TALE FROM TRENCHES OF WAR ON DRUGS

Heidi Moore is not a professional speaker nor is she a politician.

She's a 34-year-old mother of three from Carmichael on a mission.

And so this morning, she rose early and boarded a plane for Los Angeles
with a convention speech in tow. She's there at the invitation of a
shadow convention happening alongside the Democratic National
Convention. She'll talk about drugs, but her story has little to do
with the politicized war on drugs we hear so much about every time an
election year rolls around.

Instead, hers is a powerful, poignant tale from one of the battle's
front lines and it happened right here, in our community. Unlike those
at the national convention worried about how every word uttered will
play with voters, Moore's only hope is that people will listen with
open minds.

She'll be telling it like it is, she says. She knows because she lived
it.

First you need to know that Moore's husband, Brad, the late vice
president of Moore Van & Storage, was an addict.

"People hear that and they think of scummy, bottom-of-the-barrel
people, but that wasn't Brad," Moore said. "He was a great father and
his addiction was under control." At this time last year, he and his
wife were having a home built in Carmichael.

What not everyone knew was that Brad Moore was a recovering heroin
addict who had mostly managed his disease with methadone, a synthetic
narcotic that supplants the craving for heroin.

Skeptical at first, Heidi Moore became an enthusiastic supporter of the
treatment when she saw how it normalized her husband. "I saw the
results immediately," she said. "Immediately, he was himself and we had
our life back."

That all ended Dec. 15 when Brad Moore died of a heroin overdose at age
34, 60 days after being ordered off methadone by Nevada County's Drug
Court.

Heidi Moore says it was the second time a professional's non-medical
opinion of methadone brought Brad Moore trouble. He also had relapsed
into the world of illicit drugs and out-of-control behavior in January
1999 when a psychologist helping him after his father's death told him
to get off methadone.

"Within a week he was doing heroin again," Heidi Moore said. Drug use
during that time ultimately landed him in Drug Court. But he was back
in methadone maintenance and doing fine by the time he actually entered
the program, which demands that participants be drug-free, including
methadone, 90 days before graduation.

Heidi Moore understands well the societal stigma surrounding methadone.
"Many people think it's just trading one drug for another," she
said."Had I not lived this, I'd probably be one of those people. But I
saw it work. For us, it was the only answer."

After Moore's death, Dr. John McCarthy, executive director and medical
director of the Bi-Valley Medical Clinic, wrote the judge twice to
explain how the court's handling of Brad Moore's case had failed the
man the court sought to save from illicit drugs.

Patients on methadone are not addicted to it, he wrote, just as
diabetics are not addicted to insulin. It doesn't produce an altered
state. In fact, he wrote, it normalizes the brain.

"There seems to be almost total ignorance about this aspect of opiate
physiology," he wrote. "Why, otherwise, would drug courts or law
enforcement have any biases against the use of methadone when it
produces no high, no intoxicating opiate effects and merely makes the
brains of addicts normal?"

Heidi Moore wants the public to hear her story because she believes the
drug court's lack of knowledge about methadone killed her husband. "It
was so unnecessary," she said. "It's pretty sad that judges are making
medical decisions. His only other option was jail."

And so she'll stand up today and try to make people understand a world
hidden from most of us.

"I'm hoping, for one, that the drug courts will change their rules,
specifically in the way they view methadone," Moore said.

"Methadone was helping Brad. This didn't have to happen."