A RAVAGED MUSICAL PRODIGY AT A CROSSROADS WITH DRUGS

The judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan stared sternly through her
glasses at the defendant, whose body trembled. "You have been around this
planet for a long time, and you've been using drugs for a fairly
substantial amount of time as well," she said. "What I want is for you to
go and get some help with this problem."

She was giving Gil Scott-Heron a choice. He could go into a lengthy drug
rehabilitation program. Or he could go to state prison.

Mr. Scott-Heron, the musician, writer, spoken-word poet and activist whose
politically pointed lyrics in the 1970's helped give rise to rap, reached a
crossroads on July 2. After years of reports about his drug use, and after
10 days in jail, the gaunt 52- year-old pleaded guilty to felony possession
of cocaine, and agreed to enter a residential treatment program in September.

In return, Mr. Scott-Heron, the onetime prodigy whose albums full of
anthems about race, economics, love and addiction have found fans across
several generations, was allowed to leave the country for a European tour
that was already supposed to have been under way.

That moment of courtroom reckoning has inspired dismay among friends who
see him as a victim of punitive drug laws, and hope among others who want
him to get help, but little surprise. Mr. Scott-Heron has always denied
having a drug habit, and continues to do so, adamantly. "Most of the people
who comment, I've never smoked a joint with," he said. But friends,
relatives, fans and professional associates have concluded differently.
Cocaine, they believe, particularly crack cocaine, has had him in its grip
for years.

His body, if nothing else, would seem to give him away. His cheeks are
sunken, many of his teeth gone, his physique emaciated, his deep, rumbling
voice sometimes slurring into unintelligibility. A reviewer described him
as "a raggedy old man." A fan wrote on the Internet last week: "Life, and
the elements within, has beat the brother down pretty bad, as many of you
who have seen him perform recently will attest."

Mr. Scott-Heron is certainly not the only famous person to battle
addiction, or even the best known. His case, like that of Robert Downey Jr.
or Darryl Strawberry, shows how fame adds an excruciating public cast to
private disintegration, but also how it can insulate a person against the
worst consequences of his habit. Drug user or not, Mr. Scott- Heron is
still a profitable commodity to many people, whether promoters, publishers
or band mates, who know that to confront him about his drug use could mean
losing his favor.

Mr. Scott-Heron said in an interview last week: "The people who have the
most access to me -- people who I've played music with for 20 years -- the
fact that they're still around, either they have the I.Q. of a plant or I
don't have a problem." He pleaded guilty, he said, only because he had to
keep his tour commitments: "I had to say what I had to say to go where I
needed to go."

When he began his career with an explosive brilliance, there was no hint
that a judge would be deciding his fate 30 years on. Born in Chicago,
raised in Tennessee and New York, he won a scholarship through his writing
to the prestigious Fieldston School in the Bronx. He went on to Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania, and at 19, wrote his first novel. At 21, he
released his first album, which included the iconic "The Revolution Will
Not Be Televised." He was, wrote Nat Hentoff, the columnist, a "protean
phenomenon."

He set angrily political poems about black pain and what he regarded as
American hypocrisy to funk. He wrote of the race into space in "Whitey on
the Moon":

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Whitey's on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey's on the moon) . . .

He penned lyrics about Watergate, illegal immigrants, and, in one of his
biggest hits, "Johannesburg," apartheid. He rapped about Ronald Reagan in
"Re-Ron."

And he empathetically addressed addiction's cost and chokehold. "You keep
sayin' kick it, quit it, kick it quit it! God, did you ever try to turn
your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?" he wrote
in "Home Is Where the Hatred Is."

People said hearing his music changed their lives. In 1975, he was the
first artist signed to the Arista label, where he made 11 albums. He was
seen as a legend in the making.

Today, although rappers like Chuck D of Public Enemy cite his early work as
a major influence, he is seen as someone who did not make it as far as his
talent merited. Many artists become less productive or reliable over time
even without drugs, and many struggle with record labels, as Mr.
Scott-Heron has. (He was abruptly dropped by Arista in 1985.)

But it seems likely that some of his promise was squandered through drugs.
Since 1984 he has made only one new studio album, the 1994 "Spirits." He
has continued to tour regularly, and sell out shows often, but also has
earned a reputation for failing to show up for concerts. And he has been
arrested on drug charges in England, Canada and Australia as well as New York.

"Has anyone seen Gil Scott-Heron?" one fan wrote on the Internet after Mr.
Scott-Heron did not appear for a performance.

Another fan wrote, "This happens a lot when Gil is supposed to play,"
adding, "Go and see him before it's too late."

Still, Mr. Scott-Heron has maintained enough function, including writing a
nonfiction manuscript that he says is 800 pages, to cite it as evidence
that he is not a regular drug user. "It's hard to have a habit when you're
working all the time," he said at the apartment in a drug-infested part of
Harlem where he lives.

Prickly when the subject of drugs arises, he is otherwise charming and
funny. An avid sports fan, he said of the Mets, "I think they're having a
worse year than I am."

To his younger half brother, Denis Heron, that ability to get by is the
problem. "I guess we were hoping he would hit bottom, and we could jump
in," Mr. Heron said. "But he's a survivor. He's learned how to hover right
above crashing."

The challenge that his situation has posed for his family, friends and the
criminal justice system is whether, and how, to force help on someone who
denies that he needs it.

"I sort of lost interest," said Mr. Heron, who barely sees his brother
anymore, adding that he saw nothing to do "short of grabbing him and
throwing him in a room and saying, 'One of us isn't walking out until we're
both sober.' "

In the end, Justice Carol Berkman of State Supreme Court did resort to
coercion -- threatening prison to force treatment.

"He didn't want to do this, he had to be pushed," said Mr. Scott-Heron's
Legal Aid lawyer, Robert Kitson. "He had to be put in jail and threatened
with the end of his tour before he went into rehab."

Outside the courtroom, the person pushing the hardest has been Mr.
Scott-Heron's former girlfriend Monique de Latour. She has confronted his
band mates for their failure to act. She has urged promoters not to book
him, saying that supplying him with cash supported his habit. She has
pressed prosecutors to put him in treatment. And on July 2, she faxed
Justice Berkman a letter arguing for rehabilitation, not prison.

Many of Mr. Scott-Heron's friends see her as a woman scorned venting her
fury. They say that she is trying to ruin his life, and that she has
betrayed him by publicly discussing his drug use and helping ensnare him in
the criminal justice system.

Ms. de Latour is "vicious and malicious," said Alistair Abrahams, Mr.
Scott-Heron's manager in Europe, who was busy last week trying to
reassemble the pieces of a tour. Mr. Scott-Heron said he had not seen Ms.
de Latour in 18 months, and called her a "very unhappy woman."

Ms. de Latour, an artist whom Mr. Scott-Heron met in Australia in 1995, is
undeterred. "If they want to blame me, that's fine, if it's going to get
Gil some help," she said. His band mates "think he needs to be on stage,
whatever it takes," she said. "My point is, he may drop dead next week, and
then you won't have anyone to be on stage."

His band mates talk not about drugs, but about Mr. Scott-Heron's
generosity. Larry McDonald, who plays in Mr. Scott-Heron's band, Amnesia
Express, said, "No matter how people perceive someone with problems like
this, he is one of the nicest people I've ever been around, and probably
the closest I've come to working with true genius."

Mr. Scott-Heron's case poses a question: does friendship mean helping
someone to live as he wishes or forcing him to live as he should? Some
friends see drug use as a personal choice. "I think someone should be free
to do to themselves what they wish," said Jamie Byng, publisher of
Canongate Books, which is reissuing Mr. Scott-Heron's novels and poems in
the United States. He blamed "the absurd war on drugs" for Mr.
Scott-Heron's plight.

Mr. Scott-Heron's lawyer agreed, pointing out that his client now has a
felony on his record for possessing 1.2 grams of cocaine.

Mr. Byng did say that he has so worried over Mr. Scott-Heron's health over
the years that he feared getting a call saying he was dead. But, he and
others said, it was not their problem to solve.

"I didn't realize that playing God was something I was supposed to do,"
said Larry Gold, the owner of S.O.B.'s, the club in Manhattan where Mr.
Scott-Heron often plays.

Some argue that there has always been a connection between drugs and art.
And some wonder how sobriety would affect Mr. Scott-Heron. "There's
certainly the possibility that when somebody sobers up they're not as
vital, not as creative, not as charismatic," said Anuj Desai, editor of
Black Book magazine, which published a rhyming piece by Mr. Scott-Heron
this month.

It is hard to assess Mr. Scott-Heron's creativity now, because so little of
it has been made public of late. The manuscript of his latest book, "The
Last Holiday," which he has been working on for at least eight years, has
just been delivered to his publisher. It is his extended riff on a tour
with Stevie Wonder in the early 1980's to help make the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

The success of an 18-to-24-month rehabilitation program, the length the
judge suggested, is hard to predict. Long-term treatment is considered the
most effective, but coerced treatment has yielded mixed results.

Last week, Mr. Scott-Heron, overjoyed to be free, and free to tour, seemed
unconcerned. In September, he said, he would try to convince the judge that
she had been wrong about him. If not, he would agree to her conditions --
rehab or prison.

Asked if he had ever been in a program before, he replied, "I was on
'Saturday Night Live.' "