So what if Phelps smoked pot -- he's in good company

"Of course, it isn't only athletic stars who have been known to indulge in reefer madness. Important scientists such as Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Margaret Mead and Carl Sagan, billionaire executives like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, and a great many of the literary and musical geniuses of the last century or so -- William Butler Yeats, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan among them -- got high. So have many of our top elected officials, notably including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a highly successful actor and businessman whose pot habit was immortalized on film in "Pumping Iron"; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another hard-driving billionaire who once told a magazine interviewer that he had not only smoked dope but "enjoyed" it; Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Al Gore, former vice president, Google director, and winner of an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize."