Republican Rep. Susan Molinari, who has taken potshots at White House aides for using drugs, admitted Friday that smoking marijuana in college was "the wrong thing to do."
"If I knew then what I do now, I wouldn't have done it," she said in a written statement after several reports detailed her past dabblings with dope."As a mother, I wouldn't even want my daughter to experiment," added the Staten Island, N.Y., native, who has been tapped by Bob Dole to deliver the keynote address at the GOP convention.
Molinari, 38, was puffing the illegal weed in the early 1980s while her father, Guy Molinari, was a GOP congressman.
Dole tried to draw a distinction between Molinari's pot past and reports of more recent use of harder drugs by White House staffers.
"I'm talking about recent drug use, hard drugs, cocaine, crack and other things," Dole said in Kennebunkport, Maine. "It has nothing to do with this."
Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y., also defended Molinari, saying, "If I were of her generation, I'd probably have experimented."
Molinari has been one of a handful of Republicans who recently have attacked the White House for employing aides who have admitted to drug experimentation.
"Compared to a campaign team that has to worry about . . . drug use among current employes, I'll take the Dole campaign," she told CNN just last Sunday.
Molinari joins a growing list of politicians who have admitted to puffing on a joint, including President Clinton, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and White House spokesman Mike McCurry.