Fox News guest: Medical use of marijuana creates 'criminal minds' in poor people

International Faith Based Coalition President Bishop Ron Allen asserted to Fox News on Thursday that there was no difference between marijuana and heroin, and using it for medical purposes would create "criminal minds" in poor people.

Over the summer, the city of Berkeley passed a resolution requiring medical marijuana dispensaries to provide at least 2 percent of their product to poor residents.

“There are some truly compassionate cases that need to have medical marijuana,” Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates explained. “But it’s expensive. You hear stories about people dying from cancer who don’t have the money.”

On Thursday's edition of Fox & Friends, Allen, who is a former drug addict, said that the entire city council should be recalled for the decision.

"I think it's ludicrous over-the-top madness," he insisted to Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. "Why would Berkeley City Council want to keep their poverty-stricken underserved high, in poverty and lethargic. It's absolutely mind boggling, and absolutely ridiculous for Berkeley City Council to make such a suggestion, and then to put this in motion."

Kilmeade asked Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project if he also supported "dumping pot on the impoverished."

Tvert pointed out that the most recent polling from Fox News showed that 85 percent of Americans supported medical marijuana.

"Research tells us that marijuana has the same effects on the pleasure central system in the brain as heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine," Allen shot back. "And so, it's no difference at all."

"Berkeley City Council must have been high to make this decision, to cause generational poverty," he added. "Berkeley has not helped their city at all. In fact, it pushed it deeper into a depression, lethargicy [SIC], a criminal mind."

"Or wipes out ambition," Kilmeade offered.

"With all due respect, your suggestion that marijuana has the same effect as heroin and crack cocaine really just suggests that you don't know what you're talking about," Tvert observed. "I mean, the fact is marijuana has proven to be less toxic and less addictive, not only than those drugs, but than alcohol."

"The fact is that medical associations across the country, and more than 80 percent of Americans think marijuana can help seriously ill people."

Kilmeade, however, argued that "people are abusing the medical marijuana system, they're using it for recreation purposes, and doctors are just complicit, and this plays into the cycle."

"What Berkeley has done to their citizens in Berkeley, California is terrible!" Allen exclaimed. "And every last one of them should be recalled for harming the future of Berkeley's youth!"

Watch the video below from Fox News' Fox & Friends, broadcast Sept. 4, 2014.