Shortly before my first run for governor of Massachusetts in 2014, the Bay State became one of the first to legalize “medical” marijuana, and would soon legalize recreational use. I was one of five candidates in the race that included uber-RINO Charlie Baker, ultra-corrupt Democrat Attorney General Martha Coakley, and three Independents: Progressive darling Evan Falchuk (launching a new Socialist party), businessman Jeff McCormick, and yours truly. My reason for running was two-fold: to have a platform to shine the light of the gospel in the darkest arena of human affairs – politics – and to break out of the “Saul Alinsky box” the leftist media and LGBT-fascists had put me in in furtherance of their strategy to bankrupt and humiliate me with litigation and drive me from the state.
Under any other circumstances the “anti-gay” pariah-pastor Scott Lively would NEVER have been granted any respect or coverage in the highest state race in the bluest state, but by the grace of God, Socialist hero Falchuk was also running as an Independent and it would have been impossible for the powers-that-be to have given him a platform while excluding the other two Independents (especially since McCormick had the money to make them regret it if they had tried). And so they were forced to include me in election interviews and news coverage and in both of the official debates televised live statewide! I pulled no punches in either debate, calling out Baker and Coakley on abortion as a form of murder, chastising Baker for his support of the LGBT agenda, and championing the biblical worldview on every issue boldly and unapologetically. It was glorious!
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 round 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” and proceeded 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.
I started smoking pot at fourteen when a hippie-dude picked me up on a country road hitch-hiking home from my girlfriend’s house. I had been an eager consumer of alcohol since the age of twelve, and “weed” was a welcome addition to my wild and rebellious lifestyle. Although I took many other drugs over the next dozen years, marijuana was my drug of choice, and not just because it was cheap and easy to score. I loved the feeling of “creative genius” that came over me when I got high, when all of my thoughts and imaginings seemed so much more interesting and exciting. But it was all just self-delusion, as I discovered from later reviewing, sober, the notes I had written while high. Nevertheless, like so many others of my generation, including many people still enslaved to it (and defending it now as “medical use” lol ), I became a full-fledged pot-head.
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, MA 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 9th 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 8th 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.
It is commonly argued that marijuana is not an addictive drug, but that is a egregious and socially destructive lie. True, it’s not physically addictive like heroin, and there are some people who can take it or leave it as a recreational drug, just like alcohol. But marijuana is highly psychologically addictive and is especially hard to quit because the use of it over time profoundly effects one’s ability to use reason and rationality in decision-making. That’s a handicap that lingers for weeks after you stop because the active drug THC stores up in your fat cells and continues releasing slowly in the body. I didn’t feel fully normal again literally for months after I finally stopped after 14 years of use.
Marijuana use can also cause schizophrenia/psychosis – which may explain periods of extreme paranoia I occasionally suffered. But thankfully, it didn’t seem to cause lasting brain damage. So when at 28 I rediscovered personal ambition and the capacity for long-term planning in my post-pothead life (shortening one’s time-horizon is another side-effect of pot) I was eventually able to finish college, graduate law school and establish my own law firm.
Looking back, I recognized in my own life the little-noted truth that marijuana addiction severely stunts your emotional growth. And when I started trying to save marriages in my Christian family-law practice, I recognized that factor in the lives of some of my clients and/or their spouses, too. It was practically axiomatic that if one party was a regular marijuana user there would be no reconciliation in that relationship because the pot-head was simply too self-absorbed and emotionally immature to change.
I was shocked during my 2014 campaign to learn how many self-described conservatives wanted marijuana to be legalized and how vigorously they would parrot the “medical use” talking points. In all but a few cases I could see that was just a smoke-screen (pun intended) and they were just potheads like I had been. But it helped me to understand why legalizing weed was and is such a high priority for people like George Soros, who has heavily funded the effort nationally.
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, and/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.
