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Continues Anti-Drug Fight, Is Writing a Book : Nancy Reagan Just Says No to Idleness

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Times Staff Writer

In the day room of a drug recovery center in Pacoima-- Pacoima --Nancy Reagan sat well forward on the seat of the least worn of five brown vinyl sofas.

That intent, doe-eyed gaze that had variously annoyed or enchanted onlookers through 20 years of political campaigns seemed unfeigned here, for these were bona fide horrors she was hearing from the 26 women: I started getting high on PAM cooking spray as a kid. . . . I tried to kill my little sister by luring her into a pit of broken glass. . . . I swiped my father’s bottle of Thunderbird and chugged it down. . . . I watched my mother spoon dope into balloons to sell. . . . I have six children, three of them drug babies.

“Six!” interrupted Mrs. Reagan, her gaze suddenly wider yet. “Six?”

She had shaken their hands when she arrived at Via Avanta House--”Oh, how cute!” one of them had gasped at the sight of her--and she told them “how proud I am of all of you.”

When they had finished their searing stories, it was her turn to speak, and they clung to her with their eyes as she did:

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“We all go through painful times . . . you have to learn that’s part of life. Life was never meant to be level, one happy level all the time. God never meant it to be that way. There are testing periods. It’s not just us--we’re not being picked out and tested. Granted, you’ve all had more than your share; some people do, for one reason or another. But you can get out of it and you’re taking the first step. . . . I don’t care what your station in life is, you go through some difficult times.”

Nancy Reagan, former First Lady, anti-drug crusader, author of her upcoming memoirs, center of a worshipful and wealthy circle of old friends, was addressing her remarks to a circle of recovering drug users, women isolated by poverty, burdened by too many children and too little education--a crummy poker hand in which PCP or crack or speed looked like the one card that could make everything bearable, then wound up being one joker too many.

Listen on a different plane, though, and she might have been speaking about herself as well. For Nancy Reagan, back in a private and privileged life after spending eight years on the laboratory slide of the presidency, has her own “painful times” to remember. Surely there were moments in the last eight years when she was convinced that she too was being “picked out and tested”--when her husband was nearly assassinated; when her mother and adoptive father died; when she and her husband both battled cancer; when the Iran-Contra scandal threatened Reagan’s presidency; when her lavish, borrowed designer clothes, her absorption in astrology, her imperious style, all fed the mills of criticism.

‘She’s a Western Girl’

“I can tell you she is much happier here than in Washington,” said Stuart Spencer, the veteran Reagan campaign strategist. “Washington is a different town . . . a very ‘in’ town, a company town, and she’s a Western girl.”

On the 68-year-old Mrs. Reagan’s retirement calendar, besides lunches and dinners with her intimates:

* A November book tour that will take her from Detroit to Dallas, California to New York;

* Speaking engagements lined up for her at $30,000 each through a Washington agency;

* Videotaping breast cancer public service messages for the American Cancer Society;

* A trip to Japan with her husband in October,

* And on almost every page of her datebook, some event or program to bang the gong for her anti-drug crusade.

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It is the raison d’etre for the Nancy Reagan Foundation office, sharing the top floor of a Century City building with her husband. She has taped anti-drug radio and video spots, starred at young people’s anti-drug rallies at Dodger Stadium and the Rose Bowl and in Chicago with actor “Mr. T,” she startled some Reagan loyalists by calling for a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles as “tools of the drug trade,” and in April, she tagged along behind police on a raid of a rock house that was so thoroughly media-mobbed that it was a surprise that anyone was still on the premises to be arrested.

“This is not a white-gloves dainty approach,” Reagan spokesman Mark Weinberg declared.

No one expected her to be an ex-First Lady of the Rosalynn Carter mold, building homes for the poor. But of the varied crises that plague society--poverty, racism--drugs is the one that has become personal for her. Drugs has leaped the social ladder to reach every rung, into the lives of people she knows, killing movie stars’ children and welfare mothers’ children alike.

Drugs “was the greatest fear of all of us who were mothers in California in the 1960s,” said Nancy Reynolds, a longtime friend and now a Washington political consultant. “I’m sure she had plenty of friends whose children were deeply involved in drugs--everybody did. We all knew people whose kids died of it. We were always scared to death.”

On her First Lady drug tours, “people began to tell her things about their children they wouldn’t tell anyone else, children talked to her--that touched her. That really gave a purpose to her, to being a First Lady.”

Concerned Layman

Her questions on those tours have been a concerned layman’s, not an expert’s: “Who got you started on drugs? You started right away on cocaine? Usually I’ve found most people start on pot. . . . Do you think the main factor for anyone going into drugs is the self-esteem?”

“Mrs. Reagan is not a treatment counselor,” said Reagan spokesman Weinberg. “She can lend a hopeful presence, if you will, to those who have been afflicted by this plague. That’s the greatest talent she has.”

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A California political consultant who works with other Republican candidates characterizes Mrs. Reagan as “an ambitious, driven, semi-politician in her own right,” and “a hard person for people to love. She is always two notches above the average person. Her husband was only one notch above. . . . Rather than being a First Lady people tended to love or feel warm about, she was a First Lady people felt would go to any lengths to help her husband. . . . You wouldn’t want to cross her path.”

But when it comes to the drug crusade, “Just because she has a steeliness in her doesn’t mean she’s not altruistic. I think she really wants to contribute something to society in that way. I don’t doubt her motivation in that way whatsoever.”

There have been moments, though, when good intentions and the logistics to accomplish them seemed to be pulling in different directions.

Launched With Grandeur

The fund-raising campaign for the center that was to bear Nancy Reagan’s name, operated under the aegis of the nationally regarded nonprofit drug-abuse agency Phoenix House Inc., was launched with all the grandeur of a great ship.

It was to be a formidable project, renovating an abandoned medical center, establishing live-in treatment, after-school programs, research and training, and offices for Mrs. Reagan. In 1988, Merv Griffin put together a big-bucks, big-name fund-raising breakfast at his home. Griffin was also the host when the Reagans came to town last January for a $1,000-a-ticket Beverly Hilton benefit dinner ornamented by caviar, blue-corn blinis and Don Rickles’ jokes. By mid-1989 the Nancy Reagan Center had very deep pockets indeed--more than $2 million, and at least another $2.5 million in pledges toward the estimated $10-million cost.

Many of her friends signed onto the Center’s advisory committees, among them Mike Wallace, with whom she has taped a lengthy “60 Minutes” interview about her upcoming book. The rich and famous are still clamoring to help, to have Nancy Reagan grace their premises, said Suzanne Marx, national campaign chairman of the center.

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“I must have 3 million worth of offers sitting here--Tiffany’s, Cartier, Van Cleef--everybody, everybody’s been touched by drug abuse,” Marx said.

But the Nancy Reagan Center stumbled coming out of the chute. At last January’s gala, it was the 17 pickets outside the hotel, not the movers and shakers inside, who would have the last word. Residents of Lake View Terrace, the site that had been chosen, were wrathful in their opposition. In May, Mrs. Reagan withdrew her support for that plan for the center.

Mrs. Reagan, asked about it last month, seemed to pronounce the matter a dead issue, and her relationship with Phoenix House all but severed. The Lake View Terrace plan is “over, finished,” she said. “The last thing I wanted is to upset the community, that was not my aim, so I will continue my drug interest and activities and I’ll do it through (the Nancy Reagan) Foundation.”

Phoenix House is still “looking for another site,” not having “received any communication from Nancy Reagan’s people or Nancy Reagan herself to stop looking,” said Phoenix House spokesman Chris Policano.

With millions legally earmarked for a Nancy Reagan Center, Phoenix House has written to donors about the quandary, but clearly does not want to relinquish the donations, or thereby the Nancy Reagan Center that brought them in.

“What we’re doing is figuring out how this can all be handled,” said Phoenix House vice president for development Sara Ann Fagin. “This is (an) extremely complicated situation under philanthropic law; they’ve all taken tax deductions in the previous year for this already. This is a very complicated situation. We’re working it out with a whole lot of people.”

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Mrs. Reagan is putting her efforts into her own foundation. As of this week, it is authorized to raise funds in Los Angeles, and executive director John Gustafson said a charity tennis tournament in October tops the event list.

Grant Applications

The foundation has some money already, an amount Gustafson will not disclose, and has sent letters asking various drug education and treatment programs in the area to apply for varying matching grants: for example, $5,000 if a group raises $25,000, Gustafson said. The Nancy Reagan cachet makes every dollar bulk even larger.

Last April, Mrs. Reagan accompanied Los Angeles police on a rock-house raid, eating fruit salad in a nearby motor home while waiting to go onto the premises. Some neighbors cheered her, a few grumped in the background. Some mothers afterwards called it “a dog and pony show.” “We feel we’re being exploited,” one said. “There are more constructive ways to do this.”

Her highest profile remains the “Just Say No” mantra, which she uttered “not thinking this was going to be like a household word, but it did and I’m glad it did.”

It still brings in letters. One touching, ill-spelled note came last month from a 15-year-old boy being treated in Arkansas. “I can’t say that the ‘just say know’ champain helped me directly because I didn’t go to treatment by my own will,” he wrote. “The ‘just say no’ champain did help me indirectly and in that way I’m greatful. My mom saw some comercals and posters. She took a look at my drug abuse and put me into treatment.”

Just Say No Group

Mrs. Reagan remains honorary chair of the nonprofit Just Say No group, based in Walnut Creek, Calif. Executive Director Ivy G. Cohen said the clubs, for 7- to 14-year-olds, now number 15,000 in the United States, in housing projects and prosperous suburbs, with a few dozen internationally, and more chartered every week.

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Each club receives a packet of handbooks and guides to foster “good values, friendships, so they develop social circles of positive (peer) pressure,” Cohen said.

The organization also markets accessories, from club start-up kits for $50 to a baseball cap for $3.75.

No Help to Addicts

Just Say No has been faulted by some drug experts for offering a fine upbeat message for young children but hardly being of help to a crack addict.

Controversial research last year concluded that while drugs did indeed ravage the lives of heavy users, those who used less had fewer troubles, and those who had only experimented briefly showed, like non-users, no appreciable impact at all. That flew in the face of the “even one is too many” premise and the Just Say No message of abstinence.

Against that, some researchers felt that the First Lady’s campaign had sloganeered and politicized a complex psychomedical social crisis.

Karst Besteman is executive director of the Alcohol and Drug Problems Assn., and from 1974 to 1980 was deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. While he praises Mrs. Reagan for bringing drug abuse to public attention, he is equally vigorous in noting its shortcomings.

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“Her being willing to stand up as First Lady and say, ‘This is the way it should be,’ it put a little backbone into the suburban middle class to say ‘Hey, I won’t put up with this.’ ” Nonetheless, “an abstinence campaign like Just Say No has a very narrow band of effectiveness, in terms of demographics and age.” Counseling addicted mothers or crack users requires techniques “vastly different from how I talk to fourth graders.”

He faults the Reagan Administration, not its First Lady, for being slow off the mark. Officials “used her as a shield” for years to substitute for a real drug policy, he said.

“If you’d said to me, ‘Is this good federal policy?’ I’d have said, ‘No, it’s inadequate.’ If you said to me, ‘As a private issue for a First Lady, did she do a good job of highlighting drug abuse?’ I’d say she did a good job, but that’s a totally different criterion.”

Nonwithstanding a leap in the use of crack cocaine, the reported decrease in other drug use bespeaks a turnabout of public attitudes, and Reynolds is not alone in declaring that Mrs. Reagan “certainly deserves some credit for making people aware of the horror of drugs.”

Mrs. Reagan herself takes something of a bow, as at Via Avanta: “When I first started almost nine years ago, nobody knew anything about drugs, nobody knew there was a problem, admitted there was a drug problem. . . . I can’t tell you the difference between this and 8 1/2 years ago.”

She and her staff may have listened to criticism of Just Say No, and begun focusing their message where it will do the most good--children who have yet to use drugs.

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At Via Avanta, Mrs. Reagan told the women: “Now I am encouraged by the young people. I get very cross at the older people who should know better.” She warmly praised their struggle to free themselves of drugs, then almost as an aside noted a cold fact of demographics: as “the (drug-free) young people get older, they’ll push out the older ones.”

A ‘Class Photo’

She circled the room, hugging each woman, then called gaily, “Let’s do a class photo!”

Afterward, a 20-year-old former cocaine user with three children couldn’t get over it: “I’ve watched her make history for eight years and everything and it’s like wow, here she comes, interested in our program.”

The woman whose six children had so astonished Mrs. Reagan still stood in the day room, her face still aglow from the contact. “She’s a miracle to me.”

Outside Via Avanta, against a backdrop that could have been chosen by the Reagan White House for visuals that said “struggling neighborhood”--blue trash dumpsters, cinder-block walls, the racket of a freeway--Mrs. Reagan answered questions. What does she bring to those women inside? She paused for a fraction of a moment: “Hope, I think--I hope. And that somebody’s interested in them and has been for quite a long time.”

Air conditioning rumbling, the Secret Service’s ink-blue Lincoln was waiting in the parking place that had earlier been reserved by two lengths of gift-wrap ribbon, pink and red, taped up between two plastic chairs. Mrs. Reagan climbed in, waved, and was off.

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