NYC: DARRYL STRAWBERRY'S PLIGHT UNDERSTOOD TOO WELL BY HIS ELDERS

DARRYL STRAWBERRY, the recovering drug user, cancer survivor and sometime
baseball player, was back in the news this week for all the usual reasons.
He was in trouble with the law.

Mr. Strawberry's troubles came to the attention of a woman in Harlem named
Thomasina, who found them of more than passing interest. How could she not?
She has fought her own demons over the years, same as the women and men she
lives with on East 121st Street, at a drug treatment residence run by
Odyssey House.

Whatever the legal ins and outs of Mr. Strawberry's latest mess, people at
the residence figured that his longtime romance with drugs lay at the core
of his problem. They had differences, though, on the deeper meaning.

"Everybody was saying what a fool he was," said Thomasina, who agreed to a
chat as long as her last name was not used. "But I think he's a very sick
person, and hasn't gotten the guidance he needs. In a way, I consider him a
very poor guy.

"As you can see," she said, "he started with drugs in his teens. And then
he got older. It's a lot like us."

By "us," she meant 50 people living at Odyssey House in a program called
Eldercare, geared to alcohol and drug abusers who are 55 and older.

A few are in their 70's. Obviously, they have a good many years on Mr.
Strawberry, who is 38. But all have at least one concern in common: dealing
with the burdens of growing older while also straightening out lives
misshapen by booze, pills, heroin, crack, you name it.

Some did not begin to get hooked until they were middle-aged.

Thomasina was one of them. She was 50 and working as a hospital nurse, she
said, when she started using heroin. This was after her two small children
died in a fire in their Brooklyn apartment. Be happy to be spared the
details. They would break your heart.

"I just got more and more depressed," said Thomasina, now 58.

"The father of my children used heroin, and I said, `That's what I want to
do.' I was a nurse, and I knew better than that. But I was so depressed. I
did it, I guess, to kill myself."

She and a few fellow residents talked the other day about how they tumbled
into the black hole of addiction at ages when people are supposed to have
acquired some wisdom.

Susie Richardson, 59, began smoking marijuana and crack at 50 because, she
acknowledged, "I was curious." She also felt her life coming unglued after
learning that her son had H.I.V., the AIDS-causing virus. Gerardo
Alvetorio, 57, was an auto mechanic in his mid-30's when he succumbed to
cocaine - not old, but hardly a kid, either. A former truck driver named
John, 67, said he "kind of rewarded myself" with crack and powdered cocaine
on his 50th birthday. That started his decline.

Perhaps you will call some of these wounds self-inflicted, and you may not
be wrong. But that does not make the troubles any less real.

Peter Provet, Odyssey House's president, calls addiction among those who
are middle-aged and beyond "an unspoken, unaddressed problem." Its scope
defies precise measurement, he said, because figures on, say, 60-year-old
heroin addicts are hard to come by. But the Eldercare program's long
waiting list tells him that the problem is there all the same.

NOR are illicit drugs the only issue, not by a long shot. Alcoholism among
older people is a big worry, as is the abuse of legal prescription drugs.
An "invisible epidemic" is how the situation has been described by the
federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

A 1998 report from that agency said that problems with alcohol and pills
affect as much as 17 percent of American adults age 60 and up. Many showed
no signs of trouble until they were well into their 60's and even 70's.
Aging, the report noted, "makes the body more vulnerable" to the effects of
alcohol and drugs.

New York State's Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services said
that 4.1 percent of the 277,535 people treated last year in state-licensed
programs were 55 and older. That may not sound like a high percentage. But
it represents more than 11,000 people, and that number may well rise as the
baby boomers age.

There is another effect of growing older: piecing together a shattered life
hardly gets easier. Darryl Strawberry is finding that out. So is Thomasina,
who expects to leave Eldercare soon after nearly two years and to go back
to work as a nurse.

"You have to start all over again," she said, "At this age, it is not a
beautiful thing."