Gov. Christie in the Huffington Post video.
A Huffington Post video featuring Gov. Chris Christie making some powerful comments about addiction has gone viral, with more than 3 million Facebook views and multiple showings on cable news shows, according to the web site.
It’s not the first time Christie has talked this way about addiction. He did so in 2012 as well, after he received criticism for ordering New Jersey’s flags to be flown at half-staff after the death of Whitney Houston. He attended her funeral, and several days later talked about the criticism he had received, and addiction in general, at a town hall meeting in Palisades Park.
He said the incident, in his mind, exposed “some ugly stuff in America … really ugly the references that were made to her — to a person that was suffering from a disease and I think it’s awful … I had people sending me emails calling her a crack ho — and how could I lower the flag of New Jersey and the United States for a crack ho? I mean I think that’s reprehensible.”
Christie said people making such comments were “awfully disrespectful to her memory, awfully disrespectful to the things she contributed to our society — and awfully disrespectful to someone who suffered from a disease … drug addiction is a disease — and we need to start dealing with the underlying disease and stop calling people names — that’s not what’s going to make them better.”
I think it was one of his finest moments.
