Pat Robertson Demands Marijuana Reform and Blames the Drug War on Liberals

Update: Robertson has now made it official -- he's for legalization of marijuana, and supports the Colorado and Washington initiatives: NYT

For the second time now, televangelist Pat Robertson has gone off on our drug laws in a big way. This time he has an entire segment on his Christian Broadcasting Network program attacking over-incarceration and generally saying cool stuff that you never thought you'd hear on a hardcore Christian cable channel (except the liberal-bashing, of course). You can check it out from 20:40 to 29:25:

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For the video-impaired, our friends at LEAP tapped out the transcript. Here's a taste:

We here in America make up 5% of the world's population, but we make up 25% of jailed prisoners...

Every time the liberals pass a bill -- I don't care what it involves -- they stick criminal sanctions on it. They don't feel there is any way people are going to keep a law unless they can put them in jail.

I became sort of a hero of the hippie culture, I guess, when I said I think we ought to decriminalize the possession of marijuana.

I just think it's shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. The whole thing is crazy.

It is crazy. It's also crazy that so many of the politicians on the left who've backed this idiocy did so only because they were afraid people like Pat Robertson would accuse them of sympathizing with hippies. We've reached a turning point in the drug war debate where we're no longer arguing reform vs. non-reform. Every voice in the discussion of U.S. drug policy is speaking of reform, with the only difference being that people like Pat Robertson are serious about it, and people like Barack Obama are not. Weird, but worth watching.