WHICH DRUG WAS WORSE?

The bus driver sat with a beret pulled over his eyes and the
newspaper spread out on the steering wheel.

This was at a little after six yesterday morning. The bus was there to
take a group up to Albany for a demonstration against the Rockefeller
drug laws.

The story the bus driver was reading in the paper was about Darryl
Strawberry, who had been missing in Florida for a couple of days and
now had turned up and was in a hospital in Tampa.

He was put under arrest and a sheriff was put on guard at the door to
his room.

Two weeks ago, Strawberry left a drug rehabilitation center where he
was staying under court order and went to St. Joseph's Hospital for
chemotherapy. It is the only other place the courts will allow him to
be. He is a sick man. He had a kidney removed at Columbia Presbyterian
in Manhattan. Then the cancer appeared in his colon.

The normal chemotherapy drugs cannot help him. He is on an
experimental chemotherapy. The paperwork for experimental drugs
usually states the side effects of the drug: loss of hair, difficulty
in breathing, constipation, death, burning eyes...

The only experimental chemotherapy for colon cancer is oxaliplatinum.
It is a miserable, highly toxic drug. In the way it interrupts cell
growth and division it causes weird reactions in patients.
Strawberry's wife, Charisse, told people yesterday, including a doctor
who is a friend of this corner, that after taking the treatment at the
hospital, he came out to the van and immediately started to throw up.
His wife said that they had been prepared for this and had three
plastic buckets in the car. As they drove Strawberry back to the drug
rehab house where he has been assigned by the court, he threw up so
much that he filled three buckets.

He has also thrown up before they put the needle into his arm to start
dripping the drug into him.

This is not uncommon in cancer. I've known two people who threw up the
moment the car turned the corner and the hospital was in sight.

This time, Strawberry could throw up no more after the van ride and he
went inside the drug rehab center and stayed there sick for the next
six days. He got one sort of good day and then was supposed to go back
for another chemotherapy treatment.

Suddenly, Strawberry had a brilliant thought.

He liked cocaine better than chemotherapy.

Cocaine made him feel good. Chemotherapy made him desperately
ill.

Sometimes, these people with cancer can go to the core of whatever
life they have left.

Strawberry walked out and got himself some cocaine. People thought he
was a suicide or kidnapped.

Then he came back.

And now he is in the hospital and he can have his chemotherapy.

After that, he can throw up in a sheriff's van taking him back to
court in handcuffs.

Society is angry with him because he ran away and took cocaine again.
One of these official women in Tampa, a prosecutor, said that because
he took cocaine again he should be given prison time.

If it takes until the end of his life, she will teach him that that he
should take only the drug chemotherapy and never cocaine.

To show how much they believe in this, the prosecutor should sit right
down next to Strawberry in the hospital's infusion room and let a
nurse slap a vein into view and hit it with a needle and let her have
a good jolt of oxaliplatinum. It might give them a few things to think
about. One of the things to think about is the thought of letting this
sick, depressed Strawberry go off into some corner as he waits for
this thing in his body to do it for him.

This is something the law doesn't know anything about. The drugs have
become such a large part of the criminal justice system that most are
afraid to touch the rules and customs of drugs. There is overtime for
cops, work for prison architects and prison guards, prosecutors,
judges, court clerks. Drugs are the best thing to happen since
prohibition almost a century ago. Strawberry has sheriffs at the door,
deputies driving him in the vans, then prosecutors and clerk typists
and judges and cells and maintenance men cleaning up the van after he
is sick in it.

When the bus driver was through reading abut Strawberry yesterday
morning, he opened the door to people like Hilda Garcia, who is 73
now. She wore a knit cap and heavy coat and walked with an aluminum
cane. She was going to Albany to protest the safety deposit box of
criminal justice, the Rockefeller law, which sends people away for up
to 15 years and more for the possession of as much as a stick of
marijuana. Her husband had been a lookout on the block for a drug gang
in Washington Heights. He never hurt anybody, but he got 10 years for
that. Two years ago, the priest from Green Haven called Hilda to say
the husband was dead of a heart attack. In his honor she goes to
demonstrations against the law that held him. She started yesterday at
five in the morning in her apartment in Washington Heights. She took
the 9 train down to Columbus Circle and got the bus with Sara Ratner,
Bill Kunstler's daughter; Randy Credico, and a busload of others like
Hilda Garcia. I've never seen anybody big in crime in jail under the
Rockefeller law.

The driver stuck the newspaper into a handle and drove off with the
story of Darryl Strawberry's chemotherapy at his side and his ears
filled with stories coming out of the seats told by women whose
husbands are serving long years for nonviolent crimes, but
nevertheless serious crimes because they are against the old rich
man's tradition of punishing the poor as fiercely as possible.