FRIENDS SAY DRUGS PLAYED ONLY BIT PART FOR OBAMA

New York -- Nearly three decades ago, Barack Obama stood out on the
small campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles for his eloquence,
intellect and activism against apartheid in South Africa. But Mr.
Obama, then known as Barry, also joined in the party scene.

Years later in his 1995 memoir, he mentioned smoking "reefer" in "the
dorm room of some brother" and talked about "getting high." Before
Occidental, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and sometimes cocaine as
a high school student in Hawaii, according to the book.

He made "some bad decisions" as a teenager involving drugs and
drinking, Senator Obama, now a presidential candidate, told high
school students in New Hampshire last November.

Mr. Obama's admissions are rare for a politician (his book, "Dreams
From My Father," was written before he ran for office.) They briefly
became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama's chief Democratic rival, suggested that his
history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if
he became his party's nominee.

Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has never quantified his illicit drug use or
provided many details. He wrote about his two years at Occidental, a
predominantly white liberal arts college, as a gradual but profound
awakening from a slumber of indifference that gave rise to his
activism there and his fears that drugs could lead him to addiction or
apathy, as they had for many other black men.

Mr. Obama's account of his younger self and drugs, though,
significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not
recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his
usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who
knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect
him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the
challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors
from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being
grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be
grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

Vinai Thummalapally, a former California State University student who
became friendly with Mr. Obama in college, remembered him as a model
of moderation -- jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at
the gym, hitting the books and socializing.

"If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag. We'd smoke or
have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people
on campus," recounted Mr. Thummalapally, an Obama fund-raiser. "He was
not even close to being a party animal."

Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. A campaign
spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said in an e-mail message that the memoir "is
a candid and personal account of what Senator Obama was experiencing
and thinking at the time."

"It's not surprising that his friends from high school and college
wouldn't recall personal experiences and struggles that happened more
than twenty years ago in the same way, and to the same extent, that he
does," he wrote.

What seems clear is that Mr. Obama's time at Occidental from 1979 to
1981 -- where he describes himself arriving as "alienated" -- would
ultimately set him on a course to public service. He developed a
sturdier sense of self and came to life politically, particularly in
his sophomore year, growing increasingly aware of harsh inequities
like apartheid and poverty in the third world.

He also discovered that he wanted to be in a larger arena; one
professor described Occidental back then as feeling small and
provincial. Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir that he needed "a community
that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I
shared when reading the latest crime statistics, or the high fives I
might exchange on a basketball court. A place where I could put down
stakes and test my commitments."

Mr. Obama wrote that he learned of a transfer program that Occidental
had with Columbia and applied. "He was so bright and wanted a wider
urban experience," recalled Anne Howells, a former English professor
at Occidental who taught Mr. Obama and wrote him a recommendation for
Columbia.

Mr. Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said her brother focused
more on his future at Occidental. "I think he felt it was time to do
some heavy thinking and assessing and time to start making a more
meaningful contribution," Ms. Soetoro-Ng said. "He felt New York was
an interesting place to be in terms of the exchange of ideas,
overlapping cultures and rigorous academics."

As for Mr. Obama's use of marijuana and, occasionally, cocaine, she
said, "He wasn't a drug addict or dealer. He was a kid searching for
answers and a place who had made some mistakes." After arriving in New
York, Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir, he stopped getting high.

In the 442-page book, published when he was 33, Mr. Obama's references
to drug use are limited to the equivalent of about a page and a half.
He got the book contract after becoming the first black president of
the Harvard Law Review. At first, he considered writing a more
scholarly book about the law, race and society, but scrapped that in
favor of writing about his search for identity.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Mr.
Obama wrote that he would get high to help numb the confusion he felt
about himself. "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the
final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," he penned in the
memoir. "Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove
what a down brother I was."

"I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push
questions of who I was out of my mind."

At Punahou, a preparatory school that had few black students, Keith
Kakugawa and Mr. Obama were close friends. They met when Mr. Obama was
a freshman and Mr. Kakugawa, who is Japanese-Hawaiian, was a junior.

Mr. Kakugawa remembered that the two often discussed wealth and class
and that their disaffection would surface. He said race would come up
in the conversations, usually when talking about white girls they
thought about dating.

"We were dealing with acceptance and adaptation, and both had to do
with the fact that we were not part of the moneyed elite," Mr.
Kakugawa said.

Mr. Kakugawa, who spent seven years in and out of prison for drug
offenses beginning in 1996, said he pressured Mr. Obama into drinking
beer.

But Mr. Obama did not smoke marijuana during the two years they spent
time together even though it was readily available, Mr. Kakugawa said,
adding that he never knew Mr. Obama to have done cocaine. "As far as
pot, booze or coke being a prevalent part of his life, I doubt it,"
Mr. Kakugawa said. He had graduated, however, by the time Mr. Obama
was in his junior and senior years, when he wrote that he most
frequently used marijuana and cocaine "when you could afford it."

Mr. Obama describes a scene in that period where, in the meat freezer
of a deli, he watched someone named Micky -- "my potential initiator" --
pull out "the needle and the tubing," apparently to shoot up heroin.
Alarmed, Mr. Obama wrote that he imagined how an air bubble could kill
him. Neither Mr. Kakugawa or the others interviewed for this article
who knew Mr. Obama at Punahou recalled hearing that story from him.

In his freshman year at Occidental, Mr. Obama and his dormitory mates
would gather around a couch in the hallway of their floor while
stereos blasted songs by bands like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin,
the B-52's and the Flying Lizards. The conversations revolved around
topics like the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, President
Jimmy Carter's proposed revival of draft registration and the energy
crisis.

Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner of debating."When he
talked, it was an E. F. Hutton moment: people listened," said John
Boyer, who lived across the hall from Mr. Obama. "He would point out
the negatives of a policy and its consequences and illuminate the
complexities of an issue the way others could not." He added, "He has
a great sense of humor and could defuse an argument."

Mr. Obama seemed interested in thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he studied in a political
thought class in his sophomore year.

The professor, Roger Boesche, has memories of him at a popular burger
joint on campus.

"He was always sitting there with students who were some of the most
articulate and those concerned with issues like violence in Central
America and having businesses divest from South Africa," he said.
"These were the kids most concerned with issues of social justice and
who took classes and books seriously."

Mr. Obama was involved in the Black Students' Association and in the
divestment campaign to pressure the college to pull its money out of
companies doing business in South Africa. To make a point, students
camped out in makeshift shantytowns on campus.

In his book, Mr. Obama said that his role in the divestment push
started as kind of a lark, "part of the radical pose my friends and I
sought to maintain." But then he became more engaged, contacting
members of the African National Congress to have them speak at the
college and writing letters to the faculty.

He was one of a few students who spoke at a campus divestment rally.
Rebecca Rivera, then a member of a similar Hispanic students' group,
said: "He clearly understood our social responsibility and the way the
college's money was impacting the lives of black people in South
Africa and preventing the country from progressing." She added, "There
was passion, absolutely, but not incoherent fieriness."

While he would sometimes attend parties held by black students and
Latinos, Amiekoleh Usafi, a classmate who also spoke at the rally,
recalled seeing him at parties put together by the political and
artistic set.

Ms. Usafi, whose name at Occidental was Kim Kimbrew, said the most she
saw Mr. Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer.

"I would never say that he was a druggie, and there were plenty
there," she said. "He was too cool for all that."