A preliminary field test on a white substance found in the White House has reportedly come up positive for cocaine, law enforcement authorities said, and the US Secret Service was investigating on Tuesday how it came to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The presence of the substance – which has been sent out for further testing – came to light late on Monday when a firefighter with the Washington DC fire department’s hazardous materials team radioed: “We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride,” the Washington Post first reported.
A Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, told the Post that the discovery led to an elevated security alert and a brief evacuation of the executive mansion after it was found during a routine inspection.
Initial reports indicated the substance was discovered in a reference library. The Associated Press, citing two officials who were unauthorized to speak about the investigation, later on Tuesday reported that the white powder was found “in an area accessible to tour groups, not in any particular West Wing office”.
Guglielmi had told the Washington Post that there is “an investigation into the cause and manner” of how the substance entered the White House. At the time, Joe Biden was at Camp David. The US president and first lady Jill Biden returned from the presidential retreat in Maryland to the White House on Tuesday morning.
An official familiar with the investigation told the newspaper that the amount of the substance was small.
This would not be the first time illegal drugs entered the White House. The rapper Snoop Dogg said he’d smoked weed in a bathroom in 2013, and Willie Nelson confessed to smoking a joint on the White House roof during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
The British actor Erkan Mustafa said he smoked marijuana and did a line of cocaine on a visit to the White house during first lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign. The Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick said in 2011 she’d tried and failed to spike President Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD in 1970.
“I think Tricky Dick needs a little acid,” she later recalled thinking.
