Gore Friends Recount Multiple DUI Incidents
A former close friend of Vice President Al Gore says they once drove from Nashville, Tennessee to Memphis while under the influence of illegal drugs.
Worse still, another Gore friend says the vice president drove his car while high on drugs as he worked the police beat for Nashville's Tennessean newspaper.
The explosive accounts were first cited earlier this year by Newsweek reporter Bill Turque in his investigative biography, "Inventing Al Gore" -- but the news has been assiduously avoided by the mainstream press ever since.
John Warnecke, who has described himself as Gore's best friend during the 1970s, told Turque that Gore's drug use during that decade was extensive, an account which starkly contradicts Gore's own claim that he smoked marijuana only on an "infrequent and rare" basis. Gore has told reporters that he stopped using the drug by 1972.
But based on what Warnecke and another source who declined to be named revealed about Gore's drug use, Turque reported:
"(Gore) remained an enthusiastic recreational user throughout the 1970s, during his newspaper career and up until his first congressional campaign in 1976.
"They remember him smoking dope as often as three or four times a week; after-hours at Warnecke's house; on weekends at the Gore farm, where they sometimes lit up and canoed the Caney Fork (river), on an impulsive road trip to Memphis for a barbecue; and even once, according to an anonymous friend, in his car cruising the police beat for the Tennessean."
"He smoked as much as anybody I knew down there and loved it," Warnecke told Turque.
Despite Warnecke's account and similar reports by other Gore friends, the vice president has never been asked about allegations that he drove a car while under the influence of illegal drugs. Warnecke says that Gore's drug habit sometimes included smoking opium-laced "Thai sticks."
Warnecke says he lost contact with Gore after he won the 1976 congressional race and initially believed his friend had stopped using drugs.
But in September, Warnecke told Tennessee talk radio host Phil Valentine that since he went public with his account of the vice president's heavy drug use, two more Gore friends have told him that they continued to supply the presidential candidate with marijuana right up until he joined the Clinton-Gore ticket in 1992.
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