Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 3 Of 41

ACT I. LINWOOD

Linwood didn't want to be in that hotel room. He didn't want to be with
some female trick looking to party. And he didn't want to be smoking crack
with her.

"This is insane," he thought. "I don't want to be doing this."

Not after eight months in jail. Not after his mother had visited him there
every Saturday and encouraged him to get help. Not after he'd won some
freedom from his addiction and convinced himself that he could quit the
street life and stop using drugs.

But living that life was like a reflex. It's what he'd done for so long:

He smoked crack every day, all day long. He'd get arrested. He'd get out of
jail. He'd smoke crack again.

It had been that way for years, but Linwood, like most addicts, was skilled
in the art of self-deception.

At first he told himself he was in control, that he could stop when he
wanted. He told himself he was cool, a subscriber to the hipster street
culture, even though he was homeless.

Even though he had lost more than 50 pounds since his days as a rugged high
school defensive back. Even though he wore three and four pairs of pants
and someone else's discarded shoes, which were several sizes too big.

For years, he fed his several-hundred-dollar-a-day crack habit with no job
and no income. He sold drugs, and he ripped off the people closest to him.
And Linwood told himself lies to justify it all.

When he ran through Coliseum Mall, stealing everything that he could carry,
he told himself he was a neighborhood Robin Hood, taking from the big
retail stores and getting everyone high with his loot.

When he conned someone out of their paycheck, he told himself he was
intelligent and witty.

But when he stole from his mother or turned to prostitution, all he could
tell himself was, "At least I'll be high."

After years of living like this, of dealing with the body-racking addiction
and the soul-crushing schemes required to feed it, Linwood could no longer
ignore the truth.

"This ain't me," he told himself.

When he felt his heart flutter after yet another hit of crack, or when he
heard that yet another childhood friend had been gunned down, he told
himself to stop.

When his cousin was murdered on a Washington, D.C., street, he knew he had
to stop. They had grown up together like brothers, and they had followed
the same path to the streets. Now one of them was dead. Linwood knew he
could be next. But he didn't know how to quit.

Weeks later, Linwood was arrested for the umpteenth time.

"Thank you," he said to himself.

This was his chance to get clean, to escape the morass of this life and be
reborn.

In jail, he reconnected with his mother and started reading the Quran. He
ate and slept and exercised, doing push-ups in his cell and lifting buckets
full of water. He thought and prayed and started believing that he could
somehow beat his addiction.

His lawyer told him about Drug Court, and Linwood agreed to take the
program. He'd never been through treatment before. Maybe the people down
there could help.

"I'm tired of living like this," Linwood said. "I don't want to go back."

But less than two days after the jail door opened for him, he was smoking
crack again. This time, he didn't feel cool or smart. He didn't even feel
the high. He just felt tired and beaten.

Later that night, Linwood held the remainder of the crack in his hand,
thinking about all that the drug had taken from him.

It had cost him his family and his health. It had cost him years in jail
and prison. It had cost Linwood the chance to know himself.

He had once been a bright student, a good athlete. He had once been a young
man with a curious mind that explored Islam and reggae music.

He wore - and still wears -medium-length dreadlocks. With his thin but
powerful build, Linwood had a style and self-assuredness that stood out on
a street corner.

But growing up, he was frustrated by his poverty. He was angry that his
mother had to raise him alone in a neighborhood where hopelessness had
become a community standard.

He lashed out with wild acts of rebellion. His mother did her best to teach
her son, but her warnings to stay off the corners only made the forbidden
street life more tantalizing.

Out there, Linwood sold drugs. He took drugs. And he enjoyed a growing
street reputation as a crazy young brother who would jump out of moving
cars on a dare and pull off risky thefts.

Before long, the man he could have been was supplanted by the homeless
addict, the one who woke up on the sidewalk and wondered where he would get
his next score.

That's what crack had done to Linwood.

And now, he thought, maybe without that rock sitting in his hand, he could
get some of his life back.

So he took the crack to the trash can and dumped it.

Then he went home to his mother.