The question of who smoked what and with whom is making Australian politicians dizzy after a rock singer said he had shared marijuana joints with an MP and visiting U2 star Bono.
Silverchair singer Daniel Johns said in a radio interview this week that he had been invited with his actress wife, Natalie Imbruglia, and MP Peter Garrett to a house rented by Bono in Sydney last November.
Johns told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Triple J youth radio station that they all lay on Bono’s bed smoking marijuana while listening to the new Silverchair album.
As the media began hounding Garrett — the opposition Labour Party’s shadow environment minister — for a response, Johns issued a statement saying his claim was meant as a joke.
Garrett, however, admitted that he had smoked marijuana when he was in his 20s and even resisted using former US president Bill Clinton’s notorious response that he had taken a puff but did not inhale.
But he would not elaborate when asked when he last used the drug and urged everybody to obey they law.
On Wednesday, Finance Minister Senator Nick Minchin surprised journalists during a lunch at the National Press Club by admitting that he had smoked marijuana when he was younger.
Asked whether he had smoked with Garrett, who went to the same school, Minchin joked: “I don’t recall actually smoking dope with Mr Garrett … the room was too cloudy.”
But, he added: “For me to suggest that I have never smoked marijuana, I would be lying through my teeth. Of course I did at that time at school and probably at university.”
Minchin said the casual, social use of marijuana was a fact of life for people who went to school and university in the late 60s and early 70s.
The senator said, however, that he now strongly opposed the use of marijuana and warned his three children that it was “very dangerous”.
The leader of Garrett’s party, Kevin Rudd, who has set his sights on becoming prime minister in elections at the end of this year, said he had not smoked the weed.
“Never, never, never, not a part of my scene,” he said. — AFP