March 22, 1983

Braniff Airways announced yesterday that it had reached an agreement in principle to sell 20 Boeing 727-200 planes to People Express Airlines for $80 million and to lease to the low-cost carrier a 747-200 aircraft. In a statement issued from Braniff's headquarters in Dallas, Howard D. Putnam, chairman, said that the agreement ''provides a significant step in the resolution of Braniff's bankruptcy and the development of continuing businesses for our reorganization.'' Mr. Putnam noted that the agreement was subject to the approval of the bankruptcy court in Fort Worth, which has been supervising Braniff's filing of May 13, 1982, for protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy law. Braniff has until April 4 to file a new plan for reorganization. An earlier plan was ruled inadequate by a Federal appeals court this month, a decision that led to the collapse of a deal with PSA Inc. to use Braniff planes and employees to begin service in Dallas.

''I guess my immediate task, as I see it, is to stabilize E.P.A., is to reinstill in the people there the dedication to their task, to their jobs that they have had from the outset of that agency, and to get on with this enormously complicated job of cleaning up our air and water and protecting our citizens against toxic substances.'' - William D. Ruckelshaus. (A22:3.)

WITH college costs rising and Federal funds shrinking, it is no wonder that more parents are panicky about finding the money to finance their children's higher education. But some solutions are being offered. St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., gives parents the bad news that the total estimated four-year cost for a student enrolling this fall will be $36,600. But then the college has some good news. St. Olaf has devised an innovative trust fund mechanism that several other colleges may soon mimic. Basically, it is a way for parents to get more income - enough to send two or even three children through college - from the same assets they would normally have to sell to cover one child's four-year costs. There is one significant drawback to the proposal, however: the family must have, or borrow, $50,000 worth of assets.

An article in New York Day by Day yesterday incorrectly identified the lyricist of a song sung by Mayor Koch at the annual dinner of the Inner Circle. He is Maury Yeston.

AMERICAN hotel guests in Cuzco, Peru, 12,000 feet high in the Andes, are sometimes surprised at being offered coca tea to help them adjust to the altitude. But it seems to help and they probably suffer no ill effects. Peruvian Indians have been using it for generations. ''At the other end of the spectrum,'' said Dr. Robert Byck of Yale University, an expert on cocaine, ''is a man I encountered who was spending $400,000 a year, buying cocaine by the half pound, and shooting it intravenously. He was sitting in a blacked-out cellar with an M-1 rifle, shooting at his hallucinations.'' The man in the basement and the hotel guests in Cuzco were taking the same drug. The two uses point up the dramatic difference in reactions to which many Americans are now subjecting themselves. Use of illicit drugs is continuing to rise among American adults, and social scientists believe that to a large extent this usage has become increasingly ''acceptable'' on all levels of American society. To medical experts, such acceptance represents dangerous ignorance. ''The selection in the delicatessen of drugs is much greater than its ever been,'' says Dr. M. Duncan Stantan of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Some of these natural or artificially produced chemicals are new or recently produced variants of older forms that are better understood than the new ones.