Bob Barr Joins MPP

In an almost startling turnaround of alliances, former arch- conservative Congressman, Bob Barr has signed on as a lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project. I say startling because it wasn't just a few years ago he described MPP's Executive Director, Rob Kampia, as "evil".

He was also the driving force behind an effort that suppressed the vote count in a District of Columbia medical marijuana initiative.

I say almost because it seemed almost as big of a surprise a little while back when Barr was appointed as the Southeast U.S. representative of the Libertarian National Committee, so it's not like there wasn't earlier signs of change going on.

Still, hard to believe such a drastic change in attitude in such a short period of time. I imagine he might well have always had that libertarian streak in him. Maybe it just took losing his seat in congress to give him a chance to let his hair down and take a more objective look at things.

Hanging around with other libertarians no doubt helped as well.

*******

Kudos to Greg Conners for the link to the news article. I'd actually got word of this earlier yesterday on Radly Balko's blog, but Balko didn't provide a link to anything but some Reason forum at the time.