Gingrich flip-flops on pot

Newt Gingrich is flying high in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. So what does the erstwhile speaker of the House have to say about marijuana?

As Gingrich seems to have an opinion about everything, it's not hard to find his pontifications on pot. Just a few weeks ago, he said that medical marijuana is a "joke" and that government should pursue the War on Drugs more aggressively. He also supports the death penalty for "high level" dealers.

He must have been wearing a massive pair of flip-flops when he said that. In 1981, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears congressman from Georgia, Gingrich had the audacity to introduce legislation to legalize medical marijuana. Well, what a long strange trip it's been for him since. Apparently there was a day when he smoked the herb, but things changed, probably because no one else who was getting high wanted to hang out with him. As he said in 1996: "See, when I smoked pot it was illegal but not immoral. Now it is illegal and immoral. The law didn't change, but the morality did."

I'm not quite sure what that means or how it happened. Perhaps it means that it was OK for white hippies to smoke pot but not for black hip-hoppers. That's pretty much the way police enforce the law.

Gingrich explains his flip-flop on marijuana as the outcome of listening to parents who don't "want their children to get a signal from the government that it was acceptable behavior." Ah, he did it for the kids.

Now that the candidates have been so outspoken on the drug war, I think it should be a topic on the debate circuit. Ron Paul has come out against prohibition, and Gary Johnson wants to legalize marijuana. Even suspended candidate Herman Cain said it should be left up to the states (maybe it helped him with the ladies). It's not the biggest issue on the docket, but with medical marijuana exploding across the country and a fair number of state initiatives on marijuana projected for next year, candidates will be pressed to give it at least cursory attention.

Maybe that attention will be more than cursory. Recently two governors, Democrat Christine Gregoire of Washington and independent Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, petitioned the Drug Enforcement Agency to reclassify marijuana so it can be distributed like other medicines. Actually I hear that Big Pharma has a bunch of cannabis-based medications coming down the pike. So this may not be that far-fetched.

The governors cite 700 peer-reviewed studies and reports on medical marijuana, and call for public hearings so that science can weigh in on the subject. (The Oakland Press writer who reported a couple of months ago that there have been no peer-reviewed studies on the subject should peer into the petition for a few clues.) Gregoire and Chafee decided to do this in reaction to federal prosecutors who sent threatening letters to officials in states where medical marijuana is legal.

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