Red-Faced Governor Claims Growing Pot Was Rutgers’ Idea

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Photo: NY Post
Gov. Chris Christie’s hare-brained equivocation and incompetence have resulted in New Jersey patients waiting another six months for the only medicine that works.

​Butt-hurt and embarrassed that they turned down his idea to grow medical marijuana, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Friday took Rutgers University to the woodshed.

The governor claimed that he was “surprised” Rutgers refused his offer to become the lone grower of the state’s medical marijuana supply — because the whole thing was the school’s idea.

“They absolutely came to us,” Christie claimed. “I wouldn’t have even thought about it.”
The governor added that he was “disappointed” when he heard university leaders say the plan was unworkable, reports Beth DeFalco at the Courier Post Online.
“Their handling of it, candidly, was disjointed,” Gov. Christie said. (Hehehe. The governor said “disjointed” while talking about marijuana).
“And it doesn’t give me great confidence in the way decisions are being made over there,” the governor said.

Rutgers clammed up in the face of the emotional governor’s bitter onslaught. University spokeswoman Sandra Lanman sniffed that Rutgers “has no further comment.”
What some saw as a dopey plan all along went up in smoke last week when New Jersey’s largest university declined a request from Christie to become the state’s official medical marijuana grower. Gutless university officials claimed that marijuana’s federal status as an illegal drug could jeopardize federal funding to the school.
“There is no way for Rutgers to be involved in this initiative without violating the federal Controlled Substances Act, which we will not do, said Dudley Do-Right, I mean Rutgers, in a statement.
“If there is a change in federal law or a change in the classification of marijuana, Rutgers would be willing to re-examine a possible role for the university,” the official statement read.
Rutgers would have been the first university in the country to become a state marijuana supplier. Private businesses grow the herb in the 13 other states that have legalized medicinal cannabis. The University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., maintains the nation’s only federal pot farm, which supplies monthly tins of 300 pre-rolled joints to each of five surviving patients in the low-profile federal medical marijuana program.
The New Jersey Legislature approved a plan earlier this year allowing marijuana for people with certain chronic illnesses. It was signed into law in January by outgoing Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine on his last day in office.
But Christie, a fat cat Republican and former federal prosecutor, said he wanted “tighter control” over production and distribution of marijuana, to guard against abuses. So when the idea surfaced of having Rutgers grow the cannabis, which would then be distributed by the state’s teaching hospitals, the lawmakers who sponsored the legislation supported a move to push back the implementation date.
Implementation of the medical marijuana law is now scheduled for January 2011 to give the Health Department time to work out the details. But that date could be pushed back even farther by Gov. Christie’s incompetent administration.
When asked Friday how that was going, Gov. Christie replied, “Not well.”
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