FIGHTING GLOOM OF ADDICTION GLOOM

Drug Company, Mining Industry Should Help Invest In Treatment

We search the latest dispatches from Kentucky's war on drugs for public
policy lessons and points to be made in editorials, but come up with sadness.

Sadness at the empty lives, shattered families and soul-sick communities.
We come up with a sense of futility, too. No way can Kentucky police and
imprison its way out of this epidemic of self-medication.

Authorities shut down one drug pipeline and another opens up. They round up
50 people for selling pills in Lee County in December 2001 and round up 80
people for selling pills in Lee County two Decembers later.

A McCreary County gang made money a few years back by bringing OxyContin
from Mexico home to a region that was rolling in the prescription pain killer.

As long as illegal drugs, and whatever release they bring their users,
remain in demand, that demand will be met. Supply is never low for long in
a society awash in drugs. And demand fueled by addiction is insatiable.

Reducing demand is the only long-term solution. But on that front, Kentucky
is barely even in the fight.

Affordable treatment for addiction is limited to non-existent. There's a
two-to three-month waiting list for admission to the state's under-funded
regional treatment centers. The hardest hit areas lack detox,
community-based residential treatment and half-way houses for recovering
addicts.

Kentucky is one of just 21 states where Medicaid pays nothing for drug
treatment, even though every $1 going to treatment saves $4.61 in
criminal-justice costs.

Fortunately, the new leaders of Kentucky's anti-drug efforts, Lt. Gov.
Steve Pence and Attorney General Greg Stumbo, recognize the necessity of
more and better treatment options.

Treatment costs money, though, and Kentucky is broke.

Purdue Pharma, producer of the addictive and lucrative OxyContin, could
afford to put some millions into treating the addicts it helped create.
That would do more good than the company's high-gloss PR campaign.

The coal industry probably owes medical reparations, as well. Coal- company
doctors introduced prescription pain-killers to the mountains years ago as
a way to keep miners able to crouch in a four-foot tunnel for eight hours
at a time.

Lawmakers should consider shifting assets confiscated from drug criminals
into treatment.

Private charities, such as Lexington's Shepherd's House, about to open its
third home for recovering addicts, can play a role.

But taxpayers will have to bear most of the burden, and it wouldn't be a
bad deal; continuing to do nothing will cost way more in the end.

The McCreary County gang that went to Mexico for OxyContin, the "Home-Grown
Drug Lords" profiled by reporter Tom Lasseter and photographer David
Stephenson, also burned up the interstates to Chicago to buy cocaine, much
of which they ingested on their way home.

Trace that cocaine back to the rural fields from where it came, and we bet
you'd find the same physical poverty and poverty of opportunity, the legacy
of desperation, that produced David Perkins, who grew up poor and
uneducated in a Harlan County coal camp and who's now doing time with
Eastern Kentucky's growth industry -- the federal prison system -- for
dealing drugs.

What else but sadness for the trailer-dwelling families of addicts who sell
two and three pills at a time? Or the child who stood by a cruiser in the
cold telling her handcuffed daddy goodbye as he went to jail in Lee County
last week? What else but sadness for the children who U.S. District Judge
Karen Caldwell, while sentencing a pill-pushing physician, said are being
ignored because of their parents' addictions?