John Oliver has a good way of making things feel ridiculous. On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, the British comedian strips current events down to their bare bones, adds a few jokes, and then exposes our social, political, and economic realities as complete farces.
This week, Oliver set his sights on America’s tenuous affair with cannabis, and boy is it a doozy. He touches on the irony of election day legal weed celebrations in the face of Trump’s victory, Nixon’s anti-Semitic grounds for declaring the War on Drugs, inconsistencies in federal and state law, issues with legal weed and banking, veterans using cannabis to treat PTSD, Jeff Sessions’ ridiculous fear-mongering, and more.
On each and every one of those subjects, Oliver makes cannabis prohibition seem exactly like the archaic absurdity that it is.
Oliver ends the segment with the same sentiments cannabis advocates have been screaming about for years.
“Marijuana laws affect everything from environmental regulations to international treaties, and ideally we should also go back and expunge records of people convicted of low level marijuana offenses in the past. And all of this, I know, is a lot of work, which is why we should really start right now.”
You’re running out of excuses, America – it’s time to legalize weed already.
