SOLUTION REQUIRES MORE INPUT FROM HEALTH PROFESSIONALS

To the Editor:

If heroin is the life-and-death crisis Alan Burke describes in the Jan. 10
story headlined, "Fighting for their lives," it is odd - bizarre, in fact -
that he mentions only law enforcement officials and institutions as sources
and saviors for this public health problem, and seems to take no notice of
the community's doctors, nurses, pharmacists, health professionals and
their institutions.

Burke briefly mentions the unexpected client growth at a Peabody methadone
clinic. Massachusetts district attorneys and U.S. attorneys in New England
have a long, consistent and hostile history of opposing methadone
maintenance, needle exchanges and nonprescription syringe sales, promising
for the last decade that law enforcement will reduce or eliminate the
region's heroin problem entirely with expanded budgets for police,
prosecutors and prisons. The surprise doubling of demand at the Peabody
clinic is just one of many increasingly obvious clues that the
police/prosecutor/prison heroin cure doesn't work. The fundamental problem
that Burke's story misses is that heroin addiction is a public health and
medical phenomenon. And he failed to ask any health professionals about it.

When a parent suspects a child is involved with drugs, the parent does not
phone 911 or the Essex County district attorney. The parent phones the
family doctor, who has training, experience and links to a network of
professional experts. Yet Burke's story suggests that, as a community, we
should ignore that instinct and call the cops instead. And yet law
enforcement, with its total lack of professional training in medicine or
public health, and its annual Beacon Hill shopping lists of harsher and
harsher punishments for drug use, has presided over the steady growth of
opiate and cocaine addiction, and the exponential growth of the blood-borne
diseases associated with needle drug use, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis.

The war on drugs has shut out the cures and treatments for drugs, and has
"educated" the media and the public to distrust physicians and health
professionals.

There are strategies that work to reduce drug use in the community. Ten
years ago, the prestigious RAND Corp. concluded that one dollar spent on
medical resources has the same effect on lowering drug use as $7 spent on
law enforcement. Your story essentially agrees with the DAs and urges the
$7 anti-cure. So where are the health professionals in this health crisis,
and why isn't the newspaper asking them what they know and what we should
be doing to reduce the threat of heroin in our community?

Robert Merkin, Northampton