Morgan Freeman loves marijuana, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, the venerable actor said he couldn’t understand why marijuana hasn’t already been legalized.
“They used to say, ‘You smoke that stuff, boy, you get hooked!” Freeman told the Daily Beast‘s Marlow Stern. “My first wife got me into it many years ago. How do I take it? However it comes! I’ll eat it, drink it, smoke it, snort it! This movement is really a long time coming, and it’s getting legs—longer legs. Now, the thrust is understanding that alcohol has no real medicinal use. Maybe if you have one drink it’ll quiet you down, but two or three and you’re f***ed.”
The actor said that using marijuana helps him deal with fibromyalgia pain, as it’s “the only thing that offers any relief.”
“They’re talking about kids who have grand mal seizures, and they’ve discovered that marijuana eases that down to where these children can have a life. That right there, to me, says, ‘Legalize it across the board!’”
And what negative effects does it have? Look at Woodstock 1969. They said, ‘We’re not going to bother them or say anything about smoking marijuana,’ and not one problem or fight. Then look at what happened in ’99.”
Freeman has been outspoken in in his support for legalization. In 2003, he told the Guardian newspaper that he had given up hard drugs but that he still smokes marijuana, calling it “God’s own weed.”
“Never give up the ganja,” Freeman said at the time.
In his Daily Beast interview, Freeman bemoaned the state of cable news, calling it “just commentary.”
“Look at MSNBC, Fox News and CNN,” Freeman told the outlet. “Go between those three. There’s a take, there’s a take, and there’s a take. It’s just commentary. CNN wants to be pure news, but the others are just commentary. They’re just commenting on things.”
Freeman also recently discussed bigotry and race relations in the wake of violent unrest in Baltimore.
Bigotry is “human nature,” the actor told the Hollywood Reporter last month.“If we accept that… in fact we are all bigots, that we are hardwired to be biased, then we can accept that, ‘OK, that’s going to be the first thing in our brains, but the second thing in our brains can be our cautious efforts at acceptance.’”
Read more of Freeman’s interview with the Daily Beast.