REGULATING HEROIN TRADE SUGGESTED

Attorney Sylvester Salcedo's dark brown eyes sweep the East Side
streets, taking in the sketchy terrain while he calculates the cost
of the local heroin trade. It's as if he is still on patrol as a
front-line officer in the nation's war on drugs, but these days his
strategy for stemming heroin use and related crime amounts to a
negotiated peace.

Salcedo proposes amnesty for heroin addicts. In fact, he says
Bridgeport should enter the drug trade, administering heroin under
medical supervision, without fear of arrest or overdose.

It's a far cry from the anti-drug crusades he oversaw in the 1990s as
a Navy lieutenant commander in a counter-narcotics intelligence unit
with a name out of a Tom Clancy novel: Joint Task Force Six.
"Prohibition didn't work. Persecuting people and coercion seldom do.
My idea is not to legalize drug possession, although this might be a
step in that direction," at least for nonviolent offenders, he says.

Salcedo's years on the front lines in Miami, New York and Puerto Rico
convinced him that the $36.3 billion the government spends each year
to keep drugs out of the country is wasted. Those billions might be
better spent, he says, on treatment for addicts or drug-maintenance
programs operating out of community health centers. Salcedo proposes
the city declare an 11-block radius in the East Side, bounded by East
Washington Avenue and Helen Street and the Yellow Mill Pond, as a
free zone for heroin possession among those who register as heroin addicts.

Membership in this "union" would entitle addicts to receive the drug,
under supervision, at community health centers without fear of arrest.

Salcedo says Bridgeport Mayor John M. Fabrizi's public admission in
June that he had occasionally used cocaine after he took office is an
inspiration behind amnesty for heroin addicts, and sheds a light on
what he calls the nation's long and costly failures in waging the war on drugs.

He does not propose extending amnesty to cocaine addicts, due to the
differences between the two drugs. Cocaine addiction can produce
"cocaine psychosis," which resembles paranoid schizophrenia and can
lead to violence. Heroin use creates a powerful physical addiction,
and long-term users require "maintenance" doses to enable them to go
about regular life. Problems from heroin addiction range from
blood-borne diseases such as HIV, poor dosage control and the high
cost to obtain the drug, which can lead users to crime.

Instead of hiding their addictions, Salcedo wants heroin users in the
city's East Side to acknowledge their dependence. He envisions a
registry of heroin addicts, similar to the needle-exchange program
Connecticut has to curb the spread of AIDS and HIV by intravenous drug users.

"Bona fide members of this union would be issued identification cards
that would allow them to go to a nearby community center and receive
the amount of heroin they need to maintain themselves," Salcedo says.

The process would be overseen by medical professionals to ensure
safety, and to make sure heroin is not sneaked out and sold on the
street. Addicts would get their fix without fear of overdose or
blood-borne disease.

On the surface, none of this is expected from a retired drug warrior.
It flies in the face of the conventional wisdom in law enforcement,
which tends to emphasize getting tough on drugs. But Salcedo's idea
has support from some who advocate decriminalizing drugs.

Cliff Thornton, the Green Party candidate for governor and a national
drug-policy reform advocate, says Salcedo's approach is similar to
programs in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and other European cities.

However, many Americans may be unaware of the experiments with a
similar approach in the United States. "What they probably don't
realize is that in the early 1900s, Missouri and Louisiana both
offered safe injection clinics for heroin addicts," he says. "What
they also don't know is that these clinics all worked out very well."

Salcedo is legally barred from discussing details of the drug
trafficking investigations he coordinated in the 1990s. What he does
say is the war on drugs so frustrated him that he took a page from
Vietnam veterans frustrated with that war. In 2000, he returned his
medals to President Clinton in a show of protest. He has never
regretted that decision.

Thornton understands why a program to decriminalize heroin would be
controversial.

"Any time you talk about legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, you are
talking about the redistributing of income and wealth and upsetting
our economy," he says. "Once drugs are inside the law and you take
away the high profits from drug dealers and drug cartels, you don't
need the multibillion dollar drug interdiction industry anymore.

"You don't need as many new prisons," Thornton says. "You won't need
as many courts or cops to fight a drug war."

Salcedo, a Minnesota native who spent his youth in Boston and the
Philippines, is the ex-husband of former Bridgeport public schools
Supt. Sonia Diaz Salcedo.

Years of practicing criminal and family law -- as well as living in
Bridgeport's East Side, where drugs are as plentiful as boarded-up
wood-framed houses, and broken glass has replaced grass as the most
common ground cover -- remind Salcedo of the impact of drugs in his
own backyard.

At night, abandoned dwellings turn into crack dens and shooting
galleries. Everybody in the neighborhood -- even elementary-school
children -- can point them out.

"The people who live around here struggle to keep their families
together. They love their children, and they want to raise them
themselves. Unfortunately, they also have drug problems for which the
law will punish them," Salcedo says. "They live in fear of their
children being taken away from them."

He spends countless hours in court and administrative proceedings
arguing that his clients should keep custody of their children and
get drug counseling and treatment rather than jail time. It's
probably not the future that his Philippine-born parents, both of
them doctors, envisioned for their middle child, educated at some of
New England's most blue-blooded prep schools.

"Sending a parent to jail for drug possession, like heroin,
completely upends the parent-child bond," Salcedo says. "It teaches
them that when you have a substance-abuse issue, you get punishment
for a crime, not help for a medical condition. The lesson it provides
is, if you are addicted to anything or likely to become so, hide what
you are doing. Keep it a secret."

At the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services,
Salcedo's idea drew a skeptical reaction. "We already have methadone
programs at community centers, and that works extremely well with
heroin addicts," says Wayne Dailey, a spokesman for the state
Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. "From what I am
hearing, what this lawyer is suggesting is a heroin maintenance
program. So my question is, how does that get the individual off heroin?"

In Connecticut, some 75,000 people identify themselves as heroin
addicts, a figure state officials call "conservative"; 11,100 other
drug users are enrolled in state-supported methadone programs aimed
at breaking their addiction.

In his East Side neighborhood, where his former law clients refer to
him as "Mr. Counselor," Salcedo's heroin union proposal draws a more
enthusiastic reaction.

"Everything else hasn't worked. Maybe this is something that might,"
says an East Washington Avenue father of three, who declined to give
his name. "I don't even let my kids play outside of here no more.
It's too dangerous. That's why we want to move out of here."

"The place over there," he says, gesturing to a boarded-up house, "is
a shooting gallery. Best to stay as far away from it as you can when
it gets dark."

Inside Washington Avenue Park, a woman in her fifties approaches
Salcedo. She notices a photographer walking backward in front of the
lawyer and she wonders why he's getting this attention.

"Mister, are you running for something?" she asks. "What you running for?"

"Me? No, no, I'm not running for anything," Salcedo tells her.

She frowns, biting her lower lip. He introduces himself as a guy from
the neighborhood who has an idea for helping heroin addicts and their
families, and for cutting violent crime on the East Side.

"There are a lot of people around here strung out on that stuff. I've
seen it," she says, introducing herself as Bernadette McBride, a
transplant from the South who is studying social work at Housatonic
Community College.

"Now let me get this straight: What you are telling me is that they'd
give out heroin at the community center and make sure people took
their fix there, nothing left over?" she asks.

Salcedo nods and waits for her reaction. McBride, who appears to be
at least a half-foot taller than Salcedo, stares him down for a
moment, trying to figure out whether he is serious.

"You know, this idea of yours is kind of out there," McBride says,
her face breaking into a smile that reveals a few missing teeth.
"But, hey, like sometimes you got to think outside of the box."