ourselves or should the the government take care of us? And I don't believe in the nanny state. If you do have regulations and laws, they should be at the state level and not the federal level. We didn't even have a federal law up until 1937 and here we are, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, in a very unsuccessful to regulate drugs... The drug war is a total failure and the federal drug war ought to be revisited and for the most part - gotten rid of."
Stephen Baldwin: "You're looking at an actor that has starred in 2 very popular marijuana films, uh, half-baked and biodome, and uh, here I am uh, bringing a faith-based conservative perspective to this issue and y'know obviously Joy, there's a lot of common sense that needs to be, uh, included in this conservation. It's a very simple reality. Marijuana leads to doing worse things. That's just a fact, I don't care what anybody says, what the debate is. When you smoke marijuana at a young age, it'll usually lead to alcohol abuse and harder drugs. So right there, I mean, that's one reason why, uh, it should not be legalized."
The debate heats up. Both sides fire back point and counter-point.
*Is Marijuana a 'gateway drug'?
Ron Paul, M.D: "I think that's silly. Probably the most addictive drug in the country, in the world - is nictoine. And nobody talks about nicotine being a gateway drug, so there's no sense to that. And besides, it's not nearly as addictive as alcohol. So if you're a consistent person and you think the government should be regulating personal behavior, you have to be for the prohibition of alcohol. And when you look back throughout history and what happened to that, it was a total disaster. It created the Al Capones. And right now there's so much violence today not because people use drugs, but because they're illegal, that's why. You know who benefits from these laws today? These are the drug cartels they lobby to keep these laws in place because they can't exist without them.
Stephen Baldwin "Obviously if I smoke a cigarette and get in my car I'm not going to be impaired potentially, to damage somebody else's life. If we legalize marijuana there's no question that the number of deaths related to people being impaired, under the influence of marijuana, is going to increase. The question is, just to be able to tax it - is it worth it?
Joy Behar "OK, Ron, what do you say to that?"
Ron Paul "Well, I understand there's a few people that smoke marijuana already. How many times have you seen someone being arrested for driving under the influence of marijuana? I mean, I've never even heard of it. Driving under the influence of alcohol, that is dangerous! ... Marijuana is not gonna increase car accidents, let me tell you. That is not the case."
Later in the interview, Ron Paul laments on political hypocrisy:
Ron Paul: "Alcohol is the real culprit, the real problem. And we have people in DC who drink a lot of alcohol, let me tell you. Because of political reasons they're scared to death even to vote to legalize the growing of hemp! Hemp has nothing to do with smoking marijuana! And because of this obsession in the drug war, we can't grow hemp in this country! We sent the hemp growing up to Canada then we buy the products that they make from hemp. So we export our jobs to Canada. Hemp is a good product that we prohibit from being used - and it was legal up until even after world war II. This is how hysterical this war on drugs has gotten."
To wrap it all up, they ask a question that might have been on some people's minds: Does Ron Paul like to blaze?
Stephen Baldwin: "I'm just curious, uh, Joy. Do you think that there's a lot of marijuana-smoking Ron Paul supporters? I'm just wonderin'."
Joy Behar: "Have you ever smoked a joint, Ron? Congressman Paul, have you ever smoked a joint?"
Ron Paul (smiling): "You know, this is the truth, and most people believe what I say: I have never seen anybody smoke marijuana and I have never been in the same room with it. To me, it's an issue of freedom of choice!".