So it was something of a landmark moment in the campaign when Bush finally broke his silence on the issue last Friday by taking a swipe at the Clinton administration's drug war policies. In a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Bush deplored what he claimed was an increase in teenage drug use caused by Clinton and Gore "sending the wrong message" and "failing to show leadership."

Yet Bush's critique missed by a mile. It's true, as he stated, that teenage marijuana use climbed through most of the 1990s. But that trend occurred throughout the Western world, from lenient Switzerland to France, whose drug laws are nearly as tough as ours. Although Bush argued that the U.S. situation resulted from a "leadership gap," any half-serious examination of the topic makes W's claim appear dubious.

In 1996, President Clinton covered his "never-inhaled" flanks by appointing Gen. Barry McCaffrey as the nation's drug czar. The staffing of the White House drug office immediately shot up even higher than it was under Daddy Bush, when former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez filled his office with political hacks. The anti-drug budget has increased from $12 billion to $19 billion under McCaffrey's leadership, and around the country drug arrests are up 50 percent.

Clinton was the first presidential candidate of the generation that experimented widely with drugs; this year's election is the first in which both candidates have found themselves battered by questions about drug use, a situation that is likely to occur in every election from now on. The two candidates, naturally, have offered fuzzy answers to reporters' hard questions about their youthful indiscretions. They appear far more comfortable promising to get -- and stay -- tough on drugs.

Gore released a drug war plan quietly in May. Now that Bush has also weighed in on the issue, the dual plans reveal one area both men have in common: They think that drug use should be treated -- in prison.

"I think it's very unfortunate that they have these drug backgrounds because it means neither of them is willing--at least in a campaign--to make a move toward less harsh policies, because that would open them up to attacks they can do without," says Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland.

"Clinton's infamous line about never having inhaled was very expensive," Reuter says. "It really cut down his options a lot. Gore is conspicuously uninterested in this topic. And obviously for Bush, given how prominent the issue was early in his campaign, he has no room for maneuver, and probably no instinct for it either."

Bush, by his own admission, was a heavy drinker until 1988. In a classic Clintonian "nondenial" denial, he has claimed that any illegal drugs he did or didn't do he stopped doing if he was doing them 25 years ago, when he was 28 years old. "Young and irresponsible," maybe, as he has said, but certainly not a minor. People doing the same things that he was possibly doing back then can get thrown in prison today -- and particularly if they live in Bush's home state.

Gore claims to have smoked pot only occasionally while at Harvard, in Vietnam and during graduate school. But a few friends' recollections suggest his use may have exceeded the once-in-a-while toke. Jerry Roberts, managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and a dorm-mate of Al Gore and actor Tommy Lee Jones at Harvard in the late 1960s, jokingly told a group of journalists attending a conference last month that when Jones told the Democratic Convention about how he and Al would watch "Star Trek," it was a "euphemism" for smoking dope.

One former acquaintance, John Warnecke, claims that he and Gore smoked dope regularly through 1976, when they both worked at the Tennesseean, a Nashville newspaper. Gore even had his own roach clip, Warnecke says. (The Gore campaign claims Warnecke is wrong.)

Although Nixon started the drug war, it really came to occupy a central place in American politics some time after 1976, the year that Keith Schuchard and Sue Rusche, two suburban Atlanta moms, noticed that their seventh grade kids were getting stoned all the time. The women wrote letters to their congressman and the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the nationwide parents' movement they launched gave the war on drugs permanent fuel because it proved that white suburban swing voters were eager consumers of a tough-on-drugs message.