THE JEB BUSH ILLEGAL DRUG & LIQUOR
DISTRIBUTORSHIP AT ANDOVER

By: John LeBoutillier

In 2006 at my 30th Harvard Reunion, during a casual conversation one evening, a classmate told me about his years at Andover. Out of the blue he told me this story:

Jeb Bush and one other fellow student back then ran an illegal drug and liquor distributorship on the Andover campus. When the heat started coming down, Bush ratted out the partner to the school authorities and saved his own skin.  Jeb got away with it, was never caught, never punished, graduated unscathed and went on to the University of Texas at Austin.

To this day no one outside the Andover community even knows about this illegal activity. The media is apparently unaware of it. Through three statewide campaigns for governor of Florida, it never came up.

In 2012 at another Harvard event, this same Andover alumnus brought over another one of his Andover classmates – and one of our Harvard ’76 classmates and a staunch Republican – to speak to me about the Jeb Bush matter. This second alumnus confirmed the story – and added in this detail: “I never knew why Jeb walked around Andover with his jaw hanging open until someone told me he was stoned all the time.”

Forty years later does this matter? Does what someone did in high school matter if they run for president?

In fact, yes.

In the summer of 2012, the WASHINGTON POST ran a huge story on Mitt Romney’s behavior at the Cranbrook School in Michigan, with the focus on an alleged incident where Romney and some other boys cut off the blond bangs of a classmate.

If that event is worthy of the front page of the WASHINGTON POST, then the Jeb Bush Illegal Drug and Liquor Distributorship is certainly something the voters – especially GOP primary voters – have a right to know before they begin to choose a 2016 candidate.