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.