All this talk of pot legalization has Joe Scarborough pretty confused.
“I don’t get it, man,” MSNBC’s resident conservative told his “Morning Joe” cohorts on Friday. “I don’t get the legalization thing. I don’t want to get too much into it, I mean, seriously, it just makes you dumb. Pot just makes you dumb.”
And if you think this opinion is grounded in a few too many wake-and-bakes during his days at the University of Alabama, think again. Even a young Joe Scarborough knew better than that.
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“Never once did I say, ‘Hey man, that looks like something I want to do,'” Scarborough said. “Never smoked it, ’cause everybody that ever did just looked dumb as hell.”
The host’s reefer madness was applauded by CNBC host Jim Cramer, but a question from Mark Halperin led to the most telling moment of the discussion.
“Does drinking make you dumb?” Halperin asked, prompting an unusual silence from Scarborough and Cramer.
“I think in large amounts it makes you dumb,” Scarborough finally conceded.
Scarborough said he saw firsthand the best minds of his generation destroyed by munchies.
“I played with a lot of guys in bands and on football teams that smoked pot all the time,” Scarborough said.
But with Colorado opening the nation’s first recreational pot shops this week, Scarborough said that the legalization movement has all the momentum.
His fellow conservative David Brooks has some qualms with what’s going on out west though. Recalling a time in high school when he got stoned before delivering a presentation in English class (“I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser”), Brooks wrote Friday in the New York Times that he’s pretty uncomfortable with the idea of adults getting high.
The Colorado voters who helped pass the legalization measure in 2012 were “enhancing individual freedom,” Brooks acknowledged, but they’re “also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.”
This post has been updated.
