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Book: 1968 Capitol Drug Party 'Like ... Picking Out Hors D'euvores from a Buffet Table'

A story alleging late-night drug parties at the Michigan Capitol Building in 1968 draws sharp denial by a former state lawmaker whose career ended shortly after he was arrested on heroin charges.

Lingg Brewer, a former Michigan state lawmaker turned author, has re-ignited some of the turbulent flames that landed Michigan State University in the center of social change during the turbulent 1960s.

Brewer of Holt claims in his self-published tome, “Dreams Gone Wrong: Peace, War and Murder at Michigan State University,” that former Republican lawmaker Dale Warner shared drugs he had acquired as chairman of the Special House Committee on narcotics committee with visitors during a 1968 party in the Michigan Supreme Court chambers in Lansing, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Brewer, a Democrat, served in the Michigan House of Representatives from 1995-2000. He doesn’t claim to have attended the party, but he cited a source – Bill Chaliman of Hanslet, who the Free Press said confirmed much of the story. Chaliman was a Michigan State University student in 1968.

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One of the passages about the alleged drug party on a summer night in 1968 tells of Chaliman and his friends drinking beer and helping themselves to the cache of drugs Warner claimed he acquired as part of his involvement narcotics committee – “everything a drug abuser could want, from acid to amyl nitrate, lots of marijuana, Vicodin.”

“The guys took from the samples like they were picking out hors d’oeuvres from a buffet table,” Brewer wrote.

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Warner, formerly of Eaton Rapids, was first elected to the House in 1966 and served until 1974. He was arrested at a Lansing motel in 1973 on heroin charges, which a judge dismissed in 1977 after ruling Warner’s right to a speedy trial had been violated. Warner claimed his innocence throughout the proceedings, and he says now that the stories about him in ’s book are false.

“I can say categorically that I have never been in the Supreme Court chambers, I have never seen boxes or a box of pills or drugs given out, and that I have never indulged in controlled substances,” Warner, now an attorney living in California, said in an interview with the newspaper.

Chaliman, now 69 and a retired state employee, told the Free Press that he visited Warner at least twice when drugs were used and that he and his friends “all got high,” but said he can’t recall if Warner used them.

“We pretty much had free rein of everything he had in there,” Chaliman told the newspaper.

The book, whose release Brewer announced in a Thursday news conference in Lansing, is the story of social change taking place in the 1960s through the eyes of four young gamblers who hung at the Union Grill at Michigan State University, according to a book synopsis on Amazon.com. It also focuses on former MSU President John Hannah’s involvement with the CIA during the lead-up to the Vietnam War.

Warner reportedly acknowledged the book’s potential appeal.

“From the mythologies arising from that era, his book sounds pretty interesting,” he told the newspaper. “But remember it is based on recollections, I imagine, that are more than four decades old.”


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