Colorful Toronto mayor Rob Ford came forward on Wednesday to acknowledge that he smoked a lot of marijuana.
According to Canada’s Globe and Mail , the confession came after a campaign-style lunch where Ford was taking questions.
The Toronto mayor has repeatedly denied claims that he smoked crack. However, when Rob Ford was asked if he smoked pot, he chuckled: “Oh yeah. I won’t deny that. I smoked a lot of it.”
The casual confession wasn’t as out-of-the-blue as it may seem to Americans. In recent weeks, several Canadian politicians have come forward to admit they had smoked marijuana and could support liberalization of the nation’s marijuana laws. According to the BBC, Rob Ford is the fourth Canadian politician just this week to admit using marijuana.
Ford wouldn’t speculate on why the other politicians had ‘fessed up. “I don’t know why they are all coming out. You’ll have to ask them.”
The 60-year-old premier of Ontario Kathleen Wynne also said on Wednesday that she had very rarely smoked marijuana — although not in the past 35 years. She told Canadian media it was time for the nation to have a debate on legalizing weed.
It’s possible that some of the others wouldn’t want the Toronto mayor speaking up for their side. In late May, a scandal erupted when Ford was accused of appearing in a grainy video from a crackhouse that allegedly showed the mayor smoking crack.
It isn’t impossible that the allegations were some sort of extortion attempt by the drug dealers who claimed to hold the footage. But at one point the accusations were so noisy that Toronto police visited the crackhouse where Ford was supposedly caught on tape.
However, Toronto’s mayor Ford wouldn’t step down, saying that he didn’t smoke crack and that genuine footage didn’t exist. The more time that passes without any such video emerging, the more believable Rob Ford becomes.
[top photo Rob Ford by Shaun Merritt via Flickr, CC ]
