Call it an inconvenient toke.
Al Gore III, the 24-year-old son of the former vice president, was booked on pot-and-pill-possession charges yesterday after police clocked him speeding 100 mph down a southern California highway in his eco-friendly Toyota Prius.
It was his second dope arrest in four years.
Cops pulled over the budding envi ronmentalist in Laguna Hills at about 2:15 a.m. and were hit by the unmis takable odor of ganja, indicating that the hybrid car was green in more ways than one, police said.
Being the former vice president’s son did little to blunt the charges.
A spokesman for the sheriff said Gore III, who said he was heading to San Diego, received no special treatment, despite being quick to tell officers that he was the son of the star of “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Instead, cops searched the car and found “less than an ounce” of marijuana and a stash of pharmaceuticals, including pain killer Vicodin, anti-anxiety meds Xanax and Valium, and Adderall and Soma.
Adderall is an amphetamine used to treat attention-deficit disorder, while Soma is a pop ular muscle relaxant that makes pain vanish faster than a Greenland glacier.
“He didn’t have a prescription for any of those drugs,” Orange County Sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said. “He was cooperative with the police, and was taken into custody without incident.”
Gore III was taken to the men’s central jail on $20,000 bail, where he shared a holding cell with other inmates. He was bailed out at about 2 p.m.
Luckily, the high-flying Gore III – who shares his old man’s jawline and, at 250 pounds, his substantial size – may have dodged a more serious charge. “He had recently smoked marijuana, but it did not impair him enough that he was driving under the influence,” Amormino said.
His car was impounded.
The elder Gore was reportedly returning from Europe yesterday and was unavailable for comment. It was the third embarrassing high-profile bust for Gore III since 2002.
He was busted for pot possession in December 2003 when he was a student at Harvard after being pulled over in Bethesda, Md., while driving a Cadillac with the lights off at night.
Cops found a partially inhaled joint and a baggie of weed. He was sentenced to attend a substance-abuse program the following year.
In 2002, Gore III was ticketed by cops for driving under the influence of alcohol near a military base in Virginia. He was also ticketed in 2000 for reckless driving for barreling down a North Carolina road at 94 mph.
Gore III lives in Los Angeles, where he is associate publisher of Good, a magazine focused on philanthropy and young people.
The elder Gore’s 2000 rival for the White House, President Bush, has witnessed his own children’s scrapes with the law.
Jenna and Barbara Bush have made headlines with their hard-partying ways, most infamously when Jenna, at age 19, pleaded no contest to underage drinking charges in 2001. The teen had to attend an alcohol-awareness class, perform community service and pay a $600 fine.