From Kausfiles.com, a further insight into junior's prevarication on snortin':
George Bush,
Early Adopter?
Reason to be skeptical of his coke
story.
archive
masthead
contact
Posted Wednesday, August 25, 1999
What are journalists in Washington gossiping about? Well,
there's the problem with Texas Governor George W. Bush's new final,
that's-all-I-have-to-say, this-time-I-mean-it posture on his possible use
of cocaine. Bush claims to have been clean for the past 25 years --
more specifically, for the 15 years before his father's inauguration in
January, 1989. That takes him back to January, 1974, when he was 27
years old. Let's assume for purposes of argument that Bush did in fact
use cocaine at some point (or else he'd just have issued a blanket
denial and avoided the whole mess). The problem is that, for anyone
who lived through the era, January, 1974 is a little early to have
snorted, and even earlier to have stopped snorting. Cocaine began to
become prevalent, in the well-off white world in which Bush
presumably moved, in the late 70s. It was everywhere by the early 80s,
and began to decline after 1985. This pattern is roughly confirmed by
the government's household survey of drug use (available here),
which alas only starts in 1979. In '79 about 3 percent of people aged
26-34 reported taking cocaine in the previous month; by 1985 that
number had more than doubled to 6.3 percent. (See also this survey of
high school seniors, which starts in '75.)
Is it really plausible that Bush was an early adopter of cocaine,
but then suddenly stopped in '74 -- and then managed to avoid
temptation all during the Studio 54 era? (His famous personal religious
reawakening, after which he stopped drinking, didn't come until his
40th birthday in 1986, remember.) The alternative explanation is that in
recent weeks Governor Bush backed himself into a corner, from which
the only way out was to lie about the dates of his coke use. And of
course even those who decry the inquiry into Bush's drug use say
that if he lied about it, that's a legitimate issue, and he's in deep
trouble. If he were a stock, I'd short him. |
