Is Norm Coleman a pothead? Is Al Franken a trippin’ fool? We report, you decide!

Do you care that Norm Coleman once smoked Pot? Do you care that Al Franken did LSD and Cocaine? Is it fair to differentiate between the types of drugs used and how smart or stupid an individual must be to have tried them, even if it was in the past? Skeletons in the closet are a politicians worst nightmare, but should they be?

By Jake Sherman, Star Tribune - June 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - An open letter by a marijuana activist sparked a flurry of attention Wednesday about which candidates for Minnesota’s U.S. Senate seat experimented with illegal substances in the past.

Norm Kent, a former classmate of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman at Hofstra University, posted a letter on a marijuana website about Coleman’s marijuana use in the 1960s. Kent, whom Coleman defeated in a student government race at the university, recalled an instance when the New York-born Coleman stood atop a building during a protest and smoked marijuana.

But Coleman is not the only politician with illicit substances in his past. Al Franken, the former actor on “Saturday Night Live” and DFL candidate for Coleman’s Senate seat, used cocaine, LSD and marijuana while working on the late-night show, according to news reports. Franken’s first stint on the show was in the late 1970s.

In a Los Angeles Times article from 1994, Franken admitted to doing his “share of recreational drugs” but said he never was addicted.

“There’d be cocaine around the show and if it was [mid-week] at 3 in the morning and I wanted to finish something I was writing I’d do some,” Franken said in the interview.

A Washington Post story from February 1986 described a scene from a book about “Saturday Night Live” that had Franken and co-writer Tom Davis using LSD while writing a sketch about former President Richard Nixon.

In a 2006 Playboy interview, Franken admitted to doing cocaine when he was “young and irresponsible.”

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It’s natural for both sides to try to dig up stuff from each candidates background. The question is, how does it affect you as a voter? I know some people would say, “Well they were young and did stupid things, I did too.” How far back do we look into a candidates past to judge them now? I think you can only take it so far. I think it is fair to look at the types of drugs for instance and say, okay, none of these drugs are good, they are all illegal, but some are worse than others. Does it say something about a persons character when they choose to smoke marijuana? Yes. Does it say something about a persons character when they do harder drugs like LSD and Cocaine? It certainly does.

I believe in forgiveness but public figures are held to a higher standard than most Americans and I think it’s not entirely inappropriate to consider the decisions they’ve made in the past and how that will affect their decisions in the future.

More important of course is how they feel about illegal drug use now, and how they feel about the issues. After examining the two candidates I think some could reasonably argue that Norm Coleman is a little too much of a pot smoking hippie still when it comes to some issues, and Al Franken by all accounts is still using LSD and Cocaine!