Do you remember the election of 1992? Reporters kept asking Bill Clinton if he had smoked pot. “I’ve not broken any state/federal laws.” Finally someone asked him about international laws. Clinton confessed that while in England as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1960s he had smoked “once or twice but didn’t inhale.”
When asked why he hadn’t answered that way before, he said he had never been asked that way before. Contrast that with Newt Gingrich’s admission of smoking pot in the 1960s — “It just shows that we were alive and in graduate school at the time,” he said. The issue was defused because of Gingrich’s openness.