WE KNOW HOW TO HELP ADDICTS - SO WHY DON'T WE?

James Craig says, "Don't make this just another recovering-addict story,
OK? It should be about Drug Court and what it did for me." I tell Craig
we're in agreement on the aim of today's column, but that to call his story
"just another recovering-addict story" is to demean it. It strikes me as
extraordinary: Seven years ago, he was a senior resident of the sad
city-within-the-city, with 30 years wasted in Baltimore's sprawling,
teeming underworld of heroin and cocaine. Today he runs a small business,
supports his children, and dreams of putting more recovering addicts to work.

His life changed drastically when he entered Baltimore's Drug Treatment
Court in its inaugural year. The court opened in 1994 to provide treatment
for drug offenders who, if not for their hunger for heroin and coke, likely
would not commit crimes. Users or dealers of drugs, with no history of
violence, were eligible to receive probation instead of jail, the probation
requiring treatment with intense monitoring by the court.

When a police officer arrested him at Riggs and Fremont in West Baltimore
one day in 1994, James Craig was a prime candidate for Drug Court. He was
43 years old and a user of some kind of narcotic - first codeine syrup,
then heroin - since his early teen years. Arrested numerous times, he
estimates that he spent a total of 18 years in state and federal prisons,
local jails and halfway houses for crimes ranging from drug possession to
car theft. He stole cars and drove them to suburban neighborhoods, where he
stole property he could convert to cash for drugs.

As the years went by, Craig kept fathering children - eight of them, all
with the same woman, and she received welfare to support them. He sometimes
worked warehouse and construction jobs, but Craig was too deep into the
daily hunt for a fix to support his kids.

"They'd see me come around once in a while and they'd say, 'Here he come,
there he go,'" says Craig of his older kids. "That's what they'd call me:
'Here he come, there he go.'"

Craig slept in abandoned cars and rowhouses. He mainlined heroin in
shooting galleries. He stole money from people he knew. A court would
sometimes send Craig into a drug-treatment program. But they didn't work
for him; they weren't tough enough. "And I didn't want them to work," Craig
says.

It wasn't until his arrest at Riggs and Fremont, when Craig was middle-aged
and tired of the life, that he seemed ready for recovery. A female officer
found Craig pitiful as she arrested him on a car-theft warrant. "She felt
sorry for me," Craig says. "She said, 'I hate to do this.' I said, 'But
you're rescuing me. I've reached the bottom.'"

That's when he entered Drug Court. His probation called for outpatient
treatment and urinalysis five days a week, a meeting with a probation agent
three days a week, monthly progress conferences before a judge, mandatory
enrollment in an education program. It was far more intensive than any
treatment regimen Craig had experienced. "But I was willing to try
anything," he says. "I had nowhere else to go. I had burned all my bridges."

His probation was 18 months, but Craig lived up to his obligations with
such conviction that District Court Judge Jamey Weitzman, the Baltimore
judge who led the establishment of Drug Court, released him after 12.

Six years later, Weitzman remains proud of Craig, and not just because of
his "graduation" from Drug Court, but because of what he's made of his life
since then.

While working as a jack-of-all-trades for an engineering company, Craig
decided to start his own business. He bought a used pickup truck and
started hauling debris from commercial and residential demolition sites. In
time, he was able to hire helpers and to expand the business into limited
home improvement - hanging drywall, fixing roofs - and landscaping. Today,
he says, he has nine employees, and some of the people he's hired over the
years were Drug Court graduates. He calls his company New Horizon
Enterprises. His customers include insurance companies and banks. He thinks
a $1 million revenue-year is within sight.

"I'd like to put more [Drug Court graduates] to work," he says. "They want
to work, they want to be able to provide."

As Craig provides for his family now. He contributes regularly to the
support of the youngest children, who live with their mother. (She's off
welfare and employed, too.) Craig is no longer known as "Here he come,
there he go," and a couple of years ago, his eldest son, Darryl, asked his
father to be best man at his wedding.

Drug Court worked for James Craig. It has worked for a lot of people. It
represents a genuine breakthrough in the way we deal with addicts. The
state Division of Parole and Probation says 11 percent of Drug Court
"graduates" have been convicted of subsequent crimes. A University of
Maryland study found the rearrest rate among those enrolled in Drug Court
to be one-third that of offenders who rejected the option.

After seven years, Drug Court can boast about 700 graduates. But Baltimore
has between 40,000 and 60,000 addicts, so the number being reached by Drug
Court is minuscule. What's up with that?

Since the courts represent the point of entry for most drug offenders into
Baltimore's long-overdue effort to treat rather than punish them, why not
expand the program? Offer the Drug Court system to a broader population -
maybe even those who have a violent offense in their distant past - not
just the select few, by loosening the standards for entry. And why not
threaten those who won't accept the Drug Court contract - generally, the
younger ones who aren't "ready" for the kind of regimen James Craig
embraced - with longer jail sentences? Connect a job-training program to
the Drug Court pipeline. Hire more probation agents and pay them well.

The city is spending $46 million on treatment this year - a near tripling
of funding from a few years ago - and it expects to spend $55 million next
year. Treatment on demand should be a reality, not a good intention. Since
this is a long-term project, why don't we open, for starters, a 50-bed
hospital for detox and intensive treatment?

As a Baltimorean, I hope the west-side redevelopment goes sailing to full
completion and success. I hope the Ravens find an adequate replacement for
the injured Jamal Lewis. But there's nothing more important than closing
down that sad, drug-infested city-within-the-city and rescuing people like
James Craig from it. We're finally smartening up. We've learned how to do
it. Let's do more.