THE DRUG ODYSSEY OF A SENATOR'S SON

Doug MacLean Tells Of His 25-Year Addiction - And His Recovery

During almost three decades in office, William Q. "Biff" MacLean earned a
reputation as one of the state's most influential politicians. The former
state Senate mjority leader made things happen.

But even this consummate power broker could not make the problems in his own
family go away.

All three of his children became drug addicts.

This is the story of the senator's son Doug, who abused heroin for almost 25
years before flushing the drugs out his system for the last time in a jail
cell five years ago.

"You get to a point where you don't realize how you got there," says Doug,
who decided to talk about his addiction and his recovery in the hope it
might inspire others.

Poised and gregarious with blue eyes, short dark hair, a wide smile and a
ready, rolling laugh, he came to recent interview wearing pressed gray
flannel pants, a jacket and tailored wool overcoat that mark him as a young
professional on the way up.

Yet this was the same person who checked into New Bedford's Ash Street Jail
in early 1994. A snapshot taken that day shows tangled black hair and
blood-shot eyes staring vacantly from a gaunt face.

"I started out at 17 shooting dope and the next thing you know I was 37,
helpless, homeless and destitute, wondering how in the hell did I get here?"
he says. This story has two morals:

Heroin addiction does not recognize class and economic boundaries -- it hits
the privileged as well as the poor.

And once the addiction takes hold, it can't be cured by money or influence
- -- drug abuse in his family left even one of the state's most powerful
politicians powerless.

Outsiders can show the way, but ultimately only the addict can cure himself.

"There is hope for people. I want them to know there is a way out," says
Doug. "You can lead a horse to water. You can't make him drink, but you can
make him thirsty. That's the point -- to make them thirsty, to let them know
there's another life."

The first time Doug MacLean tried heroin, he could not stick the needle into
his arm himself. A friend did it, while the squeamish 17-year-old turned his
head away. The initial prick hurt. But the physical pain only lasted for a
second as the potent drug pulsed to his brain and took over.

He quickly overcame his fear of needles for pragmatic reasons. When he asked
someone else to inject him, he had to share with that person, which meant
less drugs for him.

An active child who loved boats and ice hockey and was never at a loss for
friends, Doug suffers from a learning disability called dyslexia. The
dyslexia made reading and writing difficult for Doug. Held back in school as
a result, he felt stupid and worthless.

He drifted away from academics and was introduced to drugs by friends. They
started out drinking. They tried speed, sometimes called crystal meth, so
they could stay up late and drink more. Soon they moved on to heroin.
Initially, Doug just shot up on weekends, but within two years he had
developed a daily habit and was overdosing on a regular basis.

"I didn't feel good about myself. I was insecure," he said. "When I used, it
got me out of myself."

Doug's initial exposure to drugs was smoking marijuana at the age of 13. His
mother, Martha Cardoza, recalls the first time she and her husband became
aware of the situation.

Doug had come home one evening acting strangely.

"Biff was so mad he grabbed Doug," she says.

Both parents yelled. They threatened to send Doug away to school. They
threatened to lock him in his room.

"We didn't know how to handle it," she says.

"And you know what's so strange is they were doing this anti-drug stuff in
school, showing the kids what happened if you got involved. And Biff was
very strong about telling them what to do. I just didn't
think we'd ever have this problem."

Ms. Cardoza, who was divorced from the senator in 1986 after 20 years of
marriage, took her son to weekly sessions with a psychologist. But he
defiantly announced he would not stop smoking pot. He also told them he was
too smart to try anything stronger.

"Then one thing led to another and before you know it, he had left home,"
she says. "Biff tried everything he could. We both did. But we didn't know
anything about drugs. I can't describe how awful it is. To not be able to do
anything is the worse thing a parent can go through."

To this day, her brain tells her there was nothing she could have done, but
her heart continues to ask why. Was it peer pressure? Was it teen-age
rebellion that got out of hand? She confesses to over-drinking herself at
times, but neither her family nor the senator's had a history of problems
with substance abuse.

Ms. Cardoza remembers how the young Doug doted on his grandparents, how he
loved to go out in boats, to play with his friends. One summer he went to
Ted Williams baseball camp. His grandfather, who had played minor league
ball in Rhode Island, lent Doug a baseball signed by Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

"He told Doug to be sure not to allow anyone to write on it. When Doug
showed it to Ted Williams, he offered to sign it, but Doug wouldn't let him.
Can you imagine?" she says, speculating how much a ball with those three
signatures might be worth today. "Doug did not want to disappoint his
grandfather."

But she also remembers that sometimes the young boy would get a sad look in
his eyes and stare off to someplace she couldn't reach. A slow learner, he
started to talk later than other children and occasionally had trouble
saying what he wanted.

Senator MacLean did not notice his son's drug use initially.

"Don't forget I was running businesses. I was involved with seven fishing
boats. I had a real estate business. I was in the legislature. I was so busy
trying to make a living, I couldn't see the forest for the trees."

Sitting in his wood-paneled insurance office on a rainy afternoon, he folded
his arms tightly over his chest as he looked down at a photo on his desk of
his three grown children and reflected back on their childhoods. The
normally confident senator spoke in soft tones, punctuating his conversation
with long pauses as he remembered.

A star athlete in high school, Senator MacLean was proud when his son turned
out to be a good hockey player. But the father who loved sports so much
never went to athletic events with Doug, or his two daughters.

"The shame of it is they always went with a man named Arthur Martin (a
family friend). I had the tickets but they went with him because I was in
the legislature."

Something close to regret slips into his voice, as he describes how he has
told young legislators serving after him to spend more time with their families.

"You think it's so glamorous," he says looking up at framed photographs of
him with various state and national politicians. "But it's only a short
time. Your family is going to be with you the rest of your life."

He wonders whether the pressure of being his son might have sparked some of
his children's rebellious behavior.

"I never considered myself a famous father. I just tried to be a father.
Whether I was a good one, only time will tell."

Doug says his father was rarely around during his childhood.

"You don't know what you don't know. I guess you can't miss something you
never had," he says.

"He really intimidated me. For one I didn't know him and for two, he was a
powerful person. He carries himself that way. It's especially difficult for
someone who isn't full of self-esteem and self-worth. I used to stutter
around him. I was scared to speak my mind."

He does not think his father noticed the changes in him as he grew older.

"One moment I was a cute little kid, the next I was in the seventh grade
with long hair and smoking dope. He probably wondered where did this guy
come from."

By the time he was 18, Doug already had been arrested a handful of times on
charges ranging from breaking and entering to illegal possession of drugs
and alcohol.

He dropped out of school when he was 16, around the time he moved out of his
parents' house.

Soon afterward, he went to Florida on a swordfishing boat. When he returned
to New Bedford a year later he got a job working in a fish market. Laid off
from that, he was hired at United Liquors, working in the warehouse and
making deliveries.

"I was drunk all the time."

Still using drugs, he was charged, along with three others, with stealing
$425 worth of brass fastenings and screws from a Fairhaven business. The
business owners and district attorney's office agreed to not to press
charges if Doug, who was then 18, joined the Navy. He served from 1976 to
1979 in Norfolk, Va.

When he got out he signed on as a deckhand with scallopers fishing out of
New Bedford. He also worked as an engineer and cook on the big boats. It was
a rough, tense life.

"Living-on-the-edge type of thing," says Doug. "It's not a pleasant life but
you make a decent living at it. It enables you to be very irresponsible."

Like his colleagues, when he came in from a long trip offshore flush with
thousands of dollars in cash, Doug gravitated to downtown bars where he
binged on alcohol and heroin before going back out to sea.

"You get hired in the barrooms, you get fired in the barrooms and you get
paid in the barrooms."

During the 14 years he worked on fishing vessels, Doug would flush the drugs
out of his system while offshore, then come back to port in New Bedford and
"blow my brains out" with heroin. Despite those dry periods at sea, his
habit intensified until no boat captain would hire him.

"They were tired of my bullshit."

He came back from his last fishing trip in January 1993.

Then he hit the bottom.

Doug met a prostitute named Joanne. The two moved around between motels and
boarding rooms. They spent one winter in an abandoned house, heating their
room with a two-burner electric cooking unit. They subsisted on a diet of
Little Debbie snacks and water, washed up in bathrooms around the city and
dressed in "our cleanest dirtiest clothes."

"All our money went for drugs," explains Doug.

When they woke up in the morning they shot up heroin and "nodded out" for a
few hours. At lunch time, they injected cocaine to wake back up and as the
afternoon wore on went back to heroin. After several days of nonstop
bingeing they would crash and sleep for 12 hours before starting the cycle
all over again.

The heroin "took all my problems away," says Doug. "The cocaine made me wide
awake and very paranoid."

Sometimes they did speedballs -- injecting cocaine and heroin
simultaneously. The cocaine provides a quick rush and the heroin takes the
edge off.

Doug's addiction was defined not by what it was, but by what it wasn't. He
got high, not necessarily because it felt good, but because it didn't feel
bad. A main focus was not to be "dope sick," the term addicts use for the
physical flu-like symptoms of withdrawal, the achy bones and muscles, the
runny nose, hot and cold chills and insomnia. Then there were the
psychological aches. Like a hung-over drinker the morning after a binge,
Doug was hit during his sober moments with flashes of remorse about the
course of his life.

"The more I did the worse I felt. The worse I felt the more I used. And the
more I used the more things I had to do to get the drugs."

Ever before one high ended, he was thinking about where to get money for the
next batch.

"You know it's going to run out, that the high will go away. My whole
existence was finding the ways and means to get more drugs. No matter how
much I had it was never enough," he says. "My whole world existed within a
few blocks' radius of New Bedford."

He would get drug money anyway he could, including robbing the men who
picked up Joanne. She would lure them in and when they took their pants off,
Doug would steal their clothes and their wallets. Once they found a grocery
list in a victim's pocket with money attached.

"I felt kind of bad for that guy," says Doug. "He left his house and his
wife and kids to go grocery shopping and now he has to explain to his wife
how he has no money and no groceries because he got robbed going for a hooker."

The amount of drugs they consumed depended on the money. A normal day might
bring in $500. Once they robbed $2,000 off one of Joanne's tricks.

"That only lasted two days," says Doug.

Once an angry victim came back and shot at the house while Doug and his
girlfriend huddled inside.

It could have been worse.

He considers himself extremely lucky not to have tested positive for HIV.

Doug's family and friends tried to help him cure his habit. His sisters
enrolled him in a 30-day detoxification program in New Hampshire, a former
girlfriend sent him to a clinic and a good friend picked him off the street
and took him to a program on the Cape. But each time, he could not live with
himself sober and relapsed.

"I felt my life would get better without drugs and it did get better, but I
felt lousy," he says. "After so many years of lying and manipulation, when I
took the drugs out of my system, I felt like a scared little kid. I lived in
fear to the point where I felt uncomfortable in my own skin."

When he fell back into his old habits, he made a conscious effort to stay
away from his family.

"Would you want your mother to see you that way?" he says, describing
himself as "probably the most polite junkie on the street."

Once while sitting stoned on the front step of a Fairhaven motel room, Doug
helped save the life of a woman whose boyfriend had slit her throat. She
came around the corner, holding a bedspread over her naked, bloody body.
Doug got a towel and told her to hold it against the pulsing red gash in her
neck. He yelled for someone to call 911 and went to the woman's room where
he found a naked man lying on the floor with a knife wound in his throat.

"The cops thought I had done it because I was covered in blood."

Both the man and the woman survived.

His family connections made Doug one of New Bedford's better-known addicts.
Each new arrest -- and there were quite a few -- made headlines in the local
newspaper.

The stories made his mother cringe.

"I didn't want to go to the grocery store or the hairdresser."

She remembers looking out her window one night and seeing Doug curled up
asleep on her front lawn.

"I wanted to bring him in, give him a bath and some food and tell him
everything would be OK," she says.

But despite her anguish and her belief that her son's lifestyle was killing
him, she did not go outside.

"I knew that wasn't the right thing to do. By then, I knew about the
importance of tough love. I knew I had to let him be."

The next morning when she looked out again, Doug was gone. She never found
out what happened or why he came to her house that night.

Senator MacLean also never saw his son during this period.

"It wasn't hell. It was worse than that," he says. "Everybody thought Doug
was in a situation where he was my son and that whenever he went to court, I
would get him out. That was never the case. I never picked up a hand for him."

He stops talking for a few seconds, and looks up at the ceiling. "I'm proud
of these kids," he adds about his three children, all of whom have recovered
from their addictions. "They've done it all on their own. I wasn't there.
Sometimes my temper was worse than anything else because I was so disgusted
with their attitude. Their success now is not because of me, it's because of
them."

The first-hand experience has given him new insight into the city's drug
problems.

"What I've learned from my kids is that you can spend a lot of money, but
nothing will work until an individual makes up his or her mind that they
want help and are ready to help themselves out."

He's learned something else, as well.

"Don't criticize people because it could happen to you."

One of the senator's daughters works in the correction system helping
inmates recovering from additions. The other is a guidance counselor for
elementary school students. Both declined to be interviewed for this story.

"If you only used one quote it might be that after all these years I still
want to be invisible. After 14 years, I'm still worried about the stigma of
drugs," says one.

April 25, 1994, Doug went to jail again, sentenced to five and a half months
on various drug-related charges, including heroin distribution and
possession. Over the years, he had been in and out of jail, but this was his
longest stint yet.

He does not remember much about checking in to New Bedford's aging Ash
Street lockup, addled as he was by the symptoms of withdrawal. But he
carries in his pocket a snapshot taken by a caseworker, as a reminder of
those times.

Doug obtained a copy of the snapshot after leaving jail. He was counseling
other addicts at the time and found many did not believe he had once been
one of them.

"It brought tears to my eyes the first time I looked at it," he says. "I'm
in jail looking at doing some time. I feel pretty hopeless and helpless. I'm
at the point of no return, thinking how am I going to change this situation
I'm in."

After years of abusing his body, Doug was tired. He was ready to try one
last time to clean up his life. He kept to himself in jail, weaning himself
from the heroin without any medical treatment.

His mother gave him some money and sent him a letter urging him to get his
life together.

His father never visited or wrote.

"I thought if I went there it might have an effect on the other prisoners.
But more importantly, I was thoroughly disgusted with him. So many people
along the way had tried to help him," the senator says.

When Doug's mother and a sister visited on his birthday they saw a new person.

"When he walked down the stairs, I couldn't believe it was him. He had
changed, gained weight. He looked so good," Ms Cardoza says.

His decision never to go back to drugs came quietly in a moment of
reflection soon after he had been released from jail. Living in Harmony
House, a halfway house in New Bedford's North End, he took a written test to
assess what he needed to learn in order to earn his high school equivalency
diploma. Halfway through, stuck for an answer, he almost gave up.

"I was stressed out, sweating with a headache, thinking do I really need
this. Then I just came to a realization: let's just get through the day," he
says. "I closed the book, then opened it and continued
on. Five years later I'm still in school." Soon after he left Harmony House,
Doug moved into low-income housing near New Bedford's Weld Square. His
mother helped furnish the apartment, buying pots and pans, a bedspread and
other accouterments.

He worked his way into a new life slowly. With no car, he depended on
friends for rides, or rode a bicycle. Up at 6 a.m. every day he went to
self-help group meetings and classes, volunteered with the drug treatment
and referral group Positive Action Against Chemical Addiction and spent his
evenings doing homework. He resisted the
temptation to return to lower Union Street and his fishing friends.

"Once I started achieving things its started snowballing. I realized if I
wanted to get a life I had to get off my ass and do something. You have to
learn how to feel good about yourself."

His studies paid off. Enrolled at Bristol Community College, he quickly
moved into the top ranks of his class, winning numerous awards, including
one for leadership, character and integrity. He was one of a handful of
community college students in the state chosen for USA Today's All USA
Academic Team. And he was elected as a student member of the board of trustees.

Both of Doug's parents came to his graduation in 1997. His mother cried as
she learned for the first time about the scholarships and awards won by the
son she thought she had lost.

"To this day I look at him in awe. I am so proud of him."

Doug went on to attend UMass Dartmouth where he is one year away from
earning a BA in sociology and criminal justice. A director on the board of
the New Bedford Council on Alcoholism, he also works part-time as an
alternative sentencing officer in Third District Court, helping place
criminals with addiction problems into treatment.

"I'm definitely my own person now and my accomplishments are due to what I'm
doing," he says. "You see me walking around and going to work in a suit. I
did the footwork."

And he has rebuilt ties with his father, who has become one of his son's
biggest boosters, along with most other people who come into contact with
Doug these days.

As he talks about his children, Senator MacLean's voice softens and he grins.

"Everytime I turn around someone is telling me about Doug."