EDITORIAL OBSERVER

AS ADDICTS GO PUBLIC

When I flew off to Minnesota on Dec. 4, 1988, to spend that Christmas and
the New Year with a bunch of people addicted to crack cocaine, heroin,
alcohol and prescription drugs, I scheduled a morning flight. I didn't want
to miss the cocktail hour the night before. I told no one but my wife and
daughter where I was going. I just disappeared. I paid Delta with a credit
card, and my medical insurance paid for the drug treatment and
rehabilitation center. I wasn't about to tell anyone that I was going
there. I liked Rob Roys at the end of the day, a good cabernet, brandy
after dinner and icy Scotch to take to bed. I wasn't an alcoholic. I was
just exhausted with my whole life. That's why I went for treatment. That,
and the fact that I could do it in secret, anonymously, among others who
were anonymous too. "Hi, I'm Steve." "I'm Michael." "I'm Jane." "I'm
Felicia." "I'm Brad." I listened to their stories. They listened to mine.
One of the addicts there, I discovered, as weeks of painfully sober therapy
progressed, was me. Another one, making that same discovery in a different
place that year, was Bill Moyers's eldest son, William Cope.

There are tens of millions of us in recovery in the United States. We are
the lucky ones -- sober today: the products of an expanding system of
treatment and knowledge that began some 60 years ago with the founding of
Alcoholics Anonymous by two desperate drunks named Dr. Bob and Bill. We
have a compulsion, we learned -- a progressive disease. There is no cure:
just sobriety or death. I know four people who have died in the last few
months. "That's my daddy," a little girl kept saying, pointing at the coffin.

Many of us have been watching, for three nights this week, as the series on
addiction that Bill Moyers was inspired to produce by his son's struggle
has unfolded on PBS. The people in it who tell their stories remind me of
those I was with: male and female, Christian, Jewish and Muslim,
African-American, Asian and Hispanic, affluent or broke, native-born or not.

Science, the series tells us, knows more now than it did 10 years ago. It
can watch as craving lights up an addict's brain. It is getting closer to
knowing why addicts are different from other people, why we need chemicals
to feel good about life, why 80 percent of us relapse and take them again,
even after we know that it means death. It is a compulsion rooted deeper
than where reason lives. Treatment -- and hundreds, thousands of meetings
of Alcoholics or Narcotics or Cocaine Anonymous -- can temper and tame the
craving. It is powerful to see a series intended to tell the culture what
so many of us have come to know.

But it is poignant, too. Many of the health insurance policies that paid to
send us away for treatment no longer do. In the last five years, half the
treatment centers have closed.

But worse than the problems of middle-class addicts are the problems of the
poor, because what the public sees first is not their addiction but their
crime. It scares us. I have seen my 85-year-old neighbor in Baltimore
beaten to death for his old car.

A heroin addict has been arrested. We want to make war on drugs, and to put
violent drug-crazed criminals in prison so we will be safe. But I have seen
guards trade drugs for money in prison, and have known inmates to get drunk
on death row in midafternoon.

Eighty percent of the people in prison have histories of drug abuse, and
only 13 percent of prison inmates are in some kind of treatment therapy. It
should be more.

Most of the addicts in prison will be back out. They will have learned
nothing without treatment in prison, and in probation as a follow-up.

Public understanding seems to be growing. What is remarkable is who is
making the argument that addicts need treatment. On TV this week, and
increasingly around the country, it is the population of recovering addicts
themselves.

They want to influence the nation's drug policy. Having grown strong in
anonymity, they are now going public for reform.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times