DRUGS, MORE THAN RACE, AT CORE OF MURDERS

First police denied race or lifestyle played a role in their reluctance to
call the strange deaths and disappearances of 10 black women here the work
of a serial killer or in the seemingly slow progress of the investigation.

"It makes no difference if they are black prostitutes or green mothers,"
Peoria County Sheriff Mike McCoy told the Chicago Tribune in November.
"We're doing our best to solve these cases."

Now prosecutors seem to be denying that race was behind Larry Bright's
alleged choice of victims. Peoria County State's Attorney Kevin Lyons and
Stewart Umholtz, his counterpart in Tazewell County, told reporters the
deaths weren't racially motivated. However, Lyons chose to release an odd
piece of information involving Bright's penchant for sex with black women
and watching pornographic films featuring black actors. Bright, 38, is white.

Race, it seems, is both everything and nothing in this tale. But drugs
trump all.

Bright, like his victims, has a history of drug abuse. He is jailed and
allegedly has confessed to eight murders, having been charged with just
one. Authorities have dug up burned body parts in his backyard. Still, it
is too soon to deny the myriad and complicated roles race and lifestyle
play in the wounded lives of the victims and the suspect, too soon to
exhale a sigh of relief.

Drug use, more than race and sex, oozes from every pore of this tragedy:
the lingering questions about who killed two of the dead women if Bright
did not, the possibility of yet more unimaginable news, the prospects of a
death-penalty trial, and the undeniable fear and grief and sorrow of it all.

As the numbers of dead and missing women mounted, many asked repeatedly,
how many dead black women does it take for police to say there's a serial
killer at work? But before Larry Bright, there were convicted serial killer
Joseph Miller and Arlie Ray Davis, who was convicted of one murder but is
believed to have been responsible for more. Most of their victims, though
white, also led lives dotted with drug abuse sustained by prostitution.

How many serial killers does it take to say, "Hey, there's got to be
another way to look at this?"

It is taking dozens of dead women, gang wars, broken families, dispirited
neighborhoods and budget-busting prisons to challenge our notions about
responding to the drug scourge beyond a war on drugs or criminal punishment.

It took exactly one student, firing a gun in the hallways of Woodruff High
School, for parents and school officials to reach common ground on the use
of metal detectors. But the metal detectors aren't likely to reduce the
numbers of guns on the street or a student's access to them. They are meant
simply to reduce the likelihood of a student bringing a gun into school.

That is known as reducing the harm, a practice that's finding its way into
prevention and substance abuse rehabilitation programs. The going theory in
drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs is that users find their way to
rehab and sobriety only after they hit "rock bottom," whatever that may be.

That Bright's victims did not get that chance led at least a few to ask,
"But what do we do in the meantime?" The question presents a challenge. The
answer lies in the wide gray area between black and white, but it boils
down to a community as willing to look at ways to reduce the harm of drug
abuse as it is to see a serial killer punished.