“When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t inhale and never tried it again.” Bill Clinton’s famous obfuscation was reported by Gwen Ifill in the the New York Times on March 30, 1992.
Clinton was in England from 1968 to 1970, studying at Oxford University. He and I overlapped as students at Oxford, although I never met him. Myself, I did not experiment with marijuana even a “time or two” when I was in England. My distinct impression in those days was that, at Oxford at least, there was not much drug use, and you would not come across marijuana unless you energetically set out to find it. Of course, I could have been wrong about that.
Things might have been different for Bill and me if we had been hanging out in downtown Toronto’s Yorkville district. In Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy and the Marijuana Question, 1961–1975 (printed, it proclaims without a hint of humour, on acid-free paper)...
Philip Slayton’s latest book is Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life (Allen Lane, 2011).
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