REDBOOK REPORT: WHY YOUR CHILD COULD WIND UP IN JAIL

Parents Who Are Shocked To Learn That Their Kids Are Hooked On Drugs Are
Even More Shocked By What Happens When They Cry For Help.

[Sidebar] FOR HELP:

Center for Substance Abuse Treatment www.treatment.org 800-662-HELP

Drug Policy Foundation www.dpf.org 202-537-5005

Family Watch www.familywatch.org 703-354-4002

Lindesmith Center www.lindesmith.org 415-921-4987

November Coalition www.november.org 509-684-1550

[Sidebar] TREAT OR PUNISH? DO THE MATH

For every three Americans in treatment, another six need help but can’t get
it. Only about a sixth of all prisoners Who urgently need treatment receive
it, and the treatment they do receive is inadequate. Annual cost to
incarcerate One addict: $25,900. Annual cost to provide long-term
residential treatment for one addict: $6,800. Cost to decrease U.S. cocaine
consumption 1 percent by eradicating sources of supply: $783 million. Cost
to decrease cocaine consumption 1 percent by increasing drug treatment: $34
million. Tax payer savings for every $1 invested in drug Treatment: $7.46.
How much your insurance premium might go up if treatment for addiction were
covered equally With other illnesses: 0.2%.

Imagine that your child has a potentially fatal disease that's eating him
alive.

Now imagine that the only way to get him the treatment he needs is to have
him thrown in jail.

Even today, June Gertig, a lawyer living in Herndon, Virginia, can't quite
describe how heartsick she felt when she had her drug- and alcohol-addicted
son - then just 14 - arrested. "How do you feel when police - that you
called! - come and take your kid away in handcuffs, and all your neighbors
are watching?" she says. 'When you're wondering if your kid is going to be
raped in jail? When you honestly do not know if you have done the right
thing or some-thing so wrong that God will hold you in his sights forever?"

Like most of us, Gertig had never given much thought to U.S. drug policy.

She and her husband, Joseph, a social science researcher, live in a
well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C., and their two older children
survived adolescence with no more than the usual bumps and scrapes. When
their youngest turned unhappy and defiant in junior high, flying into rages
and refusing to follow even basic rules, the worried couple took him to
individual and family therapy and had him evaluated for depression. Even
after they'd caught him drinking and smoking marijuana, they didn't want to
believe that substance abuse was the source of his problems. And none of
the therapists they consulted even raised the possibility. "We were
exhausted, angry, ashamed, and utterly terrified"' Gertig says. "But drug
addiction is so stigmatized, many parents prefer to believe their child has
a mental illness."

Meanwhile, their son was getting worse. He screamed obscenities at his
parents and punched holes in walls. He rarely attended school and got into
fights when he did. As his world fell apart, so did his family's. "Terrible
things came to seem normal," Gertig says. "I used to say, 'But at least
he's never hit me,' as if that were a measure of success. You look back,
and you can't believe what you put up with."

Finally, a therapist advised the Gertigs to send their son, by now a ninth
grader, to a drug and alcohol treatment program. But they soon discovered
that getting successful treatment is extraordinarily difficult. Programs
are scarce and vary widely in philosophy and quality, so finding the right
one can be a matter of trial and error. And treatment is expensive. Most
health insurance plans either refuse to cover it or offer minimal coverage,
limiting life-time benefits to $5,000, say, versus $1 million for other
illnesses. And treatment often doesn't work the first, second, or even
third time, particularly with adolescents. Within just a few months, the
Gertigs had liquidated their retirement accounts paying for four different
programs, including a one-week hospital stay, an intensive daily outpatient
program, and 30 days in a facility for addicts.

In treatment, the boy gradually revealed how out of control his young life
had become. Besides using large quantities of alcohol and marijuana, he had
taken psychedelics and committed a number of petty crimes his family
prefers not to discuss. Yet no single program seemed to work. Periods of
good behavior were followed by relapses and further treatment attempts.
"Looking back, I can see that things improved, slowly and sometimes
erratically," Gertig says. "But at the time it seemed like a roller coaster
of dashed expectations."

The desperate couple decided their son needed a longer stay in a
residential program, but they'd already spent more than $50,000 trying to
help him and couldn't afford the $30,000 or more that private treatment
would cost. Luckily, their county is one of the few in Virginia to offer a
publicly subsidized six-month residential program for adolescents. But -
like most public programs - this one had a long waiting list, six months or
more. The only way to get their son admitted sooner was to have a juvenile
court judge send him there.

The Gertigs by now knew enough about their son's activities to have grounds
for calling the police, but first they had to struggle with their own anger
and fear. "To get your kid what he needs to get better, you have to send
him to jail-imagine if they did that for diabetes!" Gertig exclaims. "But
at least my husband and I are white, middle-class professionals, and we
were fairly sure that if we turned in our son he would get treatment,
rather than prison time. If we were poor or black, I'm not sure we would
have taken the risk."

Even so, a treatment bed for their son didn't open up until three months
after his arrest. Their son was furious about being left in custody during
the long wait. "I didn't think we could keep him safe anywhere else,"
Gertig says. She was right to be scared. Six weeks after he was arrested,
he was sent home under house arrest (against the Gertigs' wishes) to wait
out the next month and a half. Despite his parents' vigilance, he managed
during that time to "huff" inhalants to the point of unconsciousness.

But when he finally did enter treatment, it worked - because of the longer
stay, Gertig believes, and a better fit between patient and program. Now
19, her son has completed high school, is working full-time, and is going
to college at night. He and his parents are proud of his recovery, but June
Gertig is still angry. "The way our country deals with substance abuse is
madness," she says. "We spend our resources on criminalizing drug use, not
preventing it or helping people recover from it.”

A DISEASE OR A CRIME?

For June Gertig, an important moral of her family's story is this:
Addiction is a disease that can be treated successfully.

There is extensive research showing that chemical dependency is remarkably
similar to diabetes, high blood pressure, and other chronic ailments often
caused by a combination of poor choices (unhealthy diet, smoking, lack of
exercise) and genetic susceptibility. Recent studies show that addiction
alters the biochemistry of the brain and that relapses are the predictable
result, not of moral collapse, but of those biochemical changes. Further,
when addiction is treated as a chronic brain disease, those changes can be
reversed. Last year, a group of prominent doctors affiliated with Brown
University presented conclusive evidence that addiction can be controlled
with a mix of medication, therapy, and behavioral changes - and that such
treatment works at least as well as similar strategies for treating
diabetes and other chronic diseases.

Whatever the scientific evidence, addiction still looks to many Americans
more like a crime than a disease. Of the $17 billion federal anti-drug
budget, only 20 percent is spent to help people stop using drugs; most of
the rest goes to law enforcement. Drug arrests have pushed the U.S. jail
and prison population to over 1.8 million people, of whom an estimated 1.2
million are alcohol or drug abusers. Few of these people are violent,
high-level dealers: More than 90 percent of all drug arrests are of
nonviolent offenders guilty only of possession or of dealing small
quantities to support their own habits.

While some families, like June Gertig's, must criminalize their loved ones
in order to help them, many more people in the grip of addiction are being
slammed with criminal penalties instead of getting help.

When he was 19, Tim Bobby of Valparaiso, Indiana, discovered that his
heroin sniffing had slipped into full-fledged addiction. He and his mother,
Susan, had been trying to arrange for treatment when one of his friends
called, begging for help obtaining drugs. It turned out to be a police
setup, and Tim was arrested with two packets of heroin, each about the size
of a pea. Though he'd never been in trouble with the law before, he was
charged with felony drug dealing and threatened with 20 years in prison.
Susan Bobby, a systems analyst and single mom - had enough savings to hire
a good attorney - who got the sentence reduced to three years in prison
(which Tim has just finished serving), plus four years probation.

Unlike most prisoners (see "Treat or Punish? Do the Math," next page), Tim
managed to get treatment behind bars and began working on a college degree.
But his status as a convicted felon will brand him for life and bar him
from realizing his ambition of becoming a lawyer. His drug offense will
also disqualify him for federal college loans. "This isn't the way to deal
with a kid's drug problem,' his mother fumes. “It's just a jobs program for
jail guards.'”

THE REAL CASUALTIES OF THE DRUG WAR

Paradoxically, the get-tough approach has had little impact on the nation's
drug problem. Over the past decade, the rate at which people are using and
becoming addicted to drugs has not changed. And illegal drugs, says Ernest
Drucker, editor of the medical journal Addiction Research, are "cheaper,
more powerful, and more available today than at any time in the past 25
years."

Even more alarming, the number of young people experimenting with heroin
and other hard drugs has been rising steadily." By the time they leave high
school, almost 50 percent of kids will have tried at least one illegal
drug," says Kendra Wright of Family Watch, which monitors the impact of
drug policies. Criminalizing drug use, she argues, just compounds its
consequences. "Does it make sense to ruin their lives over a few moments of
rebellion and poor judgment?"

Andy Baltzell of Yukon, Oklahoma, was caught with $90 worth of amphetamines
after a friend who asked for help getting drugs turned out to be a police
informant. The slight, sweet-faced 21-year-old had been arrested once
before for being in a car with someone else who had a small quantity of
drugs in his pocket; his second offense got him sent to prison for 15
years. "He wouldn't ever talk about it, but I believe he was gang-raped in
there," says his mother, Judy Chancellor. He attempted suicide twice, then
was moved to a maximum-security facility where he often refused to leave
his cell for weeks at a time. He was released after four years for good
behavior, but his ordeal left him deeply depressed. "He said, 'I don't feel
like a man anymore,'" his mother recalls bitterly. "Ten months after he got
out, he took his life."

Chancellor now lobbies for mandatory treatment instead of jail for
low-level drug offenders. "It's been six years since my son's passing, but
I don't want to let society, lawmakers, any of them forget," she says. "The
real crime is what we're doing to nonviolent offenders like Andy."

While criminal penalties aren't discouraging drug use, they are
discouraging some users from getting help, even when it's a matter of life
and death. As a result, drug-related deaths have quadrupled over the past
20 years. One victim was Jared Lowry of Houston, who, like Tim Bobby,
thought he could experiment with heroin without becoming addicted. When
Jared tried to get help, his family discovered that their insurance didn't
cover a suitable program, so Jared tried to quit on his own. Hoping to make
a fresh start, he moved to Austin, Texas, found a job, and seemed to be
doing well.

Then, just a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, his mother,
Jennifer Daley, got the kind of phone call every parent dreads: Her son had
died of a heroin overdose. She later learned that Jared's relapse probably
wouldn't have been fatal if he'd gotten medical attention. But instead of
calling 911, his friends had driven him around town for several hours
trying to revive him. "They drove right by a hospital, but they didn't take
him in," Daley says. "I think they were too scared of what might happen to
them."

Daley might have tried to get her son's friends prosecuted for his death.
Instead, she is working with Family Watch on a memorial for Jared and other
young overdose victims in Houston this fall, an event she hopes will draw
attention to the dangers of punitive drug laws. "What's the point of making
other parents unhappy by taking their kids away?" she says. "I'd rather try
to change people's minds about the billions of dollars our country is
wasting on policies that don't protect our children."

THE VALUE OF A LIFE

Maia Szalavitz, now a New York writer and television producer, is a former
cocaine and heroin addict whose drug use spanned the mid-1980s, when AIDS
was in the headlines but little was being done to help addicts avoid the
terrible risk they took each time they used a dirty needle. She points out
that one of the most insidious costs of drug war is the continuing spread
of AIDS and hepatitis C by addicts sharing needles, which they often feel
compelled to do because of laws against needle possession. Needle exchange
programs, which provide drug users with clean needles, have been proven by
a series of government funded studies to dramatically reduce the spread of
disease without increasing drug use. There are now 113 such programs
nationwide, but many politicians - including President Bill Clinton -
oppose them, arguing that needle exchanges send a 'soft on drugs' message.

Szalavitz did not contract HIV during her years of use, but she knows her
escape was a narrow one resents the assumption behind opposition to
programs like needle exchange - that addicts are expendable, that they will
never recover. “I was outraged that in their eyes my life meant so little.”

Jo Anne Engelbert, a college professor in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, says
her son is a casualty of such callousness. He struggled with drugs during
his school years, went into treatment after he graduated from high school,
relapsed, and took off for the other side of the country. "He realized if
he stayed here he was going to break my heart," she says. After five years
in California, much of it spent living on the streets, he called his mother
and asked her to help him reclaim his life. Fortunately, she'd continued to
pay for his health insurance, which covered a second course of treatment.
Her son has been clean and sober for ten years, but as a result of sharing
needles he is HIV positive.

Engelbert recently told her story at a rally protesting New Jersey governor
Christine Todd Whitman's ban on needle exchange. "I spoke about the horror
of a person wanting to give up addiction and coming out of this season of
hell with HIV," she says. "I talked about how politicians like Whitman are
willing to write off huge numbers of people who are dehumanized, demonized,
and allowed to die. After I spoke, my son threw his arms around me and we
both cried."

NO MORE SECRETS

One reason we may be slow to recognize the worth of these young addicts is
that we rarely hear the success stories of people like Szalavitz. Secrecy
is a tradition in the recovery movement, but it comes at a high cost. In
1996, a bill was introduced in Congress that would have required health
plans to cover addiction and mental illnesses equally with other medical
conditions. The mental health part of the bill passed easily, but parity
for drug treatment was quickly jettisoned. "We were told that the mental
health side got 3,000 phone calls," recalls Robin Ihara, friend of Gertig's
who'd gone through a similar ordeal with one of her sons. "The substance
abuse side got three." Recovered addicts and their families weren't seen as
vote-casting constituency.

That is beginning to change. In the fall of 1997, Gertig helped found the
Substance Abuse and Addiction Recovery Alliance (SAARA), which quickly
attracted several hundred members across northern Virginia and was among 18
fledgling groups in 15 states to receive a grant last year from the federal
Center for Substance Abuse Treatment.

Virginia may soon become the sixth state to pass a bill requiring insurers
to cover drug treatment, thanks at least in part to support from SAARA
members. (At press time, the bill needed only the governor's signature.)
And though she is not a demonstrative person, June Gertig agreed to testify
last summer before the U.S. Senate in support of a similar federal bill.
While her story is one most families would probably prefer to keep to
themselves, Gertig has come to believe that openness is essential to
solving the drug problem. "If I can't say who I am, then I'm encouraging
the stigma surrounding addiction instead of fighting it," she says. "People
need to know that when they talk about addiction, they are talking about my
family and people like us."