VIEWS CHANGE WHEN DRUGS ARE CLOSE BY

All illusions about drug use in small-town America should have disappeared
some time around the Reagan era.

For hold-outs who hold onto that tired it-can't-happen-here mentality, I
take you to Spring Valley, population 5,200, where 150 people turned out
recently for a community meeting on heroin use in the area.

In the last 18 months, heroin has become a problem in the Illinois Valley
area of Spring Valley, LaSalle-Peru, Ladd, Depue and surrounding farm
towns. Authorities have recorded a few heroin-related deaths and made a few
heroin-related arrests, which hints at a larger problem. As in the big
cities, newer, purer strains are replacing marijuana, cocaine, crack
cocaine and methamphetamine as the drug of choice.

Spring Valley, like a lot of places, has been slow to realize what's
happening in its backyard. The problems that kept city officials busy
tended to be too-tall grass, potholes, barking dogs, and unsightly fences.

"I'll be blunt, a lot of it was just bull," says Jim "Uda" Taliano, the
alderman who called the meeting.

But Taliano's tone about the drug problem, and apparently the tone of the
meeting, hint at a newer, purer response to that worn-out war on drugs.
Surprisingly, reports of Monday's meeting contained absolutely no mention
of the military metaphors Peoria leaders love to throw around when they're
talking about combating drugs.

Nobody talked about lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key strategies. Nobody
referred to users as small-town vermin or mentioned taking up small-town
warfare against small-town terrorists. Substitute "urban" for "small-town"
and you have the tone typically employed by officials describing inner-city
drug problems.

In fact, the Spring Valley meeting treated drug use more like a public
health problem than a crime problem, which is an amazing turnaround from
typical war-on-drugs rhetoric.

The news story described parents devastated by a child's drug use. There
was a mother who told of the horror of watching her child go through heroin
withdrawal; there was the mother whose child went from straight-A student
to straight addict. Most tellingly, there were the small phrases Taliano
used during the meeting and later in an interview:

"This is not a witch hunt against users."

"It's like a disease out there."

"I don't know if we can cure this cancer, but we can sure control it."

Taliano's use of terms like "disease" and "cancer" tells me he takes a
personal perspective on the area's drug problems. It's not someone else's
child in some other neighborhood; it's their children in their
neighborhoods and the solutions don't necessarily lie in tougher laws, more
police and bigger jails.

We've been down that road and we're paying for it. Dearly. As states
grapple with record budget deficits, they're finding they can no longer
afford the unprecedented prison-building boom fueled primarily by this war
on drugs. So we have newly-built prisons standing empty, construction
companies griping about not getting prison construction contracts, lower
crime rates and more prisoners than ever before.

Money problems, more than a sudden dose of good sense, are forcing state
and federal governments to re-evaluate prevailing strategies in the
so-called war on drugs. But old habits are hard to break. Some of that is
still evident in the Spring Valley area. There's still an undertone of
blaming the big bad city, in this case Chicago. Taliano would like to see
random drug testing in high schools, albeit with parental consent.

Still, Taliano and Spring Valley seem to understand there are no winners in
a war against drug use and that's a good sign. But isn't it funny how drug
users we know need help and drug users we don't know need jail time?