COMMUNITY HOSPITALS SHOULD BE OFFERING DRUG TREATMENT

As a member of the West Timonium Heights Community Association, I was
really impressed with Dan Morhaim's column "Hospitals can help solve drug
problems" (Opinion Commentary, May 5). He not only presented facts and
figures about a complex problem, but offered a compassionate, no-nonsense
solution.

All communities have alcohol and drug problems. What better place to handle
treatment and follow-up programs than our community hospitals? Their
24-hour schedules could accommodate even addicts with bizarre
round-the-clock work schedules that rule out 9-to-5 treatment
programs.(Yes, there are working alcoholics and drug users.)

I certainly commend efforts such as that of Mayor Martin O'Malley and the
Baltimore police to clear street corners of drug dealers and to decrease
killings. But their job is nearly impossible if nothing is done about the
root of the problem through education and treatment and follow-up programs
for current addicts. Helping addicts to recover is like throwing a pebble
in a pond: Benefits ripple out in all directions. I agree with Dr. Morhaim.
It is time to play serious ball: Dollars up.

Robert Welsh, Timonium

Dan Morhaim has the right idea. Indeed, using hospitals to treat drug
addiction was part of the recommendation of the Mayor's Working Group on
Drug Policy Reform (submitted to Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke in Nov. 1993) that
all primary care providers be encouraged to provide substance abuse treatment.

Hospital-based treatment was also an explicit recommendation of the Jan.
1995 "Report of the Grand Jury of Baltimore City," a panel charged with
investigating the city's drug problem. These recommendations, which could
save Maryland billions of dollars, have not been acted upon, because of the
vicious stereotyping of addicts and a lack of political integrity. Drug
addicts are stereotyped as terrible people because they are criminal. But
most addicts suffer terribly and treating them as law-breakers interferes
with our ability to provide humane treatment.

National drug policy leaders talk about drug treatment, but fail to deliver.

U.S. drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey fights for more money for the Pentagon
for Colombia, not for the kind of treatment Dr. Morhaim argued for so well.

Eric E. Sterling, Washington, The writer is president of the Criminal
Justice Policy Foundation.

DRUG WAR HAS FAILED EVEN TO KEEP PRISONS CLEAN

Vice President Al Gore wants to spend $500 million drug testing prison
inmates ("Gore calls for prison drug tests," May 3). What does it imply
when, after 60 years of drug prohibition and hundreds of billions of
dollars spent on the drug war, we still do not even have drug-free prisons?

William P. Jenkins, Bel Air