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Francesca Washtell
Jan 31, 2015
Potential Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has admitted that he smoked marijuana as a teenager at the elite Phillips Academy boarding school.
In an in-depth profile in the Boston Globe, the former governor of Florida is described as being "resolutely apolitical" during his time at the school, in Andover, Pennsylvania, from which he was nearly expelled at one point due to bad grades.
Bush, pitted as a potential Republican frontrunner for the 2016 campaign following an announcement on his Facebook page in December, admitted:
I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover. It was pretty common.
In the interview George W Bush's younger brother recalls his time at the academy as one of the hardest periods of his life, acknowledging that he made it harder by initially breaking a series of rules, although he also credits the school as the place where he "learned how to think".
It was a difficult time for me. I was 14 when I left Houston to go to Andover and it was a very cynical time. The school for all sorts of reasons in the early 70s was cynical, not the same way it is now. It was a very Darwinian place.
In the years since entering politics he has been a vocal opponent of marijuana legalisation, including "strongly" urging Florida last year not to allow medical marijuana.
Oregon and Alaska are the most recent states to legalise recreational cannabis, after it was legalised in Colorado and Washington in 2012.
More: Legal marijuana trade could be bigger than the NFL by 2020
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