YOUNG, RURAL, ADDICTED--AND IGNORED

DUBLIN, N.H. ­­ Presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush have
spent a lot of time in this bucolic corner of the country, but they have
paid little attention to the Chris Weavers of the world.

Weaver is a bright but rebellious 21-year-old who grew up in an idyllic
small town near the Canadian border. He is also a recovering heroin
addict--an example of a new and growing breed of drug user: young, rural
and, in this year's election, mostly ignored.

Once primarily an urban scourge, heroin has expanded its reach, spreading
from the inner cities to middle-class suburban pockets in the mid-Atlantic
and small towns up and down the eastern seaboard. It is now cheap,
plentiful and so pure it can be snorted, meaning that a teenager's
experimentation can quickly lead to a needle addiction.

Recent surveys show heroin is as easy to obtain in rural areas such as New
Hampshire as it is in big cities. Two percent of Long Island teenagers had
used heroin in the previous month, a 1998 survey showed--twice as many as
in New York City. And the average age of first use among addicts dropped
dramatically in the 1990s, from 27 to 17.

Weaver was a high school senior when he snorted heroin for the first time,
thinking it was just a more potent version of the tranquilizers he had
already tried. "I had no idea," he said. "We didn't have junkies lying on
the road." Five months later, Weaver was shooting heroin and dealing to
support his habit. He has just completed a year of treatment.

But despite the emergence of a new class of addicts like Chris Weaver,
drugs have been a back-burner issue in the 2000 race. On Friday, Bush for
the first time threw a bit of a spotlight on the issue, saying the Clinton
administration has failed to combat the drug problem and unveiling a plan
to put $2.7 billion more in federal funds into drug treatment and prevention.

Yet drugs have not been a big part of his--or Gore's--political agenda, a
sharp contrast to past elections, when illegal drugs were a major focus and
candidates vied to outdo each other on what they would do to combat the
problem.

"There is no political 'get' in it right now," said Mitchell S. Rosenthal,
president of Phoenix House, a nonprofit substance abuse service
organization. "It's a very serious problem in America that is receiving
very little attention. The candidates believe there is no political
constituency that cares one whit about the drug abuse issue and votes."

Illegal drug use nationally has risen steadily since 1992, defying federal
interdiction efforts. Yet the drug problem has dropped off the political
agenda in part because the violent urban drug wars spawned by the crack
epidemic a decade ago have mostly burned out.

Though drug arrests rose 50 percent from 1990 to 1998, drug-related
homicides dropped the same amount during that period, according to the
Office of National Drug Control Policy. The crimes associated with some of
the drugs growing in popularity--heroin and the party drug Ecstasy--tend to
be less violent and less visible property crimes, though that cannot be
said of methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant popular in the West
and Midwest.

The two candidates have differences as well as common ground on the drug
issue. Gore has focused on stepped-up treatment in prisons. Bush has said
he will fund faith-based treatment programs in prison and out--something he
began as Texas governor--saying they have the best chance of turning lives
around.

Gore rolled out his drug program in February but has said little since. He
promised a $500 million federal matching grant program giving states money
to test and treat prisoners and parolees. He supports expansion of special
drug courts to supervise offenders and divert them into treatment instead
of prison, and he pledges a stepped-up anti-drug media campaign aimed at
young people.

Bush, as governor of Texas, took a hard-line approach to enforcement. He
pushed the repeal of a law that provided automatic probation for first-time
offenders convicted of selling or possessing small quantities of drugs.
Many more inmates are now incarcerated for drug offenses in Texas: The
number convicted of drug crimes has grown from 17,000 to 28,000 since Bush
became governor.

Some of that increase is due to the fact that Bush and Democratic
predecessor Ann Richards commissioned a doubling of prison space, resulting
in fewer early releases. But the legislature in the Bush years has funded
treatment for only 5,300 inmates, a third of what Richards envisioned.

Those involved in treating addicts say they know it's a hard issue for
politicians to sell, though many of those who will go to the polls have
friends or relatives who have needed help with drugs.

"It's very difficult for politicians to say we want to provide drug and
alcohol treatment for those guys in prison when people want money spent on
highways and other things," said Joseph A. Califano, a former Cabinet
secretary under Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter who is now director of
the Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. "On
the Democratic side, use has gone up since 1992, so it's not part of the
Clinton record Gore wants to sell."

Although the overall number of new heroin users has stayed relatively
constant over the last several years, a large and growing proportion are
young people: Among the estimated 471,000 people who used heroin for the
first time between 1996 and 1998, one-fourth were younger than 18, and an
additional 47 percent were ages 18 to 25 at the time of first use,
according to the 1999 national household survey on drug abuse.

During the 1980s, the survey found, fewer than 1 in 1,000 youths ages 12 to
17 reported trying heroin; that number rose to nearly 2 in 1,000 between
1996 and 1998. While heroin has made inroads in the eastern third of the
country, the story is much the same in the West and the Midwest, but the
drug is more often methamphetamine, which is smoked, snorted or injected
after being brewed in makeshift labs from chemicals available over the
counter. The Drug Enforcement Agency shut down 1,919 meth labs in 1999, six
times the number raided in 1995. A recent CASA survey of rural
eighth-graders found that 5 percent had used meth in the previous month.

In the East, where the heroin trade is dominated by Colombia, heroin is
cheaper and purer than ever before. Earlier this year, Congress passed a
controversial administration-backed bill to provide $1.3 billion to equip
and train Colombian armed forces in combating heroin and cocaine
production. Skeptics contend the aid will end up embroiling the United
States in Colombia's decades-old civil war, but both Bush and Gore support
the effort.

It is this pure-grade Colombian heroin that's found its way into small-town
New Hampshire. Now that it is so plentiful, it is being cut with fewer
additives. As a result, it is possible to get high from snorting or smoking
heroin, which often leads to intravenous use.

Tod Stacy, 24, has been fighting the drug's grip for the past year at an
intensive Phoenix House residential drug treatment program in Dublin.
Stacy's descent into heroin addiction began when he was suspended from the
University of New Hampshire for having marijuana in his dorm room. He
returned home to Dover, N.H., and moved into a "party house" with friends
when his disappointed parents said he could not live at home.

"I think I did it just to fit in," Stacy said. "I started sniffing it.
There was no way I was going to use a needle--I don't even like my blood
being drawn." But one night that all changed. "I think I was drunk. Someone
else was shooting up. Someone shot me up. I couldn't believe the difference."

At another residential program in nearby Keene, 21-year-old Joanna, who
asked that her last name not be used, started with nothing to lose. Her
mother was hooked on crack cocaine, and her childhood was a story of chaos
and neglect. She started snorting heroin at 16. By 17, she was shooting it,
hopelessly addicted. By her own account, she has spent years stealing and
"scamming people" to get money to buy heroin. She has spent 13 months in
treatment and state prison, and she faces more time if she washes out of
this program.

Jan Manwaring runs the treatment program Joanna attends. " 'I don't do
needles,' that's what I hear all the time--so they sniff it," Manwaring
said. "There was a myth going around that that way you don't get addicted."

Getting a spot at even a month-long residential program is becoming
difficult. Private residential treatment programs are closing their doors
because insurers, especially managed-care providers, refuse to pay.
Two-thirds of the patients at some private programs are paying out of
pocket, providers say. In New Hampshire, only three private residential
programs are left; a dozen have closed over the past decade, state
officials said.

There are elements of Joanna's story in the lives of most everyone who
spends time in court-ordered treatment here: recklessness, a powerful
addiction, degradation, criminal activity and the real prospect of long
years in jail--or worse--if they don't manage to kick the habit.

"I was lying and cheating and stealing and manipulating. I stole from
everyone I loved," Chris Weaver said. He was jailed after a convenience
store robbery and charged with narcotics trafficking after his girlfriend
allegedly smuggled drugs into prison for him.

The jails are full of addicts like Weaver. Studies have found that more
than three-quarters of jail inmates have drug and alcohol problems, and
many find ways to continue drug use in jail. Increasingly, both the states
and federal government are funding prison-based treatment programs.

Those who advocate treatment over prison say neither presidential candidate
is too willing to talk about addiction as an illness. And taking on the
drug issue at all is venturing into territory where solutions and success
have been hard to come by.

"It's the stealth issue, boy," Califano said. Candidates would rather avoid
it, he said, because "they're unsure about what to do about it."