A $20 BAG, AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

THE last time Louis Carrasquillo was arrested, on Sutphin Boulevard
in South Jamaica, Queens, he was 45 years old. It was 1995, and he
had been getting high for 35 years; he started sniffing glue when he
was 10, and was injecting heroin by 13. He had been arrested before,
and spent time in state prison in the 1980s for the criminal sale of
a controlled substance, though he said he sold drugs only when he
needed money to support his habit.

On that day, he was selling again, holding six $10 bags of crack
cocaine. Mr. Carrasquillo sold two of the bags to an undercover
police officer. He went to trial and was convicted, and, for the $20
deal, a judge gave him 12 1/2 to 25 years.

So began one man's experience with the Rockefeller drug laws, the
statutes requiring long sentences for nonviolent and even first-time
offenders, which made New York's policy among the toughest in the
country. The laws took effect in 1973 and were eased somewhat in 2004
and 2005, around the time, coincidentally, that Mr. Carrasquillo was
finally getting clean after nine years of heroin use behind prison walls.

There is talk of ending the laws. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon
Silver, is a vocal advocate of changing them, as is Governor
Paterson. In February, a state commission recommended allowing judges
more leeway to sentence offenders to treatment programs.

In one sense, this prospect comes too late for Mr. Carrasquillo, who
was released from prison last April, having served his 12 1/2 years.
But he will be watching keenly what happens in Albany, he said in a
recent interview, and he thinks that his experiences may be instructive.

Mr. Carrasquillo was speaking from Samaritan Village, a residential
drug treatment center in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, where
he lives. He checked into the center the day after he left prison. He
has been doing so well, administrators say, that he is training to be
a substance abuse counselor, at a Samaritan Village branch in Midtown.

Dressed in black corduroys, a gray button-down shirt and white
Reeboks, and looking for all the world like a retiree, Mr.
Carrasquillo, a 59-year-old Brooklyn native, made no excuses for the
person he was for most of his life. Though he sometimes held onto
jobs -- the longest as a truck driver -- he admits that he was an
addict, a thief and a batterer of women.

"I was uncaring, selfish, self-centered, mean, spiteful," he said.
"That was me." Of the heroin, he added: "It just made me an animal. I
didn't care about anything. My own family, I didn't care about. All I
cared about was to get those drugs."

Yet there is another truth: Prison did not help.

It did not help him stop using drugs -- they were readily available
on the inside, he said -- and it did not make him a better person. In
fact, he said, it made him and many other inmates worse. His
cellmates included a double murderer and a man who had been arrested
for possession of more than 1,000 pounds of cocaine. (Both were
serving 25 years to life, roughly double Mr. Carrasquillo's sentence
for selling $20 worth of crack.)

"It's not a deterrent, because they come out bitter, angry, confused,
and they just go back where they left off," he said of prison.
"There, you're so busy thinking about survival that you don't have
time to make changes in yourself."

What finally enabled him to leave the drugs behind was the ability
that he found in treatment to speak openly and fearlessly, first in a
tiny addiction program he entered near the end of his sentence, and
later at Samaritan Village, where he considers the other residents a
second family.

Mr. Carrasquillo said he was thinking about getting treatment in the
days before he was arrested. Whether that would have happened is
unknown. The only certainty is what happened next: a lost decade
behind bars and, much later, in treatment programs, a measure of peace.

Before, he said, heroin was his closest companion. Now he can be
around for his parents, and he can help other addicts. And at long
last, he has a life of his own. He has been clean since April 4,
2005, and that is still a source of wonder.

"Today it's 10:30, and I didn't get high," Mr. Carrasquillo said.
"That's a miracle."