Truban Admits to LSD and Repeated Marihuana Use in Past
Bratislava, August 8 (TASR) – Chairman of the still non-parliamentary Progressive Slovakia party Michal Truban admitted to his repeated use of marihuana in the past and added that he had also tried out LSD 12 years ago.
Speaking in a video posted on his social network page on Thursday, Truban specified that he had used marihuana more than once and not only on campus during college days.
The controversy is centred around an old video from Truban’s 2013 lecture at Nitra university titled ‘All you need for success in business!’, where Truban openly told students how he engaged in drinking and drug use with his friends at high school before changing his lifestyle and launching his company. He also drew many parallels between various life situations and drug use. “What I like about sports and drugs is the dopamin effect. Now everyone will say: yeah, but rising early and having a healthy diet is nowhere near as rewarding as smoking weed because you don’t get that pleasant high before or after,” Truban told the students.
At the lecture, Truban also elaborated on tenets he had applied on his path to success, claming to have learnt them “while using drugs”. “The way drugs, booze and related stuff that students do for fun works, you can use the same thing for success and work,” he elucidated the analogy.
In his Thursday video reflecting on the lecture, Truban stated that he had “acted as the kind of politician he had never wanted to be” and added that drug use shouldn’t be discussed with students in the way he had done it.
In response, Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) chair Alojz Hlina stated that the difference between Michal Truban and other top politicians is that Truban admitted to lying and apologised.
Whether Truban’s conduct caused any damage is up to people to judge in the election. “They say ‘Turk-convert is worse than true-born Turk’ [an old idiom originating from times when the Ottoman Empire threatened Europe – ed.note], so maybe Slovakia has acquired a great new crusader against drugs in the form of Mr. Truban just now,” quipped Hlina.
Hlina added that the conservative position of his party on drugs remains unequivocal, specifically – “help for victims and severe punishment for perpetrators”.
