During the Republican presidential primary campaign, Chris Christie made it clear that if elected to the White House he would oppose marijuana legalization anywhere in America.

"I will crack down and not permit it," he said at one debate.

That position differentiated him from the bulk of the Republican presidential contenders in the primary campaign. Most took the states' rights approach championed by conservatives in other areas.

Sen. Nicholas Scutari talks about one of his trips to Colorado at a Statehouse press conference; he is holding up empty bottles that once held edible marijuana products.

That was timely given what happened on Election Day.

For one thing, winner Donald Trump was among those who had gone on the record as saying he would leave the question up to the individual states. ("In terms of marijuana and legalization, I think that should be a state issue, state by state," Trump said last year.)

For another, voters in four states approved legalization. They were California and Nevada in the West plus Massachusetts and Maine in the East.

That's getting mighty close to home. And an increasing number of New Jersey legislators have come around to the pro-legalization side of late.

The most prominent is state Sen. Nick Scutari. The Union County Democrat recently led a bipartisan delegation of eight legislators to Colorado for a tutorial on how the experiment is going there. They were suitably impressed by the way the industry is regulated, he said.

"You can make sure of the purity levels and you can tax it," he said. "The whole purpose is to get rid of the illegality of it."

The problems of illegality were highlighted in an article in this paper the other day. It was about two New Jerseyans who are being sought for allegedly robbing and killing a grower of illegal marijuana in California. That should change now that the growing will be above-board and monitored.

Then there was an article about how in some Western states a weasel-like animal called the fisher is being driven into extinction because of the rat poison that illegal growers use to protect their crops.

I got that one from Mike Carroll, a conservative Republican who back in 1993 defeated Christie in a race for the Assembly seat Carroll still holds.

Carroll does not agree with his fellow Morris Countian on the need to keep pot illegal. He pointed to the issue of bail reform, which was before the Judiciary Committee the other day.

"They said last year there were 282,000 arrests," said Carroll. "Let's assume 25,000 of those are marijuana arrests and we kick them out of the legal system."

He said exempting those defendants, actually about 28,000, would save millions of dollars and clear jail space for real criminals - people who do bad things to others, not themselves.

Here we get to something that has always bothered me about what the great H.L. Mencken called "the uplifters" - politicians who think they have the power to tell us what we should do for our own good.

A lot of these people want to control the vices of others but can't control themselves. Early in the War on Drugs we had the example of Bill Bennett, the "drug czar" in the Reagan administration who was a chain-smoker and gambling addict who lost millions in Atlantic City.

(By the way, where is Bennett now that the city needs him?)

When it comes to Christie, I realize this is a sensitive topic and all. But he can't control his eating. He even went so far as to down a plate of nachos in front of a New York Times reporter while being interviewed for a magazine profile.

Well, if we're going to ban Mexican marijuana then why don't we ban Mexican food?

I ask this in all seriousness. We've learned quite a bit from science in the half-century since the War on Drugs began. One thing we've learned is that unlike smoking cigarettes, smoking pot doesn't have much in the way of negative health effects.

But then there's overeating. Back then obesity wasn't a big problem. It is now. The Surgeon General says that obesity-related conditions cost over $150 billion and cause an estimated 300,000 premature deaths each year.

We've also learned that when it comes to effects on the brain, food is right up there with drugs.

A recent article in the journal Addiction reported that studies of the addictive nature of foods at Princeton University "have shown that rats overeating a sugar solution develop many behaviors and changes in the brain that are similar to the effects of some drugs of abuse."

Now imagine if we started putting junk-food junkies in jail the way we lock up pot smokers. And imagine we gave them the sort of treatment Christie insists drug offenders should receive. Perhaps they'd have to do a five-mile run before a breakfast of granola and kale.

Makes sense to me. But then I don't smoke pot or overeat. But if anyone can explain to me how one such vice can be encouraged while the other is outlawed, then perhaps I'll come over to Christie's side of the debate.

The big question at the moment is how much longer he will be around to influence the debate. After Donald Trump won, it looked like Christie would be headed to Washington.

But the Donald soon booted him back up I-95. So perhaps Christie will stick around through 2017 after all.

In that case he'd be in a position to veto any legalization bill that made it to his desk.

But there's a way around that. The Legislature could go directly to the voters by putting a constitutional amendment on the November 2017 ballot. Scutari said he doesn't favor that approach.

"Based on my conversations, that's not the best way to do it," he said. "There's a lot less flexibility when you run into problems."

In Colorado, for example, the ballot measure permitted every resident to grow six plants. That meant there was a lot of pot left over to sell on the black market in neighboring states like Nebraska, Scutari said.

Legalization via legislation offers lawmakers a way to fine-tune their approach and correct any mistakes, he said. But if Christie sticks around, that will have to wait for the next governor.

On the Democratic side, leading contender Phil Murphy has said he'd sign a bill, Scutari said. Meanwhile there's still no clear leader on the GOP side.

So we'll just have to wait and see who succeeds the uplifter who couldn't lift himself up from is current position.

(Below: It's impossible to write about pot policy without repeating this classic performance.)