VIP Al Gore

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Al Gore (b. March 31, 1948)

As Al Gore was promoting his July 7, 2007 global "Live Earth" concert, his 24-year-old son, Al Gore III, was busted a second time for pot (the first was December 2003, when he was stopped for driving without headlights and sent to a substance abuse treatment program). This time, the young Gore was driving at 100 mph in his Prius, which when stopped, reportedly smelled of pot and contained several unprescribed pharmaceuticals (Valium, Xanax, Vicodin and Adderall). Perhaps it was just an enviro publicity stunt, to demonstrate that a Prius can travel at 100 mph (who knew?)

Thumb suckers (aka editorial writers) from around the country were quick to jump on the news, including Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group whose personal drug of choice, she writes, is "a heavenly elixir made from crushed grapes." Purely as a policy matter, Parker wrote, "If marijuana were legalized, regulated and taxed at the rates applied to alcohol and tobacco, revenues would reach about $6.2 billion annually, according to an open letter signed by 500 economists who urged President Bush and other public officials to debate marijuana prohibition. Among those economists were three Nobel Prize winners, including the late Milton Friedman of Stanford's Hoover Institution. Friedman and others were acting in response to a 2005 report on the budgetary implications of marijuana prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, visiting professor of economics at Harvard. By Miron's estimate, regulating marijuana would save about $7.7 billion annually in government prohibition enforcement -- $2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels." She suggested a "fresh, freewheeling debate free of politics and bureaucratic self-interest is overdue. Maybe Al Gore could moderate."

Gore, who achieved movie star status in possibly the most important film ever made, "An Inconvenient Truth," had some help developing his environmental consciousness. In 1987, during his first presidential run, Gore admitted to the use of marijuana while an undergrad at Harvard, as an Army news correspondent in Vietnam, and while a reporter in Nashville. Gore stated, "During my junior and senior year of college, it was looked at in the same way moonshine was looked at in Prohibition days." In 2000, John Warneke, a friend and colleague of Gore at The Tennessean, said he'd been pressured by Al and Tipper Gore to downplay Gore's marijuana use and that the two had smoked marijuana together until the time Gore ran for Congress in 1976.

In 1992, during his first run for President, Gore was asked about Jack Herer's book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy while on the campaign trail in West Virginia. According to a New York Times reporter, Gore's answer was "meaninglessly vague and vaguely meaningless" and managed to convey that the candidate was against both hemp and nudity. (He didn't seem to have a problem with Hans Christian Anderson, except that Gore forgot the name and meaning of Anderson's fable.) Later that year, Michigan activist Ben Masel said Gore came up to him at a rally and bought The Emperor, saying everyone was asking him about the book. (Masel is now running for Senate in Wisconsin.)

Herer's book, which has sold over 500,000 copies and been compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, contains a 1989 exchange between the author and Steve Rawlings of the USDA in Beltsville, Maryland. Herer gets Rawlings to realize that hemp could be the answer to global warming, and Rawlings gets all excited until he realizes that marijuana's illegal and can't be grown. "Not even to save the world?" Herer asks. "No, not even to save the world," came the reply.

While campaigning in 1999 in New Hampshire, Gore said that his sister's doctor had prescribed marijuana when she had cancer, and that it should be available for medicine. In May 2000, campaigning against G.W. Bush instead of VIP Bill Bradley, Gore said he saw "no reliable evidence" of marijuana's medical use. In September 2000 he said there is "absolutely no evidence" it is medically effective. At the end of "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore quotes Upton Sinclair saying, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

In the movie, Gore tells a story about a teacher of his who told a fellow student he'd asked a stupid question when noticing that Africa and South America looked like they fit together: Had the continents ever been joined? "That classmate is a drug addict and a n'er do well today," Gore joked (?). Gee, maybe being told we aren't supposed to think for ourselves is bad for us.

On February 8, 1999, Vice President Gore personally presented the administration's Drug Control Strategy at a Washington, DC press conference, saying, "And if young people… feel there's phoniness and hypocrisy and corruption and immorality," Gore said, "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."

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