Hey, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado and Washington! Smoke up those skunk weed spliffs while you can. (Don’t bother correcting me in the comments. I have no idea what the kids are calling it these days.) If Chris Christie is elected president your days of happily getting high in the public square are over because the feds will be enforcing the law regardless of what your hippie dippy state legislatures have to say about it. (Bloomberg)

Residents in U.S. states that have legalized marijuana should toke up while they still can, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said.

“If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it,” Christie, a Republican campaigning for the 2016 presidential nomination, said Tuesday during a town-hall meeting at the Salt Hill Pub in Newport, New Hampshire. “As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws.”

At a time when a majority of Americans say recreational pot use should be legal, and four states have already made it so, Christie remains opposed. The former federal prosecutor said Democratic President Barack Obama has selectively chosen which laws to enforce.

“If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it.”

Recreational pot is still illegal in New Jersey and Christie has regularly threatened to veto any legislation which might decriminalize it, so he’s not being inconsistent here. Of course, it’s a sure fire way to lose the libertarian, Rand Paul wing of the party but I don’t think he’s particularly concerned with that right now. More likely Christie is looking for his own Trump / Huckabee style moment where the media suddenly starts talking about him again (he’s sort of disappeared from the cable news beat for weeks now) and he gets a shot at having a few angry conservatives rally to his side and bump his poll numbers enough that’s he’s assured a spot on the big debate stage.

Will that work? He’s facing a lot of competition in the Look At Me pageant. Huckabee’s “marching the Jews to the oven door” comment is currently just about the only thing the press wants to talk about aside from Mr. Trump. Even Rand Paul failed to get much of a media surge when he took a chainsaw to the tax code, and that was a fairly transparent cry for attention. But at this stage of the game it seems like everyone outside of the top five can afford a bit of embarrassment if it saves them from dropping out of the crowded field entirely.

But to give credit where credit is due, we can at least give a nod to Christie for bringing up the state vs federal supremacy issue, along with the responsibility of the feds to enforce the laws as written, not selectively based on the political winds of the day. It might be nice if some of the other candidates (besides Trump) were getting away from safe topics and digging into the sticky issues of concern to conservatives such as this one. I’m not holding my breath, though. It looks like the top non-Trump guys are mostly sticking to Don’t Rock the Boat mode for now.