Story Says Drug Foe Rep. Rohrabacher Is Ex-User

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach)--a prominent conservative who favors drug testing for congressional staffs and supports strong anti-drug legislation--used marijuana, hashish and LSD as a young man, the magazine New Republic will report in its Nov. 5 issue.

The liberal journal states that Rohrabacher asked former friends--only one of whom is named--not to talk about his youthful drug use during his 1988 congressional campaign, and in exchange agreed to avoid “noisy anti-drug crusading.”

Gene Berkman of Riverside, the only source identified by the New Republic, told The Times on Thursday that he smoked marijuana with Rohrabacher many times, and had also seen him use hashish and LSD. Berkman, who Rohrabacher called a disaffected friend with a faulty memory, made the same claims to the magazine.

Berkman said he decided to make public his claims because Rohrabacher has assumed a strong anti-drug stance in Congress.

“I’m only aware of him using LSD on one occasion. But as far as use of marijuana, it was numerous occasions,” Berkman said. “I only remember him using hash on one or two occasions. We just considered it a form of cannabis, like marijuana.”

Berkman said he was present when Rohrabacher and others took LSD at Disneyland in Anaheim in 1970.

In an interview with The Times, Rohrabacher, 43, would not confirm or deny that he used drugs as a young man, but he insisted that he never struck a deal for his friends’ silence.

“I made a lot of mistakes when I was a young person,” said the first-term lawmaker, who in the last year has emerged as a leading spokesman for congressional critics of the National Endowment for the Arts.

“But I don’t think any mistake I made in my personal life as a young person is anybody’s business but my own,” he said. “Mistakes that I may have made in this area were over 20 years ago. Since that time, I have lived a very responsible life (and) held very responsible positions in government.”

Before his election to Congress, Rohrabacher served as a speech writer in the Ronald Reagan White House from 1981 until 1988.

Rohrabacher said Berkman is a disaffected acquaintance, since arrested on drug charges, who is angry because Rohrabacher long ago abandoned the libertarian view that drug use should be legalized.

“He’s a fellow that I used to know years ago. . . . He’s obviously got me mixed up with some things he himself did and some other people he was with. His memory is very, very cloudy,” Rohrabacher said.

“For a magazine to take the word of someone . . . who is upset with me because I took a position on a drug bill, and then to publish it, is unconscionable,” he added.

Allegations of past drug use have become an issue in political races and government appointments in recent years, and such incidents are expected to occur with increasing frequency as members of the “baby boom” generation rise to positions of authority.

Three years ago, the Reagan Administration was forced to withdraw its nomination of Douglas H. Ginsburg to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court after Ginsburg acknowledged having smoked marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s.

But last April, the Bush Administration stood behind its nomination of T. Timothy Ryan Jr. as the nation’s top savings and loan regulator, even after Ryan admitted past marijuana and cocaine use. At the time, the White House said it did not consider the disclosures “relevant” to Ryan’s nomination, which was approved by the Senate.

Officials said the Administration did not consider past experimentation with drugs to be politically fatal because it was a shared experience among millions of young Americans during a more permissive era.

Berkman, whose legal name is Douglas Kennell, said in an interview that he met Rohrabacher in 1969, when Rohrabacher was attending what is now Cal State Long Beach. Berkman said he smoked marijuana with Rohrabacher and others at Rohrabacher’s Long Beach apartment on “numerous occasions” during the next two or three years.

Now a bookstore owner in Riverside, Berkman told The Times that Rohrabacher gave up drugs in 1971 or 1972.

Berkman said he was arrested on marijuana possession charges in Texas in 1980 and was placed in a drug diversion program. As a result, he said, he was not technically convicted. His only other brush with the law was an arrest for draft evasion during the Vietnam War, he said.

Rohrabacher said he believes the New Republic is printing the allegations because “of the tough stand that I took on the NEA. People don’t want to confront your arguments, they want to attack you personally. In this case they were willing to go back over 20 years ago . . . to dredge up some things to make me look bad.”

Rohrabacher, along with Sen. Jesse A. Helms (R-N.C.), has strongly criticized the federally financed arts agency for using taxpayer money to pay for work that Rohrabacher has characterized as pornographic or sacrilegious.

In the last year, the congressman has sought unsuccessfully to eliminate funding for the agency and to enact tough content restrictions on the work it finances.

Karen Lehrman, an assistant editor at the Washington-based magazine and author of the Rohrabacher piece, said the story is unrelated to the NEA debate.

“He’s a good story, basically. . . . I saw him as an interesting story. I’m not getting back at him for anything,” Lehrman said.

Lehrman’s article highlights Rohrabacher’s days as a Libertarian activist in Southern California. Born in Coronado, Rohrabacher graduated from Palos Verdes High School in 1965 and a year later signed on as Los Angeles County chairman of Youth for Reagan.

In 1967, he moved on to chair the California chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. In the next two years, Lehrman wrote, Rohrabacher became heavily involved with other YAFers who believed in the libertarian philosophy of little or no government.

Rohrabacher said the magazine’s account is “fantasy.”