hlntv.comNancy Grace and 2 Chainz hashed out their differences over pot legalization in a lengthy debate on her HLN talk show.
The 55-year-old outspoken talk show host and legal analyst opposes the legalization of cannabis, and the 37-year-old supports it. He talks about drug use in his rap songs and has been seen smoking blunts in videos posted on social media. He said on Nancy Grace that for him, pot helps him alleviate anxiety, noting that he often performs and appears before thousands of fans.
"I got a problem—as successful as you are, as rich as you are, as famous as you are—with this," she said, rattling off inaccurate lyrics of his and Pharrell Williams' 2013 song "Feds Watching."
2 Chainz, who is promoting his new Tru Jack City mixtape, couldn't help but repeat the last word in the lyric, drawing laughs among Twitter fans.
"Tru!" he said, chuckling.
@2chainz just said "TRUUU" on Nancy Grace ???? and is still coming across with a more focused argument than she is . What is life .
? Hailey Hinton (@haaileybrooke) January 14, 2015The segment aired on Tuesday, about two months after Oregon, Alaska, and Washington D.C. voted to allow the recreational use of marijuana, which is classified as an illegal narcotic under federal law, joining Washington state and Colorado, which legalized it after a 2012 ballot. Pot used for medicinal purposes is legal under state laws in 17 other states, including California.
Grace and 2 Chainz interrupted each other at least five times throughout their debate, carried out via satellite. The host based most of her argument on viral videos of children appearing with pot paraphernalia, such as a pipe, including one featuring a 2-year-old girl that was filmed by her mother, an Ohio woman who was sentenced to two years of probation over the incident.
Grace argues that legalizing pot would make it easier for people to obtain it and subsequently, allow it to get in the hands of their children.
"Why do you advocate legalizaltion of pot when you hear stories like what I'm talking about?" Grace asked 2 Chainz.
She also asked him if he has children, to which he replied: "I have two beautiful little girls and I'm a great father. I just feel like, basically, everybody should take care of their own."
The woman who gave her toddler pot, he said, was a "bonehead." He also commented on another video of an adult giving another child a marijuana pipe and fired back with some sarcasm of his own.
"It's the same thing we talked about earlier, darling, with the legalization of alcohol," 2 Chainz told Grace. "You will find some footage of this but everybody is not doing this. Some people actually love their child."
"If this is legalized, then everybody is gonna have unlimited access to pot and unlike other who are responsible, irresponsible child abusers are gonna have free access," Grace said.
Currently, in states where pot is legal, such as California, you can sometimes find multiple pot dispensaries within a 5-mile radius, in plain view, such as in strip malls.
"Um, I'm not sure if you know but everybody has the ability to get their hands on pot right now, whether it's legal or not," 2 Chainz said, interrupting her. "I just feel if you legalize this particular drug, it could cut out certain things in the criminal justice system as far as the overcrowding of prisons, as far as putting this on our criminal record to prevent us from getting loans, to prevent us from getting homes...I figure if we got half of the states legalizing pot, if the rest of the community legalizes pot, that frees up taxpayers' money."
"My bus gets pulled over and they say they smell weed, like they do all the time, OK? They find a grinder on my bus that has .01 of residue inside of it. They lock me up, they strip me...and then they find out I'm a rapper and they wanna know how fine is Nicki Minaj, they wanna take pictures and they wanna let me go," he said.
She also got personal.
"You went to college on a sports scholarship, did you not?" Grace asked 2 Chainz, whose real name is Tauheed Epps.
"Yes, and I'm very intelligent and smoking pot, for me-" he began,
She then moved her hands around and cut him off, asking him if he was "using pot" when he was 16 and in high school.
"Uh uh, I was selling pot then," he replied.
In his 2013 song "Mainstream Rachet," 2 Chainz raps, "I'm a D boy with a degree / I sold dope in my mama's home."
"And would you want your children to do that?" she asked.
"No, but it was a means for me, it was a way of living for me," he said.
"Why don't you want your children to do it, man?" she asked.
"Because I did it for 'em," he said. "I sacrificed that so they won't have to do that."