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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (38769)	9/21/2000 10:25:10 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Article...Gore Smoked Pot as Senator, Friend Charges.. Wednesday September 20, 2000; 3:45 PM EDT newsmax.com A once close friend of Vice President Al Gore has added to charges that he and Gore regularly smoked marijuana until 1976, and now suggests that Gore used the illegal drug right up until he ran for vice president in 1992. John C. Warnecke Jr. told Newsweek and DRCnet's This Week Online earlier this year that he supplied Gore with marijuana until the vice president began his 1976 campaign for Congress and that they smoked together three or four times a week. "We smoked more than once, more than a few times, we smoked a lot," Warnecke said. "We smoked in his car, in his house, we smoked in his parents' house, in my house ... we smoked on weekends. We smoked a lot." But, said Warnecke, he stopped supplying the drug to Gore after 1976. During this period Gore worked with Warnecke at Nashville's Tennessean newspaper and attended Tennessee's Vanderbilt Divinty School, where he flunked out. Gore then enrolled in Vanderbilt Law School and dropped out after a middling academic career to seek public office. In 1987 Gore told reporters that his use of the drug had been rare and had ended after he came home from Vietnam in 1971. But in an interview Monday with WLAC-Nashville talk radio host Phil Valentine, Warnecke said that two old friends have called him since his accounts to Newsweek and DRCnet became public and said that they continued to supply Gore with marijuana during his 16-year congressional career: WARNECKE: I smoked with him one time while he was actually campaigning. VALENTINE: For Congress. That would be in '76. WARNECKE: That's correct. Now, when I first came out with this story of covering up for Al just last year, I got two calls from two different people in Nashville who are old friends of mine and they told me after I left they became Al's source for marijuana. This continued while he was in Congress and while he was a senator. VALENTINE: So, as recently as the early '90s he may have been using marijuana as well? WARNECKE: Yes. As far as I know from these two people, and I consider them reliable sources, I really think Al was committing a crime while he was in office. Warnecke declined to identify his two sources, telling Valentine only that they worked in the music industry and would deliver drugs to Gore at his Carthage, Tenn., farm. When Gore joined the 1992 presidential ticket, the contacts stopped abruptly. Warnecke told Newsweek last year that Gore pressured him to lie about their drug use when he decided to seek the White House in 1988. He confirmed for reporters that Gore had used marijuana but did not go into detail. The confession ended their friendship. Warnecke told Valentine that his account of Gore pressuring him to lie would be part of an upcoming edition of PBS's Frontline, scheduled for broadcast in October. In his comments Monday, the former Gore friend added yet another new dimension to the vice president's past drug use: VALENTINE: Was he (Gore) doing more than marijuana when you were with him or was it just pot? WARNECKE: Well, we smoked hashish together and we smoked a type of marijuana called Thai sticks. It's a special high-grade marijuana that comes wrapped in a special stick from Thailand. And what they do is, after they wrap it around a stick, they dip it in opium. Warnecke told Valentine he has been "clean" for twenty years. Attempts by NewsMax.com to reach John Warnecke Tuesday were unsuccessful.