WASHINGTON – Barack Obama admitted using drugs in his autobiography but never revealed if or when he stopped, points out an explosive new book on the Democratic presidential candidate written by the co-author of 2004's "Unfit for Command," the Swift Boat exposé that impacted John Kerry's campaign for the White House.

"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years," Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father," in a section of the book about his college days. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it."

In "The Obama Nation," a new book by Jerome Corsi, a WND staff writer, the author speculates about why Obama disclosed his drug use.

"Why Obama chose to disclose he smoked marijuana and used cocaine at all remains a mystery," Corsi writes. "Perhaps Obama felt the information would eventually come forward from his school buddies. So, to minimize the damage from this concealed fact, Obama possibly judged self-disclosure was the best route."

Obama wrote that he stopped short of shooting heroin when it was offered to him by a friend.

"I'd looked at him standing there, surrounded by big slabs of salami and roast beef, and right then an image popped into my head of an air bubble, shiny and round like a pearl, rolling quietly through a vein and stopping my heart. …"

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Corsi points out Obama has yet to explain whether he ever sold drugs or when he stopped using them.

"Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois?" Corsi asks. "How about in the U.S. Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why questions George W. Bush successfully avoided."

Obama linked drug use in his college years with his struggle for identity and specifically with issues of race.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final fatale role of the young would-be black man," he wrote.

Corsi continues: "He denies the 'highs' had been about "me trying to prove what a down brother I was. … I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory."

Despite the seriousness of the revelation by Obama about his college drug use as late as the 1980s, there has been little attention given the issue by the political reporters who cover the candidate. In fact, none have asked the questions Corsi asks in his book – or, at least they have not published or broadcast answers if the questions were asked.

Last year, when a Minnesota man, Larry Sinclair, made startling allegations that he used cocaine and had homosexual sex with Obama nine years earlier, the candidate was able to ignore the charges. Subsequently, Sinclair reportedly failed polygraphs.

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