Even Michelle Malkin Likes Weed… Can She Convince Trump?

Some issues are nonpartisan. Guarantees of air that’s good to breathe and water that’s safe to drink and the assurance that there will be a planet suitable for human habitation in a century’s time are not. These are liberal ploys. They won’t make America great! Thus, they are bad.

But marijuana! Yes. Here we come together. Here is the common ground where the dirtbag left and the #MAGA gather to swap memes and exchange ideas in harmony.

This has happened before. Conservatives admitting the obvious and acknowledging the drug war has failed has led to bizarre alliances and incongruous scenes like far-left tree-huggers exhorting the virtues of Ron Paul (who wanted to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency) and medical marijuana entrepreneurs supporting such qualified, thoughtful individuals as Gary Johnson.

For ur-conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, the idea of a patriarchal society is nonsense, and peddlers of conspiracy theories like Project Veritas are great Americans. Hardcore conservative, and proud of it.

But Malkin is cool with weed. Not for herself, per se (or if she is, she won’t divulge), but she’s cool with giving it to sick people—including her own child.

Malkin is a self-admitted former “table-pounding crusader” for the War on Drugs (because sometimes big government is good, as long as it’s used to achieve your own personal aims). She used to work in Seattle, where, around 1999, she met a Navy vet with bone cancer—the patient whose suffering led to Washington’s medical marijuana law.  

She now lives in Colorado—where she was among the first in line at Colorado’s recreational cannabis shops in order to buy weed for her mother-in-law, who was also suffering from cancer. Now, with one of her children stricken with a motor tic so bad that it causes her joints to dislocate, Malkin is on the pediatric pot kick, as she wrote in a recent piece published on the National Review. 

Malkin’s story echoes all the other “medical marijuana changed my life” stories.

Her daughter, Veronica, fell ill. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. She tried powerful prescription pharmaceuticals. They were terrible—they didn’t work and sometimes made things worse. Here, though, is the pivot: a mainstream neurologist recommended Malkin and her husband give their daughter some CBD.

“Two physicians signed off on our daughter’s application for a medical-marijuana card,” she wrote. “She became one of more than 360 children under 18 to join Colorado’s medical-marijuana registry in 2015. And we became pediatric pot parents.”

Good! Yes. People should share stories like these, readily and proudly.

Cannabis is medicine. Even doctors and scientists agree with Michelle Malkin. The choir hears the sermon and loves it. Wonderful music. Now what about everyone else?

Why Malkin chose now to share her story with the world, with the conservative world—and not, say, during election season, or during confirmation hearings for her fellow social conservative Jeff Sessions, who is happy to use punitive drug laws in the pursuit of an authoritarian state—isn’t readily clear.

It is true that the New England Journal of Medicine recently published a study that confirmed what many of us already knew through studies, anecdotes and billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies patenting marijuana-derived medicine: CBD is good for neurological conditions. CBD is good for kids with epilepsy. Liberty-loving conservatives can like marijuana, etc.

So, maybe Donald Trump and his gang of do-gooders should stop fucking with it?

“The Trump administration has sent mixed signals on a medical marijuana crackdown,” wrote Malkin, for whom months of threats to dismantle the cannabis industry, gut research and putting nonviolent drug offenders back in jail for nonviolent drug offenses is a “mixed signal,” in the same way that exiting the Paris climate change accord means maybe you are secretly an environmentalist.  

Look. It’s great marijuana has helped Malkin’s family. It’s nice she’s being (sort of) vocal about medical cannabis, at a time when 90 percent of her fellow Americans agree with her.  

Taking the next logical step, and rightly condemning her conservative fellow travelers who don’t agree—and who very clearly want to reverse all this progress—would be really great.