NO TIME FOR WAITING ONCE THE CHOICE IS MADE

Addicts Need Access To Care Before They Change Their Minds

PRESIDENT CLINTON announced earlier this month that federal employee health
plans will provide the same coverage for mental illness and substance abuse
as for other diseases. News reports called it "parity'' and said this may
raise businesses' health insurance bills a few percent annually.

I don't know whether the economy can afford this or if the legislation is
well-written or of the highest quality. But let me tell you about a girl I
once knew.

She looked much like the teenagers at my daughter's high school today. She
wore a great deal of pale foundation to cover the acne on her cheeks, and
her hair was too fashionably stringy for adult tastes. But she -- let's
call her Susan -- was a nice girl with a ready smile and a good heart. She
was also a hard-core drug addict.

Alienated from her family, she waited tables to make a living. When she
came into our lives about 13 years ago, my mother befriended her.

I met Susan only once, at my daughter's third birthday party. Susan gave my
daughter a book. It was Shel Silverstein's, "The Giving Tree.''

Silverstein died last month, but he left behind a fine legacy of children's
books, many of them profound. This one is about giving to someone you care
about, regardless of their abilities to love in return.

The book became one of my daughter's favorites and we read it aloud so many
times, I still remember how it goes, "Once there was a tree . . . and she
loved a little boy.''

As the boy grows up and grows old, the tree progressively gives him
everything it has: apples, shade and branches to play in, then its limbs
and trunk to build with, and finally, nothing else left, its stump to sit on.

After Susan gave us this book, I never saw her again. But my mother told me
one day that Susan came to her and wanted to know how she could find help
to get off drugs. It was Susan's hope, my mother said, to enroll in a
drug-treatment program so she could get clean.

My mother is a shy, retiring woman. How she raised six children through all
our trials and tribulations, I'll never know. But, as I recall, she turned
into a tiger trying to help Susan.

Up and down Silicon Valley they looked for someone, anyone, who could get
the near-penniless Susan into a substance- abuse program.

"The best we could do was a six-month waiting list,'' my mother told me. My
mother was sad about this. "I don't know where Susan will be in six
months,'' she said.

My mother meant not only physically, as in the address of a girl on the
drift, but emotionally, and in the struggle with her habit.

"When an addict is ready for help, they need it right away, before they
change their mind or something happens to them,'' my mother told me.

I remember how my mother looked when she said this. She was slumped in a
chair in her kitchen, staring at her hands, clenching and unclenching the
right in the left.

In a far-off voice she said, "It's like Susan is at the bottom of a deep
black well -- maybe she climbed down it herself or maybe she just fell --
but she hasn't got any way to climb out.''