COPS CLEAN UP THE YARD: CRITICS HIT CITY EFFORT

A drug treatment advocate and several vagrants who live in and around
Boston Common and the Public Garden say a police crackdown on druggies that
got under way in earnest yesterday is not solving the problem, instead
simply pushing it to other neighborhoods.

"Moving people around does not solve their addiction," said Gail Enman,
executive director of the Cambridge and Somerville Program for Alcohol and
Drug Abuse Rehabilitation. "They carry their addiction around with them."
Police were out in force in the Common and Garden, largely in response to
Monday's Herald expose of open-air drug activity in the premier Hub
greenspaces. Undercover officers strolled in pairs, police radios and
handcuffs tucked under T-shirts; mounted police staged horse trailers in
one of the Common's worst locales for drug use, where last week brazen
crack fiends smoked in broad daylight. "Once you squeeze the tube of
toothpaste, it really is a dilemma," said Enman, who estimates 90 percent
of the homeless her program treats have substance abuse problems. "If you
move the problem, it just sprouts out someplace else." Even as the police
push was on, junkies still congregated at St. Paul's Church across
from Park Street T station on Tremont Street. Asked where addicts are
headed now, a man said, "Who knows." Police on horseback questioned
anyone who seemed to be camped out in the park. But none of the addicts or
dealers photographed by the Herald over the past two weeks was spotted
yesterday on the Common. One woman stood by a tree while two
mounted officers and three cops arriving in cruisers donned gloves to
search her bags for signs of drugs. Police put the woman in a cruiser and
shuttled her to the Pine Street Inn.

"Some people are just so messed up there's nothing you can do," said one
mounted officer who helped in the search. Moments later, a few yards up
the path, the two mounted police stopped to question another homeless man
partially hidden behind trees.

Meanwhile in the Public Garden, in nearly the identical spot where John P.
Gagliardi Jr. was photographed taking a fatal hit of heroin on Aug. 25, a
photographer caught two liberal arts students sharing marijuana while
listening to music on an Apple laptop computer.

When told about the overdose death, the Herald's follow-up reports and the
subsequent crackdown, the inhalers were unphased.

"Yeah, but this is a joint," said one, a literature and English major, who
copped to toking up in the Garden with his pal once a week. "It's
very refreshing. We do it to like take in nature," he said. Neither saw
anything wrong with smoking marijuana in an area replete with families and
children.

"We're not out here to bother anybody," one student said.