THERE ARE NO 'SAFE' NEIGHBORHOODS

A few lifetimes ago, I was the editor of the daily newspaper in Holyoke,
another old mill town where the jobs were going away, whites were selling
their homes and leaving in droves, arson had given the city the nickname
Holysmokes, and cocaine and heroin were sold openly on many street corners.

But I lived 10 miles north of the city in a safe little town, where almost
everyone was white, had jobs and the freedom to cluck their tongues at what
was happening in the city as they drove home to neighborhoods they knew
were "safe."

I know because I was one of them.

I had a wife, two beautiful daughters in the neighborhood elementary
school, taught Sunday school classes at a historic old Congregational
church on the common, hosted backyard barbecues and did a lot of volunteer
work.

Perfect, right?

Ten years later, my wife was dead, my younger daughter was in the court
system and everything I thought I knew about my world was wrong.

Drugs had found us.

Andrea, my wife, had worked in a dental office. She found a way to call in
prescriptions for painkillers for herself and got so badly addicted that,
by the end of her life, she was spending thousands and thousands of
dollars of our personal savings to buy drugs from street-level dealers.

She was in and out of treatment programs for several years. The day after
her last 30-day residential program ended, she swallowed two vials of
painkillers and died on her 46th birthday.

Our daughter Kate, devastated by her mother's suicide, ran off the day of
the funeral, and for months her sister and I didn't know where she was. She
found relief in crack cocaine, formaldehyde-soaked marijuana, and heaven
knows what else. She and her infant daughter lived in an unheated
apartment with some "friends" through a bitter Kansas City winter, often
going days between meals.

There is more to tell, as anyone who has watched those they love be
consumed by an addiction knows, but that is enough. You need only know
that, although I once was certain that my family was safe from the
epidemic of illegal drugs, the truth is that we were as vulnerable as any
of the poor who crowded Holyoke's tenements in the neighborhoods that were
the center of the drug trade, the gangs and the violence that all but
destroyed a once-proud community.

And so when New Bedford Mayor Fred Kalisz and School Superintendent Mike
Longo and others first presented their plan for a voluntary drug-testing
program to be administered through the schools, I had more than a
journalist's interest.

I didn't like the thought that the public schools, for some children the
only refuge from the disorder of the rest of their lives, would become a
place where the outside world's troubles would so readily find them. It
seemed so...invasive...and so outside the real mission of the schools,
which is to teach our sons and daughters the academic and living skills
they will need to be productive citizens.

Then I thought about my daughter, who today is a hard-working and happy
mother of three and glad to have me share her story. And I asked myself
whether, knowing what I know, there were anything I wouldn't have done to
have prevented the worse trouble that drugs would mean for her.

I don't think the mayor's plan will make much of a difference in how many
children in New Bedford ultimately use drugs, but it might let one or two
or three parents know their children are in trouble while there's still a
chance to help.

And I know that somewhere in this city is a girl just like Kate, just
waiting for drugs to find her first.