Presidents and Cocaine

Bush and Obama, but not, remarkably, Trump

After writing about the drinking practices of Presidents in Taki’s Magazine, I started wondering about their harder habits.

In this century for 16 years, the Chief Executive has been somebody who at least tried cocaine.

George W. Bush has more or less admitted to cocaine use early in his hard drinking days before going sober with Billy Graham’s help after a disastrous 40th birthday party in 1986 threatened to embarrass his father’s bid for the presidency in 1988. In 1999, when asked if he’d used cocaine, Bush replied that he hadn’t used any illegal drugs since 1974, when he was 28.

Voters accepted that.

In 1975 or 1976, either Newsweek or Time ran a cover story about how cocaine was the perfect recreational drug because it wasn’t addictive. Yeah, right …

My view as a high school senior reading that article was that because cocaine sounded like something I’d really like, I wasn’t going to touch it.

I spent 8 months of the year in Bush’s Houston in 1976-1980. Cocaine didn’t come up much, but then I was a college student on a highly limited budget, and I didn’t have the kind of personality (or bank account) that cokeheads wanted to party with at the disco. It’s suspect it’s kind of like how in early 1940s Hollywood, Erroll Flynn probably didn’t find the earnest Ronald Reagan, his co-star in two movies, sympatico when it came to partying.

In contrast, stoners wanted to play me Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and explain, in detail, why it was the greatest album of all time.

Oddly, my musical taste tended toward that of the coke fiends’ need for speed.

For instance, today, this strikes me, along with plenty of other people, not all of whom were stoners in 1979, as the greatest rock guitar solo song ever: