According to recent interviews with his former classmates published by the Boston Globe, possible 2016 GOP presidential nominee Jeb Bush was a pot-smoking bully in his younger days, and not exactly a model student when it came to his academics.
“[H]is grades were so poor that he was in danger of being expelled,” reported the Globe, “which would have been a huge embarrassment to his father, a member of Congress and of the school’s board of trustees.”
Bush admitted that he had, in fact, drank alcohol and smoked pot while a student at the Andover school. “It was pretty common,” he said, also telling the Globe he had no recollection of the bullying.
“The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb’s room,” said Peter Tibbetts, one of Bush’s classmates. “He had a portable stereo with removable speakers. He put on Steppenwolf for me.”
Tibbetts said that he had once bought hashish from Bush, but that he sought it out — Bush wasn’t a dealer. He also said that, despite getting kicked out of school for drug use, that his only regret with his relationship with Bush was that he participated in bullying with the former Florida governor.
The two had targeted a smaller classmate, who they taunted and then “sewed his pajama bottoms so that they were impossible to put on.” Tibbetts said he felt remorse for joining in with the “kids being cruel.”
Another of Bush’s classmates, Gregg Hamilton, described Bush as “large, physically imposing, and [said that he] traveled in a crowd that was somewhat threatening.”
“I saw him as a cigarette smoker and ‘toker,’” said Hamilton, who described the all-male boarding school as a “hostile environment for the kids — sort of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation.”
A teenager smoking pot, drinking, being mean and not uninterested in academics isn’t’ anything particularly newsworthy. But given his strong anti-marijuana stance during his political career, his classmates’ remarks display Bush’s true hypocritical nature.
