Molinari's Memory Loss

  • Share
  • Read Later
NEW YORK: Days before she will address the nation's conservatives at the GOP convention, keynote speaker Susan Molinari is being dogged by contradictory reports of her marijuana use. In an interview with Staten Island Cable in 1992, the Republican congresswoman said she had never smoked marijuana. Two weeks ago, the 38-year-old Molinari said that she did "experiment with marijuana less than a handful of times" during her years at the State University of New York at Albany. "It was the wrong thing to do," she added. A Molinari spokesperson called the re-airing of the 1992 footage Thursday by television station New York One "ridiculous," saying Molinari had "come clean" about her drug use which made the previous interview irrelevant.

National drug control policy director Barry McCaffrey agreed. McCaffrey said Thursday that drug experimentation was a generational thing and that politicians should stop use their opponents past usage for partisan purposes. "I think this 'gotcha' mentality just isn't very helpful to our national strategy," he said. "We need to reach for a higher standard and have people who used and rejected drugs able to talk openly about this subject and say, 'I've seen the horrors of drugs, and that's why I don't do them.'" Many baby boomer parents have experimented with drugs, said McCaffrey, and partisan witch hunts may make them reluctant to impart to their children that "the drug revolution didn't work." Molinari hints that she might have benefited from such insight herself: "If I knew then what I knew now, I wouldn't have done it," she said. "As a mother, I wouldn't even want my daughter to experiment with it." -->