ADDICTION LIFTED, BUT AT A PRICE

Drugs: A Brain Injury Wiped Out Lavelle Scott's Desire For Cocaine, But
Left Him Mentally Disabled. With Help He Gains A New Lease On Life.

Lavelle Scott literally got the crack knocked out of him. But exactly what
happened on that November day in 1990 may never be told. Scott simply
doesn't remember.

He landed in intensive care at County-USC Medical Center, slipping in and
out of consciousness, suffering from a severe head blow that caused
permanent damage.

When he finally came to weeks later, his cravings for crack cocaine had
vanished. But so had a significant chunk of his memory from the 1980s, when
he and thousands of others in Los Angeles were swept up in the crack
epidemic. "It's a miracle," said his mother, Patricia Scott. "I don't think
Lavelle would be alive today had that terrible thing not happened. He was a
crackhead, a hard-core drug addict. It saved his life."

It's a measure of the devastation of crack cocaine--to a community and one
man's life--that Scott and his family view his violent cure as a gift,
despite the severe limits it has imposed on his life.

The injury left him unable to function on his own. But it has restored
serenity to his life and modest pleasures. Now Scott can bask in the
company of his 12-year-old son, feel the love of a mother who stood by him.
Together, they resurrected a life with music that drugs had all but killed.

It is, however, a mixed blessing.

"It's like you have a violent husband who is self-destructive, but then he
gets Alzheimer's and calms down," his mother said.

Neurologist Bruce J. Weimer, who treated Lavelle Scott from 1992 to 1997,
said the head injuries "edited out" portions of his past.

"He lost a good part of his life that he simply can't ever recall," Weimer
said. "It turned out not to be a very good period of life for him, a period
of time [when] he was addicted to crack."

Scott suffers from short-term memory loss, which means his brain has
difficulty encoding new information. For example, Weimer said, Scott can
remember events from his childhood, but he has trouble recalling what he
had for lunch.

It's the same condition dramatized in "Memento," a film that portrays a
brain-injured man's use of Polaroid pictures, scribbled notes and his own
body tattoos to overcome memory loss and find his wife's killers.

Susan Bookheimer, an associate professor at UCLA's Brain Mapping Center,
said it is quite unusual to find an addiction cured by the loss of
short-term memory. But in Scott's case, she speculated, the injury may have
blocked his ability to remember the environmental factors that trigger
cravings--like a smoker losing the compulsion to light up after a full meal.

Doctors also say that Scott's recovery from drugs may have been aided by
the fact that his injury cut him off from the circle of friends who used
the drug with him.

Little is known about what happened the night of Scott's injury. He cannot
recall who hit him or why. Back then, family members had grown accustomed
to his disappearing for weeks at a time. They suspect he was living on the
streets. They were not surprised that someone tried to kill him. Given that
he was a crack addict, they expected it.

When Scott arrived at County-USC, doctors were pessimistic. They wondered
whether he would ever walk again or be able to perform even such simple
tasks as brushing his teeth.

After spending a month at County-USC, Scott was transferred to Rancho Los
Amigos Medical Center, where he spent three months in a special unit for
brain-injured patients.

Scott recalls none of his hospital experiences. His earliest memory begins
after arriving back at home. The first months were fraught with problems as
he struggled to make sense of a strange environment. He would call 911
dozens of times and say he was being held hostage. He would wander off and
be picked up by police.

The job of caring for Scott fell on his mother, the same woman who put him
out on the street when his addiction became intolerable.

During his recovery, Patricia Scott would rush to the hospital when he
became disoriented and aggressive with the hospital staff. She brought him
tapes of Bob Marley and Luther Vandross. At home, she papered the house
with notes reminding him of mundane little things--where to go and what to do.

Making Sense of a Strange Environment

They spent hours playing the memory game Concentration, as well as gin
rummy and other card games. She used flash cards and Scrabble tiles to
stimulate his reading skills. She encouraged him to return to one of his
former loves, the steel drums.

Today, Scott, 38, lives with his mother in a neat, wood-framed house in the
Crenshaw district. He spends his days watching TV, playing computer games,
doing chores and developing bonds with his son. He sometimes plays with his
mother's Caribbean music group, the Island Dreams Band.

He also lives with the consequences of his injuries and his past.

"It took away parts of my memory," Lavelle Scott said. "I'll do something
like wash the dishes, clean the stove and defrost the refrigerator. And
when my mother comes home, she'll ask me, 'What did you do today.' and I'll
say, 'I cleaned up the yard.' The other things I did, but it just skipped
my mind."

A trip to the supermarket can be a serious challenge. Scott's mother might
return home to find five frozen pizzas crammed in the freezer, her son
unable to recall what he bought on the last trip to the store.

Scott tries to compensate for his lapses by writing down and typing
everything. He sometimes asks the same question over and over, as if trying
to force-feed his brain information.

"I really try to work on my memory, try to make it kick back in," he said.

There are constant reminders of how much his life has changed.

"I was walking and someone tried to sell me some drugs," Scott recalled.
"This guy kept saying: 'Rocks! I got rocks!' I told him to get away. I
don't ever want to use that stuff. It will make a monster out of you. It
made a monster out of me, and I don't ever want to be like that again."

His mother spoke of her son's frustration at living with a faulty memory,
and how much we take memory for granted.

"There is what you look forward to and what you look back on, and there's
the moment--right now," she said. "I can make plans and anticipate with
great pleasure. He can't do that. I can set goals and work toward it. He
can't retain it.

"What is left for him is to enjoy life when it happens. He lives in the
moment."

It wasn't always like that.

Lavelle Scott learned to play steel drums in the early '80s from Carl
McKnight, a Trinidadian who organized musicians in the Jefferson Park area.

The group became popular, playing their 55-gallon oil drums in the Rose
Parade, at parties and county fairs. In the early '80s, Lavelle Scott, his
mother, McKnight and the group cut an album. It was one of the first steel
drum bands to include conventional instruments and vocals.

McKnight was shot to death in a neighborhood dispute in 1984, and the music
group eventually disbanded. At the same time, the Jefferson Park area, like
much of South Los Angeles, was in the middle of a cocaine epidemic that
spawned crack houses, prostitution and violent crime.

In the Grip of Cocaine Epidemic

"There was a pawnshop down the street that was like a black hole, sucking
up everything out of the neighborhood," Patricia Scott recalled.

After McKnight's death, Lavelle Scott continued to play the drums with some
success. In 1989, he appeared on "The Gong Show" in a shirt he borrowed
from a Jamaican drug dealer. He won first prize, $702 in cash.

"I spent the money on clothes and a lot of it on drugs, actually," he recalled.

Scott's life began to spiral out of control. He stole from family and
friends to support his habit.

Then, in November 1990, the family received a telephone call, saying that
Scott was clinging to life at the hospital.

"He was hooked up to all kinds of machines," recalled his sister, Sabrina
Scott. "There was something inserted in his brain to prevent swelling. He
didn't look good. He wasn't responsive."

Now, more than a decade later, Lavelle Scott has refashioned a life.

"The experts didn't know what they were talking about," said Patricia Scott
of the many doctors who had predicted her son's life had been damaged
beyond hope.

"There's only one expert, and he's upstairs," Lavelle said.

On a recent day, his son was visiting, watching his father take a turn on
the steel drums.

"It's a happy music, a party music," Lavelle Jr. said.

"You have to be fast. . . ," his father told him, offering a display of his
skills. "It's all in the touch, in the touch."

Then, contemplating his life's strange turn, Lavelle Scott had this thought:

"To all those people who thought I was gone . . . well, I'm back. That's
right, I'm back."