STRIKE THREE FOR STRAWBERRY

I met Seth Mnookin in Los Angeles, lunch at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. He
was covering the McCain campaign and so was I - and so were the others at
our table. Somehow the conversation turned to addictions - cigarettes,
mostly. It was then that Mnookin mentioned he had been a heroin addict.

Oh, and coke, crack, pot, mescaline, LSD, speed and prescription
painkillers, too. But it was heroin that nearly killed him. He's clean now,
back to writing (which he does very well) and working for Brill's Content,
a magazine about the media. Last August, he wrote his own story for
Salon.com, an online magazine. Read it. It's worth your time.

At lunch, I asked him what he thought of Darryl Strawberry, the former
Yankees star who was suspended last month after he tested positive yet
again for cocaine. This was Straw's third time - he had been suspended
twice before for using cocaine - and probably the end of his career. He's
38, which is old for baseball, but more than that, he's clearly an addict.
That means he should have lengthy treatment, probably a lock-up. Mnookin
agreed.

I had my Strawberry file with me in L.A. I had been intending to do a
column on him because I was struck by the outrage when he failed the recent
drug test. In New York, the papers quoted fans who dismissed Strawberry
with contempt. Many sports writers expressed similar views, and when
washingtonpost.com asked its readers for their opinion, it was more of the
same. "He's had enough chances," wrote one fan. "Three strikes and you're
out," said another.

This was indeed Strawberry's third strike. He had been suspended in 1995
for 60 days and yet again last year for 120 days. Both suspensions were
long enough for him to detox, but way short of what's needed to stay clean
- - for the addict to learn what compels him to use drugs in the first place.
With Strawberry, that compulsion must have been all-powerful. He is deeply
in debt, his wife is pregnant, and he's nearing the end of his career. Yet
he used cocaine anyway - even though he knew he would be tested.

What compels someone to do something like that? For the answer, go to
Mnookin's article. "Within a week of trying pot, I was smoking it every
day," he wrote. That's not the case for most people. They can take pot or
leave it. But for the addict-in-waiting, the experience is different,
transforming. Within a year, Mnookin was using just about every drug
imaginable and boozing it up as well.

In his case, the urge to write eventually returned. He got himself to a
treatment center and stayed for three months. But Strawberry never hit
bottom, and his addiction apparently did not interfere with his ball
playing. The result was that nothing - and no one - compelled him to seek
extended treatment.

"He needed to face the way he feels about himself that causes him to do
drugs," said Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, the president of New York's Phoenix
House, a treatment center. Rosenthal has no firsthand knowledge of
Strawberry, but he's been treating - and mostly curing - addicts for many
years. In general, he recommends a year's treatment for tough cases.

Baseball and Strawberry were willing to settle for far less. They had a
game to play. Strawberry always vowed he would stay clean. No doubt he
meant it. But life intervened, and for reasons he probably does not yet
understand, he used cocaine. This is the power of addiction. Mnookin was so
desperate to get off heroin that he tried crack as a replacement addiction.
"I ended up smoking pieces of linoleum I carved from my kitchen floor," he
wrote. He hoped bits of crack had stuck in the tiles.

At one time, we were admonished not to blame the victim. A bit later, we
were given permission to do so. The welfare recipient, the unemployed had
only themselves to blame for their plight. Mostly, I agree. A person ought
to be accountable for his actions.

But addiction is a different matter. You don't choose to smoke linoleum.
You don't choose to risk death by overdose. The word "choose" is
meaningless in these cases.

Yet all of baseball came down on Strawberry. The fans acted as if he had
let them down, instead of himself and his family. They blamed only him for
his plight and not professional baseball as well. But baseball chose -
there's the correct usage - to let him play. It did not compel him to go
into extended treatment.

Maybe baseball should hire Mnookin. He knows that a cure takes the one
thing neither Strawberry nor baseball could afford - time. Now Strawberry's
got nothing but.