PATAKI'S BAKED BEAN DISH COULD LEAVE YOU FRIED

ALBANY -- Forget pork and beans -- Gov. George Pataki said he was once into
pot and beans.

In a memoir scheduled for publication in June, Pataki writes that he not
only inhaled while at Columbia Law School, but even ingested marijuana.
That may not seem that unusual for a child of the '60s, but the vehicle of
choice for Pataki and his friends wasn't brownies, but a can of beans.

"We cooked down some of the stuff into a can of baked beans. . . . A lot of
people baked marijuana into brownies, but we didn't have the wherewithal
for that kind of cooking,'' Pataki, 52, writes in an excerpt quoted in
Friday's New York Daily News.

The tabloid said it had obtained a copy of the uncorrected page proofs of
Pataki's upcoming "Pataki . . . Where I Come From'' which is being
published by Viking.

At an impromptu news conference Friday afternoon, Pataki was asked about
his pot-and-beans recipe.

"You take a can and heat it,'' he quipped. "That was a major cooking foray
for me.'' But the governor was cagey about confirming anything he might
have written. "I'm not going to talk about my book,'' he said. "You're
going to have to go buy one.''

At an earlier news conference Friday, this one dealing with cutting down on
teenage smoking and drinking, Pataki took a more serious tone about his pot
experiences.

"It was something that I'm not proud of. It was something that was wrong at
the time, but everyone was doing it at the time,'' he said. "That's no
excuse, and I stress to my kids the importance of obeying the law, being
responsible and not engaging in any sort of illegal drug activity.''

During his 1994 campaign for governor, Pataki admitted he had smoked
marijuana while in law school. But the governor-to-be said he did it just a
few times and preferred beer.

In his memoir, Pataki also recounts that when New York City Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani crossed party lines to endorse Mario M. Cuomo in the 1994
governor's race it was like "a knife in the back.''