FAILED WAR ON DRUGS HAS TAKEN HARD TOLL The Grey2K-ers almost had me with bleeding heart tales of dog abuse, not necessarily at the racetrack, but at off-track kennels where the also-rans end up, useless and neglected at the end of their racing careers. Yesterday we learned that Question 3 hopes to ban state greyhound racing using images of dead dogs - from Arizona - and a lone starving dog from parts unknown. I don't mean to get picky. But if the plight of greyhounds, in Massachusetts, justifies taking away people's jobs, in Massachusetts, shouldn't the Grey2K-ers be guilt-tripping us all with dead and/or starving dogs - from Massachusetts? Likewise Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin, the only non-ridiculous Republican the commonwealth has left. In his battle against Question 8, he almost had me, too, with visions of shadowy drug dealers seducing inner-city children into lives of crime. Then I snapped out of it. How did we ever let the war on drugs get this crazy? This is America, not Havana. Yet here we've given police the power to seize the property, homes, cars and land, of an innocent person who happens to be related to a suspected, not even a convicted, drug dealer. Here we've grown so hysterical over marijuana - a non-addictive, non-lethal, non-hard drug - we've let our government deny it to a dying person to ease that person's suffering. Sorry, we've allowed our conniving lawmakers their say. That dying person isn't suffering enough, we've let them tell us. Or maybe they've faked suffering. Or they've failed to prove that they spent enough of their few miserable remaining days trying every other palliative first - before pot. Last week in her Back Bay office, Holly Bradford, now a 38-year-old, tax-paying, upstanding citizen, talked about her old life, one of shooting both heroin and cocaine, ``speedballing,'' she called it. Of stealing and dealing to pay for a habit exceeding hundreds of dollars a day. ``It's a full-time job, running around to get the money. If you're a prostitute, you have to work the street and save the money. If you're shoplifting, you've got to sell enough. ``If you're dealing,'' which Holly was, sometimes while her infant daughter was in day care, ``well, your dealer gets busted so all the time you're losing your connection and then you're always waiting for another dealer to show up who never shows up.'' Or you're getting ripped off, people stealing the money. Or you give somebody money to get the stuff and then they don't. ``It is,'' she said, ``an awful life.'' But like so many drug addicts, Holly Bradford began abusing at a young age: 12. And like so many addicts, she tried many times to quit and she was never able to get into the sort of long-term, intensive treatment program Question 8 argues for. When Holly Bradford finally came before the court, she was just the sort of small-time dealer who'd be jailed today. She faced 22 years for possession of heroin and cocaine with intent to distribute, among other charges. She was 24. She stood 5 feet 8 inches, weighed 93 pounds and faced losing her child. But because it was 1987, just before mandatory minimums, instead of jail, she went to Meridian House in East Boston. For a year. But the cost of that pales beside the cost of prison and, like nine out of 10 addicts who do get long-term treatment, she has never taken drugs again. Instead, she has worked, completed college and raised a child. In May she completed a graduate program at Lesley College, where her 18-year-old daughter is enrolled now. Her pictures are all over Bradford's office at AIDS Action, where Bradford manages the mental health programs, watching young addicts like she once was sentenced to prison, not to treatment, or ready to enter treatment and unable to find a bed. Like proponents of Question 8, Holly Bradford believes we'd all be better off spending the profits of government-confiscated cars, etc., not on more drug stings in the middle of the night, but on beds for addicts struggling to stay clean. Quite simply, she is right.
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