ANGRY OBAMA THE POTHEAD IS NOT HOW THEY REMEMBER HIM ON HAWAII

Barack Obama's frank admissions of youthful drug abuse, helped
establish him as a refreshingly different front-runner for the US
presidency.

The confession that he smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine presented
the American public with a candidate prepared to tackle, head-on,
questions usually ducked by senior politicians.

But now his candour has been questioned by some of those who knew him
best.

Sen Obama's self-portrait of an angry young black man who became a
"pothead" is scarcely recognisable to those who knew him during his
formative years in Hawaii.

Now some are asking whether the first serious black contender for the
White House may also be the first major candidate to exaggerate his
drug use for political effect.

Sen Obama's emergence as Hillary Clinton's main rival for
the Democrat presidential nomination next year is based heavily upon
his compelling personal history and charisma.

Born Barack Hussein Obama the son of a Kansas teenager and a Kenyan
goat herder - he overcame a troubled youth to become the first black
editor of the Harvard Law Review.

In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, published 10 years ago, Sen
Obama, 46, freely admitted to smoking marijuana and makes an oblique
reference to hard drugs.

"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years," he wrote. "Pot
had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.
Not smack, though." "Blow" is street slang for cocaine, "smack" is
heroin.

In the book, Sen Obama recalls that he had "been headed" to the status
of "junkie" or "pothead", which he describes as "the final, fatal role
of the young would-be black man". He recalls smoking "reefer" in the
backs of his friends' vans, dorm rooms and "on the beach with a couple
of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school".

That is not what Bryon Leong, a former classmate at the elite Punahou
School where Sen Obama won a scholarship aged 10, remembers.

"He was known as a partier, as a guy looking for a good time, but not
much more," Mr Leong said. "There was pot in Hawaii in the 1970s, but
it wasn't a big deal."

"It wasn't like guys were smoking dope on campus and coming to school
high," said Eric Kusunoki, 57, Sen Obama's teacher from age 15 to 18.
"If they did, it would have been pretty obvious. If he did dabble with
drugs or alcohol, I didn't see it."

The Illinois senator's depiction of his Hawaiian upbringing as a time
of intense inner struggle, full of racial angst, is also a surprise to
those who shared his time in the archipelago where the "Aloha Spirit"
of racial harmony defines America's 50th state.

The verdant islands, with their golden beaches 5,000 miles from the
American capital, are the home to a Pacific melting pot, where
Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese have harvested sugar cane for
generations and whites from the mainland, known as haoles, have long
been a minority.

A keen basketball player, Sen Obama highlights in his book the
feelings of alienation caused by "always playing on the white man's
court - by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a
teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the
power and you didn't."

But that's not the Barack Obama, nor the Hawaii of the 1970s, recalled
by his friends, teachers and team-mates. They remember instead the
summer of 1978 when "easy-going Barry" was in constant search of a
basketball game, strutting around the island as if he owned it,
dribbling a ball from school to the golden sands of Waikiki beach as
he belted out Earth, Wind and Fire songs in a distinctive, gravelly
voice.

Kelli Furushima, 46, a close friend of Mr Obama, recalls: "We're just
such a mixed-up bag of races, it was hard to imagine that he felt that
way because he just seemed happy all the time. Smiling all the time."
Flicking through an old school yearbook, full of pictures of a
grinning Obama, she added: "You see he talks in his book about race
and stuff, and we all have the same reaction: we're all so surprised
that he had any sort of anguish at all. You can see we had so many
tones of brown. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or
Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian, or black." She paused to
point out how Sen Obama had dotted his signature with a little
Afro-haircut symbol atop the "B" and the "O".

They all remember his easy smile and that same confident stride they
see on national television. "It all comes back to that walk and that
smile. That's the one thing that hasn't changed," said Alan Lum,
another member of the Punahou basketball team.

"He describes himself as a skinny black kid who just arrived from
Indonesia, but he was a chunky black kid from Indonesia," said Tom
Krieger, recalling how he once teased Sen Obama about not needing a
pillow at night, because he had his afro. "It was Hawaii. We can make
fun of each other."

The interest in Sen Obama's Hawaiian upbringing is fuelled because,
unlike his chief rivals, Sen Clinton or former senator and
vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, Sen Obama has not previously
been subjected to a national presidential campaign or the dark arts of
opposition research.

Sen Obama's father, also called Barack, walked out on the family two
years after his son was born. When Sen Obama was six-years-old, his
mother got a divorce and married an Indonesian. Young "Barry" spent
four years living in Indonesia, rising early to read for his American
correspondence courses.

Aged 10, he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and
attend Punahou School. He made friends quickly and told his classmates
that his father was an African prince, the leader of a proud and
successful people.

In challenging Sen Obama's recollection of the 1970s, many of his
friends are careful to note that he may have been hiding his inner
anguish during his years on the tropical island, like any uncertain
adolescent.

"I wish I would have known that those things were bothering him, or if
they did bother him," said Mr Kusunoki. "Maybe we could have helped
him. But he seemed to have coped pretty well."

Dan Hale, a blond, 6ft 7in basketball team-mate, said: "I don't
remember seeing certain things that are referred to, but it doesn't
mean that they didn't happen. For him, it was something."

If Sen Obama did show flashes or anger or hurt, according to
team-mates and friends, it sprang from his lack of minutes on the
basketball court rather than his angst as a young black man in a
multi-racial society.

But once he became a senator, he may have made peace with his
basketball demons. On a return visit to his former school, he sought
out Chris McLachin, the coach who sat him on the substitutes' bench in
his final year. "He came up to me and said: 'You know, coach, I was
never as good as I thought I was'," said Mr McLachin. "And I said:
'No, Barry, you weren't'."