BENJY SARLIN
Rick Santorum, who has stepped up his attacks on Rick Perry in the last two debates, now is accusing the Texas governor of being soft on drugs.
In his book, Fed Up!, Perry wrote that while he did not believe drugs like marijuana should be legal, he emphatically supported the right of states like California to legalize it themselves.
“When the federal government oversteps its authority, states should tell Washington they will not be complicit in enforcing laws with which they do not agree,” he wrote. “Again, the best example is an issue I don’t even agree with—the partial legalization of marijuana. Californians clearly want some level of legalized marijuana, be it for medicinal use or otherwise. The federal government is telling them they cannot. But states are not bound to enforce federal law, and the federal government cannot commandeer state resources and require them to enforce it.”
As he alluded to in the above quote, he brought up the marijuana issue at several points in the book. “If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas,” Perry wrote in one passage. “If you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.”
Asked by Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin about the issue, Perry spokesman Mark Miner reaffirmed the governor’s position, saying that “while the Governor is personally opposed to legalizing the use of medical marijuana, if states want to allow doctor prescribed medical marijuana, it seems to him that under the 10th amendment, they have the right to do so.”
Santorum swooped in to attack. “Governor Perry was quite clear too in his recently published book, that the definition of marriage should be left up to 50 different state interpretations,” a spokesman told Rubin. “It’s certainly Gov. Perry right to believe marriage can be redefined at the state level, that marijuana can be legalized and that tax dollars should be used to give illegal aliens special college tuition rates, but that’s completely out of touch with what most Americans believe.”