TV preacher Pat Robertson asserted this week that Ferguson police had been right to kill Michael Brown because the unarmed teen was "probably high on something" and "charged the police officer."
On the Tuesday edition of The 700 Club, Robertson weighed in on the shooting, and on the unrest in Ferguson that followed.
"The facts aren't totally clear," he admitted. "But this great big guy -- this gentle giant, they call him -- went into a convenience store where he wanted some cigars. So, he stole some cigars. And when the clerk tried to stop him, he pushed the clerk aside, pushed him down, walked out into the middle of the street."
"Now, was he high on some kind of drugs?" Robertson asked. "That hasn't come out yet... But the next thing we understand was he was walking down the middle of the street and obstructing traffic, which says to me he probably was high on something."
The televangelist speculated that Brown "knew he committed a crime," but "the police maybe didn't know about it yet."
"So then, did this giant man charge the police officer, and the police officer tried to defend himself?" he wondered. "It doesn't seem like there was some kind of wonton act of assassination or execution. That just doesn't fit the pattern."
Robertson said that he could not understand why "on the strength of one man who robbed a store and was shot, all of these thousands of people start tearing the city of Ferguson apart."
"What is wrong with people who would destroy the city where they live?"
Based on an anonymous person "familiar with the county’s investigation," The Washington Post reported on Monday that Brown "had marijuana in his system" when he died.
But as New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer blog noted, "marijuana use is not linked to violent behavior, nor is it a crime punishable by death in the United States."
"[T]he research tells us that aggression and violence are highly unlikely outcomes of marijuana use," Columbia Professor of Psychology Carl Hart wrote in a 2013 New York Times op-ed about slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin. "Based on my own work, during which I have administered thousands of doses of marijuana, I can say that its main effects are contentment, relaxation, sedation, euphoria and increased hunger, all peaking within 5 to 10 minutes after smoking and lasting for about two hours."
Hart added that high doses of THC could "cause mild hallucinations and paranoia, but even these effects are rare and usually seen only in very inexperienced users."
Watch the video below from CBN's The 700 Club, broadcast Aug. 19, 2014.
