BUSH DENIES TAKING DRUG WITHIN LAST SEVEN YEARS

AFTER months of refusing to say whether he has ever used illegal drugs,
Texas Governor George W. Bush has finally offered a partial answer by
declaring that he has not done so within the past seven years.

The front-runner for the Republican nomination, whose campaign has been
dogged by rumours of past cocaine use, told the Dallas Morning News that if
elected president, he would insist that appointees respond to the official
FBI background check on drug use and said that he could be held to the same
standard.

"As I understand it, the current form asks the question: `Did somebody use
drugs within the last seven years?' And I will be glad to answer that
question, and the answer is No," Mr Bush said.

As before, Mr Bush (53), flatly refused to discuss whether this abstinence
applied to his earlier years an incomplete response that is unlikely to
defuse an issue that has come to overshadow his campaign, to the mounting
fury of the candidate.

At a press conference on education in Austin, a reporter again asked
whether he had taken cocaine and Mr Bush snapped: "You know what happens,
somebody floats a rumour and it causes you to ask a question. That's the
game in American politics and I refuse to play it."

Asked if he believed the rumours of drug use were being spread as a
deliberate political ploy, Mr Bush became still more testy: "Do I think
they are being planted? I know they are being planted, and they are
ridiculous and they're absurd and the people of America are sick and tired
of this kind of politics and I am not participating." He then turned away
and answered a different question, as another reporter attempted to follow up.

However, the press is far from tired of an issue that has made the first
significant dent in the aura of invincibility surrounding Mr Bush.

The Republican governor's stock answer to the drug question "When I was
young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible" has grown thin from
over-use and Mr Bush's rivals have now begun to stoke the fire in earnest.
Gary Bauer, the conservative Republican who came fourth in the Iowa straw
poll won by Mr Bush last weekend, was the first rival to twist the knife by
calling on the pace-setter to come clean.

All the candidates except Mr Bush have stated publicly that they have never
taken cocaine.

To date, no evidence has been produced to substantiate the rumours and the
issue is being propelled more by Mr Bush's defensive posture than anything
approaching proof.

Mr Bush has danced around the question ever since his first run for governor.