The first thing you need to know about legalizing marijuana is that it has nothing to do with marijuana. It is all about criminal justice reform.

And the first thing you need to know about criminal justice reform is that it is really about black people in prison.

And the first thing you need to know about black people in prison is that there are too many of them there for one reason only: white racism.

And how do we know that? That’s the part about pot. Cory Booker begins the circle game:

“From the time I was a kid growing up as the only black family in a white community, you get to realize how our justice system is so broken,” Booker intoned to an enthralled NPR host. “It treats people differently based upon geography, based on the color of their skin.”

“And seeing in college at Stanford, the use of drugs, pretty significantly. And then you see in neighborhoods like the one I live in now -- we have a country where there’s no difference between blacks and whites for using marijuana. Or using drugs. But the arrest rates are multiple times higher for African Americans.”

So it is not about pot after all: pot is just one example, picked seemingly at random, that Booker et al would have us believe shows how black people and white people do the same crime, but only black people do the time.

And what about assault or burglary or rape or murder or home invasions? The black crime rate for those felonies is way higher as well. Which of course is further proof that cops are picking on black people while letting white people get away with murder.

Wouldn’t it be pretty if that were true?

But it’s not. Not even close. And if you do not know that by now, it is only because you are wrapped up in denial, deceit, and delusion and refuse to know it.

Yet for all the times that Booker and other national politicians repeat that pot canard, not one reporter ever stepped up to ask: "How do you know that?" Presumably there’s something more than a nerdy Cory Booker remembering through a cannabis haze how white kids smoked a lot of dope at Stanford 25 years ago.

Apparently, it is so obviously true that no one bothers to ask, thus breaking the first and only rule of journalism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

But when the rare reporter is forced to at least tip his hat in the direction of a source for this questionable assertion, we come up with a questionable statistic from a strange place: the census department.

When the census takers go into a home to ask about drug use, black people and white people answer the question about the same.

That’s called self-reporting. And for drug use, it is notoriously unreliable -- especially by race. If you check out my scintillating bestseller Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, you’ll find lots of details about lots of studies that document the difference between testing for drugs and asking about drugs.

One is reliable. The other is stupid. Think you can figure out the difference? Cops can.

America’s favorite blue-checked white guy, Tim Wise, invaded my Twitter space the other day to scorn anyone who cites studies that show black people use more drugs and lie about it more often than white people.

Like Johnny Appleseed, Wise makes his living traveling the country and telling college students about the evils of white racism.  There is no black drug problem, he tells us. No black crime. No black violence. And he has about a million studies to back up what he says. Only, you have to meet certain criteria before you are allowed to see this secret info:

“I have researched this for a quarter of a century,” said Wise, a Poli Sci major from Tulane. “So what makes you think you are even qualified to enter into this discussion? The only reason you did is because you assume the worst about black people not based on data but bias.”

If you disagree with this transparently absurd denial of reality, you can be kicked off Facebook, Google, YouTube, Patreon, iTunes, even Amazon -- as your humble correspondent has been over the last few years, and days. (Not to worry, that scintillating bestseller is still available at Smashwords, until Amazon buys it, that is.)

There is even a study that shows not only do black people use more drugs, they lie about it way more often too. Easy to find in the Journal of Addictive Behavior. If you don’t want to take my word for it, and you cannot find my scintillating bestseller because Amazon yanked it down a few days ago, then go here, for starters: Comparison between self-report and hair analysis of illicit drug use.

It is difficult to see how the black violent crime rates could get any worse: They are five, ten, twenty, even a thousand times greater than white and Asian crime rates.

But here’s the real story: when you factor in stitches for snitches, witness intimidation, not calling 911, stopping cradle to prison pipelines by arresting fewer black people, and Bronx juries, the true black crime and violence numbers go from really, really bad to astronomically out of proportion.

Sorry Booker. Sorry Tim Wise.

The entire enterprise of criminal justice reform and legalizing pot is built on a big fat lie of white racism and black victimization -- the greatest lie of our generation. And it depends on not even one reporter asking one simple question that would break that lie into one million pieces: “How do you know?”

So far, no takers.

So all we are left with is a transparently false fairy tale:  And to believe it, to ignore the enormous statistical and real life information that makes it easy to see how this is the greatest lie of our generation, all you have to do is get really, really, really, really, really high.

Colin Flaherty is the author of Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry. Which used to be an Amazon #1 bestseller before Amazon removed it for being offensive or something. He is working on a biography of the sage of New Jersey, T-Bone.