DRUG PAST RETURNS TO HAUNT GORE

It is the story that won't leave Al Gore alone. Thirteen years after
he admitted 'rare and infrequent' use of soft drugs in his youth, the
dope smoke is still lingering around the Vice-President. This weekend
it is threatening to engulf his campaign for the Democratic nomination
for the presidency.

In an ominous re-run of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Gore's trouble
began with a spiked magazine article. A chapter of a new biography,
Inventing Al Gore by reporter Bill Turque, was due to appear in the
latest edition of Newsweek , but was pulled just before publication.
Editors thought it made too much of Gore's past drug use.

According to John Carl Warnecke, a former friend and colleague at the
Nashville Tennessean, where Gore was a reporter, Gore's use of the
drug was frequent and extensive, and continued until he entered
Congress in 1976.

The claims threaten to ignite a damaging war between the two front
runners Bush and Gore - both of whom have admitted taking drugs,
although with considerable circumspection. Bush said last summer,
following claims that he had taken cocaine, that he had not taken any
drugs in a quarter of a century. Now Gore is likely to face the same
furious media scrutiny.

The claims are all the more damaging in a country that regularly
imprisons people for possessing marijuana.

The Newsweek editors were apparently concerned about the reliability
of the source, a recovering alcoholic with a history of depression.
Turque, who had checked Warnecke's allegations with other sources, was
persuaded to agree to the extract being pulled in return for more
space to explain the full context of the story.

But Warnecke took the story to the campaigning Drug Reform
Co-ordination Network, which published his claims on its website.

He said he and Gore 'smoked regularly, as buddies. Marijuana, hash. I
was his regular supplier. I didn't deal dope, just gave it to him.'

Asked how frequently, Warnecke responded: 'We smoked more than once,
more than a few times, we smoked a lot. We smoked in his car, in his
house, we smoked in his parents' house ... we smoked on weekends. We
smoked a lot.'

Warnecke's strategy had a devastating effect. The story was
immediately picked up by Mediagossip.com, a website regularly used by
American journalists. By yesterday the story had taken Washington by
storm, not because of the allegations themselves, but because of the
suggestion that Gore misled the public when he made his original
statement about his drug use.

In November 1987, the New York Times reported Gore as saying he had
last taken the drug when he was 24. He had first used the drug at
Harvard and used it 'once or twice' while off-duty in Vietnam; on
several occasions while he was in graduate school at Vanderbilt
University and when he was at the Nashville newspaper. He was quoted
as saying, 'We have to be honest and candid and open in dealing with
the [drug] problem.'

Warnecke's allegations suggest that Gore's 'occasional' use was a
habit that carried on into the very week he ran for Congress in 1976.

A spokesman for Gore yesterday insisted that the Vice- President's
previous statements were true and that Warnecke had backed them at the
time. 'This is old news. [Gore] brought it up himself in 1987 and was
definitive at that time that he's never used it since entering public
office,' Chris Lehane said.

'He's said he used it in college, used it in Vietnam and used it in
Tennessee, but definitely hasn't used it since entering public service.'

Warnecke now says it is now time to set the record straight, and he
accuses Gore of pressuring him to keep quiet. 'He called me three
times in one morning, and he said, "Don't talk to the press at all
about this," Warnecke now says. 'That's a stonewall, and it's another
form of lying. But I couldn't do that. But I was torn ...So I came up
with this half-truth - that Al had tried it a couple of times with me
and he didn't like pot.'

The new allegations about Gore come on the eve of the Iowa caucus,
when voters in the Midwest state will decide between the
vice-president and his main rival, Bill Bradley, a former basketball
star.