Gore Friend Alleges Drug Use By Vice President While In Congress
Commentary by Phil Valentine / September 21, 2000

A few days after an account of my investigation into Vice President Al Gore's ties to the "Hillbilly Mafia" in Tennessee appeared on the Internet news site WorldNetDaily.com, I got an unexpected call. You may recall a story from late 1999 in which a former colleague of Gore's at the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville claimed that he had been keeping quiet at the behest of Gore since 1987. What was he keeping quiet about? Believe it or not, Al Gore's drug use. John Warnecke, who worked as a reporter along with Gore, claimed that he and the future vice president had smoked pot "hundreds and hundreds of times together." Throughout Gore's public life Warnecke had remained silent about their secret. He kept the secret to himself until, he says, his conscience drove him to tell the truth. Warnecke claims to have been "clean" for more than twenty years. Warnecke says his claim that Gore asked him to lie has been corroborated and will be part of a special 'Frontline' edition on PBS in October. But it gets even more interesting.

It seems that Warnecke wasn't quite finished telling all he knew. After being maligned in the Tennessean, Warnecke sought out a forum in Nashville through which he could tell his side of the story. As fate would have it, he chose me. In an exclusive interview, Warnecke alleges drug use by Gore as a congressman and senator. He cited two different friends of his in the music business who claim to have supplied marijuana to Gore while he was a congressman and later a senator from Tennessee. They claim that they delivered drugs to Gore at his Carthage, Tennessee farm and would use the drug with him there. These
sources claim that their contact with Gore was abruptly ended when he joined the presidential ticket in 1992. They told Warnecke they were afraid for their jobs if their identities were revealed. These allegations grossly contradict Gore's claim that he used the drug only a few times while in the Army.

He also revealed to me, for the first time in public, that he and Gore had, on many occasions, smoked Thai sticks, a high grade of marijuana dipped in opium. Such drugs are regarded as much more serious than casual marijuana use. He went on to challenge the vice president to take a polygraph test or admit to the American public about the time span and extent of his drug use. Warnecke called Gore a hypocrite for advocating tough treatment of drug users while keeping his own drug use a secret.

The stench becomes stronger with each layer of this onion we peel back. In a piece on WorldNetDaily.com by Charles Thompson and Tony Hays, Gore is accused of killing a major drug probe in Tennessee. According to the story, Gore is friends with alleged drug dealers, a pattern I found to be true in my investigation into the Hillbilly Mafia. In fact, an alleged key member of that organization and suspected drug dealer is such good friends with the vice president that my sources tell me he was seen with Gore at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.

The American people tolerated Bill Clinton's shady past as the facts trickled out only because he was already in office. I doubt if they know the kind of company this presidential aspirant keeps that they'll be in any hurry to repeat their mistake.