HOW TO SAVE A HEROIN ADDICT

You can rant yourself hoarse about the Puerto Rican heroin connection.

You can demand more money for more cops, with more tools.

But heroin is known as "the Hook" for a reason.

Anyone who has ever had a passing glimpse of a person in the grip of the
deadly stuff knows that, even if law enforcement could get it off the
streets, addicts will just take to the alleys.

That's just one reason why the state needs to sit up and pay attention to
the 20 or so folks lining up every morning, like clockwork, outside the
paint-chipped building housing the Center for Drug-Free Living.

They look like you and me because they are like you and me.

They hold jobs. They have families.

They can do that because they are lucky enough to afford methadone, a
chemical that alleviates the vicious physical cravings of a body dependent
on heroin.

They line up in front of the Center for Drug-Free Living because it's one of
just a handful of Central Florida locations that offer methadone.

And, like clients at almost every methadone treatment facility in Florida,
they have to pay for it: The state cut off all local methadone funding in
1996 -- just as the needle-marked bodies began piling up in Central Florida.

Here's what's happened since the state turned off the local methadone
spigot: More people have died from heroin use. A lot more people.

Despite an influx of drug enforcement dollars, the high-minded rhetoric of
national politicos and the copious bleeding of liberal hearts everywhere,
deaths from heroin use in Orlando jumped from 16 in 1997, one year after
state-financed methadone funding was last available in Orlando, to 36 last
year.

The deadly outcome is all too predictable: Insurance companies, not known
for their soft and tender side, are among methadone's biggest fans
specifically because hard data links the treatment to sharp reductions in
heroin-related deaths, and thus, sharp reductions in heroin-related hospital
stays.

So why would a community accept this kind of methadone funding cut just as
its children are being laid out on morgue slabs in record numbers?

It is as though we have elected to stand vigil over the bed of a dying
patient, weeping for the imminent loss, moaning the absence of a cure -- and
refusing to administer antibiotics.

Maybe antibiotics would work. Maybe they wouldn't.

Maybe the only sin is not caring enough to find out