ASHEVILLE'S DRUG CULTURE HAS A CRIPPLING EFFECT ON CITY AND REGION

The pending loss of Asheville's McCormick Heights neighborhood
highlights an imploding complacency with an unrestrained open-air hard
drug market in our city. The residents of this much-needed affordable
housing resource are understandably resistant to a move from the
frying pan to the fire when encouraged toward Pisgah View or a similar
public housing neighborhood. Their hesitancy is not founded in the
availability of affordable options, but rather in a clear
understanding of the perils attached to communities where drug
dealers, users and their protectors thrive. If you live in an upscale
neighborhood or limit your Asheville forays to an occasional movie,
restaurant or shopping venue, it is easy to minimize the personal
risks of Asheville's drug problems. Like cancer, hard drugs have a way
of eating a community from within, and ignoring the symptoms and
passage of time similarly limit the options for a cure.

No matter where we live, we do well to look beyond Asheville's surface
health and examine X-rays revealing deeper truths.

The drain on our largest employer, Mission Hospitals, of an unfunded
revolving door for addicts seeking "medical time out" over the more
demanding responsibilities of recovery is a starting place. Using
threats of legal action, government-generated loopholes and
self-inflicted medical crises as a pass key, addicts in every guise
are bleeding health-care dollars and shifting tremendous costs to
those who can still afford health insurance. This institutional
accommodation of destructive lifestyles has less to do with mercy than
surrender.

Open-air drug markets are, by design, highly visible -- especially to
the wide-open eyes of children searching for personal role models as a
tunnel through a hazy future. Unfortunately, their capacity to
identify the underlying weakness of surface "bling" are limited, and
thus the seductions of "drugs and thugs" create neighborhood
recruiting stations tagging impressionable children for a lifetime.

By school age, the lion's share of their identity and social model is
formed. We play catch-up for the rest of their lives trying to contain
or alter the aggression and maladpative coping methods that our
open-air drug market neighborhoods have instilled. The 70 percent
dropout rate for black males in our city schools shouts our failure
and the fact that culturally-damaged children are leaking their pain,
confusion and scars on every other student in our school system.

Odds are if a car is broken into, home robbed, child abused or an
adult murdered, hard drugs are operating in the background. There are
a host of neon arrows pointing to crack, meth and painkillers as a
sticky foundation for prostitution, family disintegration,
unemployability, chronic health problems and a host of other social
problems that lay a heavy hand on far too many of our people.

The widespread existence of an open-air drug market sends a powerful
message to the vulnerable, lost and struggling among us: Hard drugs
are a socially acceptable way of easing emotional pain. The problem is
that once you get on the bus of hard drugs, whether as a dealer, user
or protector, it is extremely hard to get off.

Though we should never stop trying to help, most addicts lose their
fight against hard drugs and thus a culture of conscience and
responsibility is left with but one realistic option --stop the
seduction of new recruits. It is true that we will never completely
eradicate hard drugs, but we can drive this harm underground, where it
will pale, shudder and struggle in the darkness, impaired in its
ability to seduce an army of new recruits with its hollow message of
hope. Our community's chemotherapy must start with an unwavering
commitment to end our open-air hard drug markets in every neighborhood
in Asheville. Our city and police administrators must break patterns
of ineffectiveness and work creatively to create accountability
through consequence in make dealing or buying in Asheville a risky and
unpleasant activity 24 hours a day.

Our state legislators must be reminded of their responsibility to
renew an impaired judicial system that has fallen from being one of
the best to 48th in the nation and become a mockery of justice in the
interim. At the local level, our leaders must resist the comforting
temptations of "feel-good initiatives" that have no chance of success
unless grounded in a foundation of authentic public safety and
personal accountability. Ben Franklin once offered that "Half a truth
is often a great lie." Our fight against our open-air drug market is
not about statistics or half truths that conceal our failure. It is
about hard realities demonstrating our children, neighborhoods, and
futures are being undermined by a cancer that places us all in peril.

It is time to say "enough." Enough to a social harm that, as we speak,
is searching for a key to everyone's door.

Carl Mumpower serves on the Asheville City Council.