Not that I'm inclined to defend Bush in anything, but in all fairness I should point out that rumors of drug use in the White House aren't new.

During the Carter years, coinciding with wider acceptance of things like pot-smoking in society in general, people winked at reports that COS Hamilton Jordan smoked pot inside the White House. The joke going around at the time:

What do Hamilton Jordan and Rosalind Carter have in common? They both blew a little dope in the White House.

What is different this time around is hypocrisy, with Dubya trying to position himself as champion of the narrow values of his most conservative and religious base; and Dubya's coyness over past drug use. He copped to having once abused alcohol and swears he's given it up; yet won't take the same stand over his (likely) past drug use.

What's also different is that by the end of the Bush I reign, times had changed, and attitudes about drug use had turned around 180 degrees. The son of a conservative President who snorted coke at Camp David was taking a big risk, and that's evidence of some pretty serious bad judgment. He could have seriously damaged his old man's Presidency. Bush wasn't still a kid by then, and just a few years later he became governor of Texas.

Lots of people, politicians included, experimented with drugs when they were young, and the phrase "youthful indiscretion" has some legitimacy. The question on the table with Bush, though, is that, given that there's little doubt that at some time in his past he did drugs, how late in life did he continue to abuse drugs?