Pat Robertson backs legal marijuana. Will other conservatives follow?

“Clearly he is ill-informed about the drug war,” says Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation. She says in 1978, 58 percent of high school seniors had used an illicit drug in the past year, compared with 28 percent in 1992 – more than a 50 percent drop.

The numbers have crept back up to 40 percent, a trend she attributes both to the 16 states and Washington, D.C., which have legalized the medical use of marijuana, as well as the big push in California last fall to legalize recreational use through Proposition 19.

But she adds, “We are still well below the 1978 usage rate, hardly a complete failure.” 

For Paul Armentano, deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the recent trends relate to a bigger picture. Polls have been shifting for three decades, showing that voters of all ages and both parties support regulating cannabis like alcohol, he says. At least 70 percent of Americans support legalizing medical marijuana, he says.

“When a person like Pat Robertson realizes that the immorality of jailing nonviolent marijuana users, keeping medicine away from the sick, and contributing to murder and mayhem in Latin America is far, far worse that the supposed immorality of using marijuana, we have reached a positive turning point in the debate," adds Morgan Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project in an e-mail. “We are starting to see more people's moral judgments aligning themselves with the realities of marijuana prohibition.”

Critics, however, worry that Robertson's comments only hurt antidrug efforts.  

“If you work and live in the world of addiction, a world where you have your sleeves rolled up and are dealing with the true impact that drugs have on society, you just may have something to say to people like Pat Robertson, who so cavalierly come out with a statement like this,” says Richard Taite, founder of Cliffside Malibu, an addiction treatment center, in an e-mail.

Adds Robert DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health: “I think he’s acting out of his sense of compassion and thinks he is being reasonable, but that he is drinking the Kool-Aid of the pro-marijuana forces.” 

Recently, Robertson said that God could have stopped the tornadoes that swept the Midwest if more people had been praying. He also said in December that homosexual people can "un-acquire" the lifestyle. 

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