A FOE OF DRUGS ALSO BATTLES HARSH LAWS OF THE 1970'S

Jeffrion L. Aubry was playing basketball for the College of Santa Fe when
the call came from home. A boyhood friend, a jokester who shot hoops with
him at the park down the street, had died. The young man was around Mr.
Aubry's age, in his early 20's, but already an addict. He had injected
himself with what turned out to be rat poison.

It was the late 1960's. Jimi Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland" was on the air.
Huey Newton was in prison. Northern Boulevard, the main commercial artery
of Mr. Aubry's native Corona, was a thriving narcotics bazaar. When Mr.
Aubry came home from college, he threw himself into the middle of that
world. He joined a group of former convicts and social activists who called
themselves People for the People and offered drug treatment from a basement
office on the boulevard.

"The battle for social change was clearly over drugs," Mr. Aubry said,
explaining his thinking at the time. "It was a danger to the generation I
grew up in. A lot of people my age and older had succumbed to it."

In the three decades that followed, Mr. Aubry watched many others succumb.
Heroin left, crack came, heroin came back. Mandatory drug sentencing laws
were instituted. Thousands of people from the neighborhood went to prison.
Crime went way up, then quieted down.

Mr. Aubry spent most of those years running a drug treatment program. In
1992, he won a seat in the State Assembly, representing northern Queens.

Once in Albany, year after year, Mr. Aubry led a one-man crusade proposing
legislation to repeal New York's mandatory drug sentencing laws. Under
those Rockefeller-era laws, drug offenders are sentenced based on their
felony records and on the amount of drugs seized. Judges have no
discretion, regardless of the circumstances, such as whether the defendant
sold drugs to support a habit.

Curtly dismissed for years, Mr. Aubry's crusade is now about to yield
results. Gov. George E. Pataki has promised a change that will offer judges
some limited sentencing discretion and some treatment for low- level
offenders. The Democratic leadership of the State Assembly has followed
suit; the party's proposal would offer treatment for many more drug felons.
Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, is expected to introduce a bill next
week.

Realistically, as even Mr. Aubry concedes, a total repeal of the
Rockefeller drug laws is out of the question. But the three men who control
everything in Albany -- Governor Pataki, Mr. Silver and the Republican
leader of the State Senate, Joseph L. Bruno -- are expected to hammer out a
compromise.

But no politician, it is safe to say, has been as central in this political
drama as Mr. Aubry. For him, drug law reform has not been an abstract
political quest. For nearly his entire adult life he has seen what drug
addiction -- and the war on drugs -- has done to his family and his
neighborhood. "They," he said, referring to those who used and then sold
drugs, "were us."

Jeffrion L. Aubry was born in 1948, the second of three children. His
father, an ambitious man with a master's degree in chemistry, moved his
family from New Orleans to Corona in 1948, with dreams of putting his
education to good use.

He was able to find work only at the Postal Service, and he ending up
working there for 25 years.

"He could have gone crazy, he could have been a radical, thrown bricks,"
Mr. Aubry recalled the other day. His parents, he said, "did what they
needed to do to survive."

The Corona of his childhood was a protected, ordinary place, where civil
servants and schoolteachers bought their own homes and dressed for church
on Sunday. Mr. Aubry went to Roman Catholic school. A basketball
scholarship took him to college.

By the time Mr. Aubry came home from Santa Fe, drugs had come to Corona.
The buying and selling went on by the light of day on Northern Boulevard.
Banks and supermarkets had disappeared by then. White- owned businesses had
fled, leaving behind shells of storefronts.

Crack came in the 1980's. One of his closest friends, a grown man with a
college degree and a good home, became addicted and saw his life unravel in
a matter of months. By 39, he was dead. There were drug raids up and down
Northern Boulevard. At one point, in the early 1990's, the police arrested
900 people in a month.

Addiction hit home perhaps most forcefully 10 years ago, when one of his
wife's relatives became addicted to crack, leaving a daughter, barely a
year old, for Mr. Aubry and his wife, Rebecca, to care for. They had
already raised four children of their own. But the baby needed a home, Mr.
Aubry said. She is 11 now, and still with them.

He lives in the house he has lived in since first grade, a gray two-story
home with a clump of brilliant blue irises out front. His mother died
several years ago. His father lives nearby.

Mr. Aubry worked in a drug treatment program at a local social services
agency, Elmcor Youth and Adult Activities, down the street from where he
grew up. He rose to become its executive director. He also did a brief
stint at the Queens borough president's office.

The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, among the more influential
voices arguing to keep the Rockefeller drug laws intact, talks about
communities like Corona when he speaks in favor of long, mandatory
sentences. Without them, Mr. Brown says, Northern Boulevard would never
have been cleaned up. The people who live there, Mr. Brown tells lawmakers
in Albany, want drug dealers locked up.

Mr. Aubry doesn't entirely disagree. Yes, his constituents want drug
dealers off their streets. People come to his office to complain about
crack dens, just as they complain about potholes and junk-filled lots.

His objection to the Rockefeller drug laws is that they often simply send
drug offenders to prison without treating what he considers to be a
disease. When they come back home, he adds, they aren't always equipped to
find a job, a place to live, a way to lead a productive life. He knows.
They come into his office.

Mr. Aubry, who says he is an Aquarius wary of revealing too much too
quickly, first introduced legislation to repeal mandatory drug sentencing
laws in 1997. For years, his appeals were unheeded.

To loosen drug laws, it was thought, was to commit political suicide. The
bill never even got out of committee. His measure was considered so naive,
he said, that the Democratic leaders of the State Assembly didn't even
bother to argue with him. "It was a lack of conversation that was the
hallmark of this thing," he said. "The political theory was: can't be done."

Plenty of arguments are in store, as there is still a big gulf between the
proposed bills on the table. Governor Pataki, for instance, wants to give
judges limited discretion in sentencing, and only for the most serious
felons. The Assembly, meanwhile, wants to offer treatment, instead of
prison, for many more drug felons than the governor's proposal would allow.
Still, any discussion on the issue was unthinkable even a couple of years ago.

But much has happened since then. The rate of violent crime declined in the
1990's. There is a growing acceptance of addiction as a disease. A movement
has coalesced to revamp criminal justice, with college students and church
leaders speaking out against the state's drug laws. In March, a protest
against the drug laws brought more than 1,000 people to Albany.

Mr. Aubry's fellow lawmakers are talking about the need for change. Among
themselves, they occasionally talk about the people they've known --
friends, relatives, constituents -- who have succumbed to drugs.

That the lawmakers are only now coming around does not seem to rankle Mr.
Aubry. "Maybe they didn't have the same background I did," he said with a shrug.