SMOKESCREEN AT GORE POT ALLEGATIONS

The campaign of Al Gore has been hit by allegations that the apparently
strait-laced vice-president was a chronic marijuana smoker in his youth,
writes Nick Peters.

Gore has admitted to "infrequent" marijuana use before, but nothing on the
scale that fresh allegations portray.

The revelations came from Gore's old friend and newspaper colleague, John
Warnecke, who says he recounted the story to a Newsweek reporter who was
writing a biography of Gore, scheduled for publication this month.

Warnecke alleges that the publishers have pushed the publication back to
March, and that a planned excerpt in Newsweek containing these stories was
dropped last week for fear of upsetting Gore's Iowa and New Hampshire
campaigns.

The publishers, Houghton Mifflin, described the publication delays as
"normal" while Newsweek said that the story would go ahead in due course. A
spokesman refused to say whether the excerpt contains Warnecke's claims. In
frustration, Warnecke broke the news on his own via the internet.

He was interviewed by the web site www.stopthedrugwar.org owned by the
Drug Reform Coordination Network which advocates educating people about
drug use, not imprisonment.

"We smoked more than once, more than a few times, we smoked a lot,"
Warnecke said.

"We smoked in his car, in his house, in his parents' house, in my house. We
smoked on weekends. We smoked a lot."

It is entirely possible that if they make it into the mainstream media
these revelations will serve to warm up Gore's image as a wooden,
colourless drone. More likely, however, they will provide ammunition for
critics who will compare them with Gore's public stance on drugs, and draw
the conclusion he is a hypocrite.

"If young people feel there's phoniness and hypocrisy and corruption and
immorality [among their political leaders]," Gore said at a news conference
last year, "then they are much more vulnerable to the drug dealers, to the
peers who tempt them with messages that are part of a larger entity of evil."

Adam Smith, of the Drug Reform Coordination Network, said: "This is not
about whether Al Gore should be president or not. It is about the double
standard by which the children of the rich and powerful can get away with
drug activities for which the children of the poor and powerless are locked
up."