War of Words : UCLA Professor’s Satirical Letter to Drug Czar Starts Serious Controversy

By all accounts, Michael Gehman seems about as straight arrow as they come. A dedicated environmentalist, the UCLA philosophy professor enjoys camping in the wilderness. He was an Eagle Scout. And he has won the school’s coveted distinguished teaching assistant award.

“We’ve got a couple of (philosophy teachers) who missed the bus to Berkeley,” said UCLA Police Chief John Barber, “but this guy is a very conservative young man.”

So how did Barber end up searching Gehman’s Dodd Hall office last week for illegal drugs while school officials looked on? Here’s how:

Gehman, angry because Stanford fired a lecturer for admittedly toting illegal drugs in his backpack, wrote to U.S. drug czar Bob Martinez, who had threatened to cut Stanford’s federal funding unless action was taken. In his letter, Gehman said that lecturer Stuart Reges’ behavior was small potatoes compared to the way Gehman had flouted UCLA’s anti-drug rules.

“Hell, Bob, that’s nothing!” Gehman wrote in the letter, reprinted last Thursday in UCLA’s student newspaper, the Daily Bruin.

“Right this minute, in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in my office . . . I’ve got a half pound of Humboldt County sinsemilla (marijuana), several hits of acid and (my personal favorite) a brown lunch sack . . . full of ‘shrooms I harvested myself from a cow pasture the last time I visited my home in the good, great state of Mississippi.

“I often offer joints to students who come to my office hours to talk philosophy. I think it definitely enhances the discussion. . . .

“Just last week I delivered a lecture on the mind/body problem while tripping on some righteous acid. I was fried, Bob. Several students have told me that it was the finest lecture they’ve attended at UCLA. (Frankly, I can’t recall a word I said.)”

The letter, which Gehman gave to the Daily Bruin, generated immediate controversy on campus. One group of students showed up at his university office to congratulate him for his brave stand while some faculty members went to university higher-ups to express their anger.

“I was kind of shocked and concerned,” said Murray L. Schwartz, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor, the school’s No. 2 official. “If any students took it seriously, that’s not a good thing. We have a very strong anti-drug policy.”

Gehman, 33, was surprised by the response. He says he wrote the letter--which Martinez acknowledges receiving--as a satirical slap at Stanford’s decision to oust Reges for violating the university’s drug code.

To defuse the flap, Gehman offered to let Barber--a former Sheriff’s Department drug investigator--search his office under the watchful eyes of Schwartz and Joseph Mandel, the school’s vice chancellor for legal affairs.

As Gehman had assured them, no drugs were found.

Gehman said the university searchers were “very polite. They believed (the letter) wasn’t true. But they wanted to get it straight from me and they wanted to search my office to tell the public I didn’t have any drugs.”

Gehman acknowledged that he experimented with marijuana, LSD and cocaine as an undergraduate at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. But he dismissed it as a brief, youthful adventure that “got old” after a year or two.

Although he doesn’t encourage drug use on campus, Gehman said, “I advocate the right to use certain drugs, like marijuana.”

A teacher at UCLA for six years, Gehman will join the faculty of Vassar College in New York this fall. Despite last week’s controversy, he said he is leaving UCLA with good feelings.

“This doesn’t diminish my memories of UCLA in the least,” he said.