A spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said Tuesday that the potential 2016 presidential contender made a “mistake” when he experimented with marijuana as a teenager.
‘”Teenagers are often known for their lack of judgment, and Sen. Cruz was no exception,” an unnamed Cruz spokesperson told the Daily Mail. “When he was a teenager, he foolishly experimented with marijuana. It was a mistake, and he’s never tried it since.”
NBC News confirmed Cruz’s past marijuana use.
That comment from the Cruz camp followed a Boston Globe profile about former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) time at an elite boarding school in New England, in which Bush said he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol as a student.
“I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” Bush told the Globe. “It was pretty common.”
The Daily Mail reached out to representatives for 10 potential Republican presidential candidates, but Cruz’s spokesperson was the only one to offer a new admission. The drug’s legalization has become a small point of contention in the 2016 field as more GOPers who are mulling presidential bids have admitted their past marijuana use.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) seized on the Globe profile to call out Bush for “hypocrisy” on opposing marijuana legalization, even though he has sidestepped questions about whether he smoked pot when he was younger. Last year Paul told a local TV station “Let’s just say I wasn’t a choir boy when I was in college … and I can say that I made mistakes when I was a kid.”
This post has been updated.
This uptight mofu needs to sit down with a nice pile, a bong, and go at it. But then again, it might make him an even more insufferable asshole than he currently is - droning on and on and on in that monotonous accent and affectation he has.
When are we, as a country, going to stop it already with this foolishness of acting as if NONE of us has ever tried drugs. Some people truly have never experimented and that’s okay. However, the majority of us probably has. It doesn’t make you any less or more of a good person to have tried drugs. Can we move on from this America, please…
Nope. Too many cheap political attacks and false accusations of “hypocrisy” to be had.
OK, we’ve done vaccination and marijuana. Shall we move on to finding out which potential candidates were “bi-curious” in their youth?
It’s OK for a “tough on drugs” Republican to admit having smoked pot, provided that he reminds us that he didn’t like it. That qualifies the event as a “youthful indiscretion”, and is therefore exempt from the hard prison time that Republicans demand for everyone else who admits to having smoked pot.