from Salon.com IMPORTANT

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Did Bush drop out of the National Guard to avoid drug testing?
The young pilot walked away from his commitment in 1972 -- the same year
the U.S. military implemented random drug tests. 

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By Eric Boehlert

Feb. 6, 2004  |  One of the persistent riddles surrounding President
Bush's disappearance from the Texas Air National Guard during 1972 and
1973 is the question of why he walked away. Bush was a fully trained
pilot who had undergone a rigorous two-year flight training program that
cost the Pentagon nearly $1 million. And he has told reporters how
important it was to follow in his father's footsteps and to become a
fighter pilot. Yet in April 1972, George W. Bush climbed out of a
military cockpit for the last time. He still had two more years to
serve, but Bush's own discharge papers suggest he may have walked away
from the Guard for good. 

It is, of course, possible that Bush had simply had enough of the Guard
and, with the war in Vietnam beginning to wind down, decided that he
would rather do other things. In 1972 he asked to be transferred to an
Alabama unit so he could work on a Senate campaign for a friend of his
father's. But some skeptics have speculated that Bush might have dropped
out to avoid being tested for drugs. Which is where Air Force Regulation
160-23, also known as the Medical Service Drug Abuse Testing Program,
comes in. The new drug-testing effort was officially launched by the Air
Force on April 21, 1972, following a Jan. 11, 1972, directive issued by
the Department of Defense. That initiative, in response to increased
drug use among soldiers in Vietnam, instructed the military branches to
"establish the requirement for a systematic drug abuse testing program
of all military personnel on active duty, effective 1 July 1972." 
 
It's true that in 1972 Bush was not on "active" duty: His Texas Guard
unit was never mobilized. But according to Maj. Jeff Washburn, the chief
of the National Guard's substance abuse program, a random drug-testing
program was born out of that regulation and administered to guardsmen
such as Bush. The random tests were unrelated to the scheduled annual
physical exams, such as the one that Bush failed to take in 1972, a
failure that resulted in his grounding. 

The 1972 drug-testing program took months, and in some cases years, to
implement at Guard units across the country. And the percentage of
guardsmen tested then was much lower than today's 40 percent rate. But
as of April 1972, Air National guardsmen knew random drug testing was
going to be implemented. 

During the 2000 campaign, when Bush's spokesman was asked about the
possibility of Bush facing a drug test back in 1972, the spokesman told
the Times of London that Bush "was not aware of any [military] changes
that required a drug test." Still, at the time when Bush, perhaps for
the first time in his life, faced the prospect of a random drug test,
his military records show he virtually disappeared, failing for at least
one year to report for Guard duty. White House officials insist that if
Bush missed any weekend Guard drills in 1972, he made up for them during
the summer of 1973. If this is true, he would have been vulnerable to
random drug tests during his makeup days. But again, Bush's own
discharge papers fail to conclusively back up his claim that he
performed Guard service in 1973. 

"Nobody ever saw him" serving in 1973, notes author James Moore, whose
upcoming book, "Bush's War for Re-election," will detail Bush's military
record. "Not a single soul has come forward to say, 'I remember the
summer of '73 when I did Guard training with George Bush, the future
president of the United States.'" 

Moore notes that Bush's discharge papers make no reference to service in
1973. The last entry in Bush's papers are for April 1972. Also, if Bush
had served in 1973, there would have to be an Officer Effectiveness
Rating for that year in his military file. There is not. Nonetheless, in
late 1973 Bush received an honorable discharge in order to attend
Harvard Business School. 

During the early stages of his 2000 campaign for president, Bush was
dogged by questions of whether he ever used cocaine or any other illegal
substance when he was younger. Bush refused to fully answer the
question, but in 1999 he did issue a blanket denial insisting he had not
used any illegal drugs during the previous 25 years, or since 1974. Bush
refused to specify what "mistakes" he had made before 1974. 

Perhaps realizing that explanation pointed reporters toward possible
drug use during his time as a guardsman, Bush insisted he hadn't taken
any drugs while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, between 1968
and 1974. "I never would have done anything to jeopardize myself. I got
airborne and I got on the ground very successfully," he told reporters
on Aug. 19, 1999. But today we know that for his last 18 months in the
Guard, from April '72 to late '73, Bush didn't have to get airborne,
because he simply quit flying. Moreover, if Bush in fact took no drugs
at all after 1968, that would mean his drug use, if any, stopped at age
22 -- an unusual age to swear off recreational substances for someone
with the partying reputation Bush had at that time. 

Unanswered questions continue to swirl around Bush's Guard service in
part because he refuses to release the full contents of his military
records.