'I didn't inhale': would Bill Clinton's scandals break the internet in 2022?

It's 30 years today since then-presidential candidate Clinton admitted experimenting with marijuana. Jonathan deBurca Butler looks at how much has changed for politicians with the advent of social media. 

Former US President Bill Clinton speaking at the UK Labour Party conference in 2006

Months before he romped home to win the 1992 U.S. Presidential Elections, Bill Clinton’s campaign to lead his country almost went to pot. The then 45-year-old had yet to be chosen as the Democratic candidate to run against incumbent George HW Bush when a newspaper article in a local New York tabloid suggested that he had taken illegal drugs. He spent the rest of the week trying to bat away the accusation, saying in response that he had “never broken the laws of my country”. The accusations wouldn’t go away, however, and on the night of March 29 1992, he was asked about his alleged use again. This time it was television.

“When I was in England,” he responded, referring to his time as a student at Oxford. “I experimented with marijuana a time or two and I didn’t like it and didn’t inhale and never tried it again.” At the time, many commentators believed his now infamous I didn’t inhale line was damaging. Editor of the Daily Post, Matthew Storin who broke the story, dubbed the Arkansas Governor a “slick willy” but for the Democrats, and most importantly, the voters that November, Clinton’s apparent drug use mattered little.