This is a snapshot demonstrating how far public opinions on marijuana have come—Fox & Friends is airing pro-marijuana legalization segments on its broadcast. What’s more? The medical expert stating the pro-legalization opinion was Dr. Manny Alvarez, who serves as FOX News senior managing health editor.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” Alvarez said:
.@drmannyonFOX says Congress needs to make pot legal now https://t.co/PM3rsAHO0e pic.twitter.com/Dn1zu1xgvV
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) January 12, 2018
He also wrote an extensive op-ed on Fox News’ website telling Congress to legalize marijuana and remove it from the Schedule I classification. He pleaded that Jeff Sessions’ returned crusade against cannabis is a losing battle and “is taking us backwards.”
One of the most important steps we can take in furthering research into medical marijuana and its components like CBD is to decriminalize it on a national level, removing it from the list of narcotics, where it currently sits with the likes of heroin and cocaine.
The federal government needs to endorse the medical marijuana industry to further important research and make it available to patients who are not responding to synthetic medications or other treatments.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time Alvarez has expressed pro-marijuana views. He’s previously evinced belief that marijuana has positive medicinal benefits—with some sideways approval going as far back as 2012—and supported further researching those possible benefits in an objective, scientific way. However, because marijuana remains a Schedule I Drug, it remains extremely difficult for scientists to research the drug in any academic manner.
But this is the first time that Alvarez has even supported recreational marijuana legalization. During the segment, he cited statistics that 88,000 people died from alcohol-related illnesses in 2017 alone while there were no reported deaths caused by cannabis usage. The hosts tried to walk back old arguments that marijuana is a possible gateway drug to more dangerous substances, which Alvarez refuted as anecdotal hearsay.
You can watch the whole segment above.
