Officials Who Tried Drugs as Youths Find Public Is in a Forgiving Mood : Politics: Some experts term it a ‘generational triumph.’ But they warn attitudes grow tougher toward current or recent use of narcotics.

The panic began when federal judge Douglas H. Ginsburg asked President Ronald Reagan in 1987 to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Ginsburg’s admission that he, like many in his generation, had smoked marijuana “on a few occasions” derailed his career. And that in turn sent shudders through politically ambitious members of the thirtysomething generation. The legacy of drug use in the 1960s and 1970s, they feared, would be a a generational bloodletting in the 1990s.

They were wrong.

“The issue’s over,” an influential--and generationally vulnerable--Senate staff member said recently with a noticeable sense of relief.

Young appointees in the Administration still worry at times, said one senior official, also in his 30s. “You do hear chatter around the Administration about the wisdom of answering questions” about drug use, he said. But the answers “apparently do not appear to be a barrier.”

White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray said drug use has caused the Administration to disqualify some prospective appointees. But a “substantial” percentage of Administration nominees had once used drugs, he said. Among them, other officials said, are at least two federal judges.

In an unusually short period, said Republican political consultant Roger Stone, the rules of the political game have changed. Although public attitudes about current drug use are rapidly hardening, the mood about past use has become more forgiving. The result, said Stone, “is a triumph of generational politics.”

Two recent developments, one in Washington and one in Texas, underscore the point.

The first involved T. Timothy Ryan Jr., the Bush Administration’s nominee to head the government’s savings and loan bailout program. When a so-far unidentified senator leaked confidential FBI reports showing Ryan had used drugs in the past, the nomination, already vulnerable for other reasons, appeared headed for deep trouble.

Instead, the drug issue became a non-issue. No one in the Senate raised it, and Ryan was confirmed.

“Ryan,” Gray said, “has done a service, although a painful one, in solidifying the change” in how past drug use is handled by the political system.

In Texas, many politicians thought allegations that state Treasurer Ann Richards had used drugs would doom her campaign for governor. Instead, the allegations, which were unsubstantiated, seemed to backfire against Jim Mattox, the state attorney general, who opposed her in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Richards beat Mattox on April 10 with 57% of the vote, and Mattox told reporters that he had apparently overestimated how much voters would care about the drug issue.

Why did the predicted conflict never break out? In part, officials and pollsters say, the public never worried as much about a person’s past drug use as politicians had thought. In part, too, as Stone noted, the political influence of the baby boom generation has grown more rapidly than some political strategists had expected.

But, at least as far as federal appointments go, part of the credit appears to go to adroit management of a difficult issue by Bush and his aides. At least in this area, Bush seems to have succeeded in making the Washington debate a little “kinder and gentler.”

The effort, Gray said, started during the transition period immediately after Bush’s election in 1988. Bush, Gray, Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and personnel chief Charles G. Untermeyer met and discussed how to avoid having nominations meet Ginsburg’s fate.

The reasons for the attention are not hard to see.

Federal agencies by and large are headed by people in their 50s or 60s, but the next layer of the bureaucracy is typically almost a generation younger. In their 30s and early 40s, these men and women are looking for a few years of government service before returning to private life.

Right now, that means the baby boom generation. And that often means drug use.

From the the late 1960s to the early 1980s, illegal drugs were omnipresent on the nation’s college campuses. Estimates vary, but at minimum, some 30 million to 40 million members of the baby boom generation--half or more of the total--admit in government surveys to having smoked marijuana.

The Reagan Administration, at least in its rhetoric, took a hard line. Senior officials in several departments flatly ruled out hiring any person who admitted to having used an illegal drug in the past.

That policy was easier to enforce at the time because an ambiguously worded question on the standard FBI background questionnaire, asking whether a person had a “problem” with drugs, allowed job seekers to hide past use without lying. During his FBI background check, for example, Ginsburg did not disclose his past use of marijuana.

But after the controversy over Ginsburg’s nomination, the FBI tightened its procedures, requiring both sides to confront the issue head on. Prospective nominees now are asked to tell whether they have taken any illegal drug since the age of 18 and whether they have done so during the past five years.

As one senior Bush Administration official in his mid-30s put it: “A lot of people can answer no” to the question about recent drug use. The other question “requires most people to give a more complicated answer.

“They tell you prior to your giving any answer that the best policy is to be honest” and that declining to answer would simply raise more questions, the official said. “The most popular formulation is: ‘I tried it in college.’ ”

From the beginning, Gray said, the Bush Administration adopted two policies: avoid any “hard-and-fast rule” about whether past drug use would disqualify a potential nominee, and avoid any public statements that would “raise expectations” about creating an Administration untouched by drugs.

“It isn’t pass or fail on this drug issue,” said another official involved in the process. “We agreed it would not be a hard-nosed policy but would be decided one by one, on a case-by-case basis.”

Gray’s office reviews all presidential appointees and their FBI background checks. If a case is “close to the line,” Gray said, he reviews it personally. If the call is very close or if, as in Ryan’s case, the nomination is politically sensitive, Bush makes the decision.

Gray declined to say exactly what would be considered “close to the line.” But several Administration officials in their 30s said they had been appointed after revealing they had been recreational users of marijuana and experimented with cocaine while in college.

Bush set the Administration’s tone early, calling in his inaugural address for a “greater tolerance, an easy-goingness about each other’s attitudes and way of life.”

He has hewed to that line. The day of the Texas primary, for example, Bush was asked if he thought past marijuana use should disqualify a person for high office. He flatly said no.

Bush is not the only Administration official to publicly urge tolerance. Another is drug policy chief William J. Bennett.

As Reagan’s education secretary, Bennett sealed Ginsburg’s fate by publicly calling on him to withdraw after his drug use was revealed.

Now, Bennett has adopted a different rhetorical stand. “Bill Bennett’s view is essentially that (the 1960s and ‘70s) was then and this is now,” said Deputy Chief of Staff David Tell. “Past drug use is not a good thing--not to be smiled on or celebrated--but there is redemption.”

One official in Bennett’s office is a recovered cocaine addict who described her addiction several years ago in Washingtonian magazine. An aide to Bennett confirmed that the drug czar knew of the woman’s history when she was hired.

The change since the Reagan era reflects a difference in the Administrations, noted one official who served in both.

“The Reagan Administration and its cadres were different kinds of people” from those who surround Bush, he said. The contrast, he added, has less to do with official policy than with the passing of the aggressive conservatism preached by many Reagan appointees.

“Those were people who didn’t take drugs,” the official said of his Reagan-era colleagues. “The Bush Administration is a different kind of animal--not sloppy or bohemian, but at least somewhat cosmopolitan.”

The change also reflects a difference in the mood of voters.

“Voters can put this stuff in much better perspective than politicians,” said Harrison Hickman, a Democratic political consultant who worked on Richards’ campaign. “Particularly now, when you have people in the mainstream of our society who have first-hand experience” as drug users themselves or friends of drug users. “They know you don’t permanently foam at the mouth because you smoked marijuana once,” he said.

Hickman’s polls for Richards showed that roughly 70% of voters “almost from the beginning” said they were simply not concerned either that Richards, who has admitted to being a recovering alcoholic, might have used drugs in the past or that she refused to answer questions about the subject.

Republican consultant Stone agreed. “Younger voters,” who have more direct experience with drugs, “are more tolerant,” at least of past use, he said. And “younger voters are becoming a more dominant part of the electorate. . . . The problem is solving itself.”

Staff writers Douglas Jehl and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.