For all the ways in which ESPN is joyless, righteously constipated, self-important, and otherwise unpleasant, for all the things that it gets smugly wrong not by accident but as a matter of course, there is one thing that it continues, against all odds, to get right. That would be the fact that ESPN still turns Bill Walton loose during Pac-12 basketball games. It is to Walton's credit that this simple thing—or this and the genius of pairing Walton with Dave Pasch, a willing and competent straight man in the tradition of Bud Abbott—more or less makes up for the hours of Cowherdian mania and weary "First Take"-y fart conjuring. Walton is that good.He is that good at talking about basketball during the intermittent moments in which he is moved to do so, and even better at talking about the other things that float through and are quickly escorted from his whirring, wonderful, free-jazz brain. Walton is perhaps better at the non-basketball stuff primarily because of how uninhibited he is about suddenly introducing these topics—a concert he saw in 1971, something he read in the paper that morning, something he had for lunch during a previous visit to Corvallis, back in oh it must've been 1997 or so—into and over the flow of the basketball game. This is simply the way that Bill Walton would like to talk to you, and so he does it. There is no sense that it has ever or would ever occur to him to do otherwise.Anyway, anyway: here is Bill Walton, a free human being and a man I once heard tell Carson Daly a story about a "spirit drum" for twenty uninterrupted minutes, discussing the failure of the War On Drugs and calling for leadership from President Obama on this issue, during ESPN2's broadcast of Wednesday night's game between the University of Oregon and the University of Washington. There is some context to this, if you want it: Washington's star center Robert Upshaw was kicked off the team earlier this season, for what are generally believed to be marijuana-related violations of team rules. But if context doesn't matter to Bill Walton—and it doesn't, it really doesn't—then why should it matter to us?H/T to Slam Online