PROMISE THROWN AWAY

Two decades after cocaine killed U-Md. basketball star Len Bias, a
candlelight vigil spotlights the toll of drug abuse.

A school counselor who watched cocaine ravage his community.

A stunned brother who still can't believe it claimed his twin.

A crusading mother who for 20 years has preached against the drug
that killed the son who was a University of Maryland basketball star
on the eve of professional greatness.

Twenty years ago, the death of Len Bias horrified the sports world
and was a major factor in reduced recreational cocaine use among
young people. It still reverberates across the Washington region.

"Many, many people have come to me throughout the [last] 20 years and
have told me that the day Len died was the day they stopped using
cocaine," Lonise Bias said last night of her son. "I've had people
stop me in the street and tell me that. They still do, telling me
they've remained clean since that time and that it was the turning
point in their lives."

Last night, she joined school choirs, drug enforcement agents and
hundreds of grieving relatives of other victims in a tearful
candlelight commemoration in Arlington of those killed by the scourge of drugs.

Called a Vigil for Lost Promise, the ceremony outside the
headquarters of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration came 11
days before the anniversary of Bias's death on June 19, 1986.

He was 22 and had just been tapped by the Boston Celtics -- only the
second player picked in the whole NBA draft -- when he succumbed to
an overdose in his Washington Hall dorm suite on campus. Pathologists
later said he had ingested a large amount of cocaine in unusually
pure form and died of "cocaine intoxication."

"His death woke the nation up," Lonise Bias said. "We got on the
ball, and we started a lot of programs, and a lot of things happened
to prevent drug use with young people.

"I believe Len has truly done more in death than he ever could have
done in life."

Government officials who have tracked cocaine use over the years agreed.

"Traditionally, cocaine was considered a pretty benign, safe drug,"
Nora D. Volkow, director of the federal government's National
Institute on Drug Abuse, said yesterday. "In fact it was glamorized
in the '70s and the beginning of the '80s. The death of Len Bias
alerted the community in general that this drug was not a safe one."

In 1986, the institute's surveys recorded a cocaine use rate among
12th-graders of 12.7 percent, she said. "That's extremely high . . .
one in eight."

After his death, rates plunged. By 1992, the rate had dropped to 3.1
percent, she said. "Sometimes, you need a sentinel event like this
one to alert everybody."

Alas, she said, public attention can be short-lived. "All of that
generation of kids that were exposed to the death of Len Bias . . .
were very much protected," she said. "But then a generation gap
happens, and the next one was not."

The 12th-grade use rate started back up, and doubled to 6.2 percent
in 1999, she said. It's currently about 5 percent.

"I think the reason we're still seeing the numbers that we're seeing
today is that we have not gotten in and really fought the good
fight," Lonise Bias said last night. "We've done this, and we've done
that. We have a grant here and a program there. But what we have to
do is work with our young people like it's in intensive care."

If Bias's death caused a drop in cocaine use, experts say, it had
little impact on the great crack cocaine epidemic of later years,
when the drug became available in a cheaper, much more addictive and
more hazardous form.

Van Quarles, a supervisory special agent with the Washington field
division of the DEA, said crack democratized cocaine use in the
1980s. Crack, which is smoked, was far less expensive than powdered
cocaine, which is most often snorted.

"Back in the early '80s when you talked cocaine, it was more
expensive," he said. An ounce of powdered cocaine could be a couple
of thousand dollars, he said. "A certain level or group of people
could afford it -- the party people, the pretty people. . . . Crack
made it affordable for anyone. You could get a five-dollar rock,
10-dollar rock, whatever. It wasn't just limited to people who could
spend a lot of money. It made it available to pretty much anyone."

Crack use exploded in the inner city, sparking gang wars, killings,
the proliferation of crack houses -- where it was sold as if from
popcorn stands -- and a generation of crack addicts.

Art Smith, 53, a drug counselor for the New York City school system,
watched it claim scores of young people in the city, including a
sister who became a crack addict and died in the 1980s.

It was "horrible, horrible, horrible," he said last night as he
waited for the ceremony to begin.

Now, he said, the community has the legacy of grown-up children born
to crack-addicted mothers, called crack babies.

"We have them in the schools now," he said. "First of all, they
cannot focus. They're very fidgety. They're very violent a lot of the
time. And it's hard to deal with them and hard to control them. And,
also, what you have are a lot of grandmas trying to raise those kids
because the mothers are all gone, and Grandma can't do it."

Although cocaine use has subsided somewhat, there were still 5.7
million people across the country who abused it in 2004, according to
the most recent statistics from the federal Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration. The year before, about a
million people reported having tried it for the first time.

Leah Young, a spokeswoman for the agency, said first-time cocaine use
has been rebounding after rising to well over 1 million people in the
mid-1980s and then falling to 634,000 in 1993. It reached 825,000 in
1996 and 917,000 in 1999.

It's not clear why. "Our data tell us what is happening; they don't
tell us why," Young said. "You're still getting a million people a
year starting to use this stuff. People never learn. People just don't get it."

Michael Houbrick, 46, a real estate agent from Spokane, Wash., knows
the current statistics firsthand.

As he stood in the crowd in Arlington last night, he said his
identical twin brother, Matthew, a television producer, died of a
cocaine overdose Nov. 14 in a hotel room in Chicago.

Houbrick said he had no idea his brother used drugs.

"Not pot, not cocaine, nothing," Houbrick said. "That's why it was so
hard to take. From the police I found out he ordered chicken fingers,
french fries and a Diet Coke."

Houbrick shrugged. "And then he took cocaine," Houbrick said. "And
for me, it's very difficult to believe that. But that's what
happened. That's what the toxicology report and the autopsy showed:
cocaine poisoning."