NOELLE BUSH CASE SPARKS LEGAL TEST

Judge To Decide If Patient Privacy Rules Apply When Law May Have Been Broken

ORLANDO - First there was a frantic call to police claiming that the
"princess," Noelle Bush, had been caught at her drug rehabilitation center
with crack cocaine, that she had been caught repeatedly and never punished
"because of who she is."

Then, as a police officer watched helplessly, the employee who found the
drug on the governor's daughter shredded her sworn statement, protecting
Bush from certain arrest and more humiliation.

Noelle Bush's latest run-in with the law Sept. 9 had all the makings of
another titillating tabloid tale featuring a member of America's most
powerful family.

But, eight months after Gov. Jeb Bush begged for the public to respect his
daughter's privacy as she grappled with a longtime addiction, Noelle has
emerged as the central player in a legal drama more befitting the pages of
a law review than The National Enquirer.

In an Orlando courtroom, a judge will decide this week whether employees of
the drug treatment center will have to testify against Bush and help
prosecutors put her in prison on felony charges of possessing crack cocaine.

The case, lawyers on both sides say, marks the first time a judge has been
asked whether federal rules guaranteeing confidentiality for drug rehab
patients apply when a patient is caught breaking the law during treatment.

The resolution, they say, has serious implications for the decades-old
tension between those who want to prosecute offenders and those who want to
treat them. That tension has long defined a national war on drugs waged in
part by Noelle Bush's own family, from her grandfather, the former vice
president and president; to her uncle, the current president; to her
father, the Florida governor.

Underlying the case is another simmering question that may never be
answered but could haunt the governor as he runs for reelection: Is Noelle
Bush enjoying favored treatment? Or, as her lawyer maintains, is she being
targeted because she is American "royalty"?

Police and prosecutors say this is the first time that authorities have
been called with a complaint regarding a drug treatment center patient
possessing illegal drugs. Officials at the Center for Drug-Free Living
wouldn't say whether Bush has been caught before with cocaine, citing
confidentiality, but said that she has not been treated any differently
than any other patient.

"Unfortunately," said her lawyer, Peter Antonacci, "the policy debate of
treatment versus incarceration is being worked out with a famous person in
the middle."

Prosecutors and police officials said that Bush's fame has nothing to do
with their desire to pursue charges in her case.

Rather, said Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton, authorities know only
that crack cocaine was discovered in Bush's shoe, and they have no witness
testimony to back up the case in court.

"Our office is making a very deliberate effort not to treat her
differently, but to do what we would do in the same situation with someone
else," Ashton said. "The problem is we've never had a situation like this
before."

Bush has been undergoing treatment at the Center for Drug-Free Living since
she was arrested in Tallahassee in January after attempting to purchase the
antianxiety drug Xanax with a fraudulent prescription.

Her treatment is being supervised by a drug court program designed to help
first-time offenders recover from addiction and return to society with a
clean record.

So far, Bush's road to recovery has been rocky.

In July, Judge Reginald Whitehead put her in jail for 48 hours when she was
caught with a prescription drug that belonged to an employee.

FAVORITISM ALLEGED

Then, on Sept. 9, police received an anonymous call from a fellow patient
at the treatment center that the governor's daughter had been caught with
crack cocaine.

"She does this all the time and she gets out of it because she's the
governor's daughter," the caller said. "But we're sick of it here 'cause we
have to do what's right, but she gets treated like some kind of princess.
We're just trying to get our lives together, and this girl's bringing drugs
on property."

The police arrived at the center -- a one-story compound enclosed by a
six-foot fence, located on a dead-end street in a run-down neighborhood --
and were told by center employees that they had found a 0.2-gram rock of
crack cocaine in Bush's shoe.

Center employee Julia Elias, who had found the drug, initially offered a
written statement to the police. But a supervisor ordered Elias not to
cooperate with investigators, and Elias destroyed the statement.

"That's the first time to my knowledge that that's happened," said Orlando
police Capt. Robert Gregory, the head of the department's drug enforcement
division. "We were surprised with their decision just not to cooperate with
us."

That episode has now set the stage for a potentially landmark legal battle.

The Orange-Osceola state attorney's office has issued subpoenas for the
employees at the Center for Drug-Free Living who were involved in
discovering the crack.

But the center's lawyers are fighting the subpoenas, citing a little-known
federal confidentiality regulation that they say prevents the staff from
testifying against a patient.

RULING EXPECTED

An Orlando judge heard arguments in an unusual closed-door hearing last
week, and is expected to render his ruling as early as today.

If the employees are forced to testify, said center lawyer Carlos Burruezo,
"the implication will be that therapists, the people who are supposed to
help the patients recover from their addictions, will be forced to comply
with law enforcement if the police think that a crime has been committed."

Burruezo said the center's treatment of Bush is no different than for any
other patient, and that the policy when illegal drugs are found has always
been to protect the patient's privacy from the authorities.

He said the policy requires that the police be called, but only for
information about disposing the drugs. The center therapists never reveal
which patient was caught.

"The police will then decide if they should come out, or they will tell the
center to discard [the substance], to flush it down the toilet," Burruezo said.

"The [police] don't open a file," he added. "They don't do anything to
memorialize the incident."

According to police records, authorities were called to the center for a
drug violation just once in the past two years -- on Sept. 5 -- for a male
suspect at the back door allegedly trying to sell drugs to people entering
the building.

There is no record of police being called for violations involving patients
other than Bush.

Federal regulations, according to court papers filed Friday on behalf of
the center, allow treatment professionals to cooperate with law enforcement
when crimes are committed on the center premises, but do not require such
cooperation unless the state can prove "good cause" and get a court order.

RELAPSE COMMON

Burruezo said that relapse is common when patients undergo treatment, and
that the center's policy is to deal with it through more intensive therapy
and even penalties. Patients such as Bush, whose treatment is supervised by
a drug court, can be punished by a judge with jail time, or even tossed out
of the program and forced to face felony charges in criminal court.

Bush is scheduled to face Judge Whitehead again Friday.

Under the drug court program, she is tested for drugs weekly and the judge
receives regular status reports, said her lawyer, Antonacci. Bush has
tested negative every time, he said.

The allegation of favorable treatment made by the anonymous tipster -- and
last week by nationally syndicated columnists Clarence Page and Arianna
Huffington -- is misplaced, Burruezo said.

"The Center for Drug-Free Living's position would be the same if it were
your daughter or my daughter," he said.

Antonacci asserted that his client is embroiled in the legal battle simply
because she is famous.

"You have law enforcement overreacting to an allegation because they're
afraid of receiving criticism of favorable treatment of a famous person,"
he said. "They reacted in this case to her because of who she is. If it
were anyone else, they would have turned it over to the drug treatment
community."

Given the difficult conditions of her rehabilitation center, Antonacci
said, it is hard to argue that Bush has been treated favorably.

Still, prosecutors say that possessing illegal drugs is against the law no
matter where one lives -- even if home is a drug treatment center.

"To me, the law is crystal clear and unambiguous," Ashton said. "Possession
of crack cocaine is a felony."

Court papers filed by the state attorney's office argue that the federal
regulations cited by the center's attorneys do not protect patients'
confidentiality when crimes occur on the center's property.

"If what they are arguing is right, then federal law creates a zone of
immunity where you can possess drugs with impunity," Ashton added. "We
don't want access to the details of her therapy or treatment. We simply
want to know how the cocaine got there, who the dealer is.."

The final call could be made by the Florida Supreme Court, where two of
seven justices were appointed by Noelle's father.

BAD TIMING

For Jeb Bush, the timing of his daughter's troubles could not be worse.

He is engaged in an increasingly heated reelection campaign that has
already been characterized by negative attacks.

A spokesman for his rival, Democrat Bill McBride, said last week that
Noelle's troubles are a "private matter" and will not be a factor in the
campaign.

But some critics of the governor's drug policies are using his daughter's
foibles as a peg to accuse Bush of hypocrisy.

Page and Huffington used columns last week to question how the governor
could oppose a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have
guaranteed treatment for all first-time offenders as an alternative to jail.

"The tragedy is that there are thousands of other Noelles out there whose
fathers and families are not well-off or well-connected, and they don't
have the opportunity to stay in nice treatment centers," Page wrote.
"Instead, they spend their nights in jail."

Huffington wrote that "Jeb's wildly inconsistent attitude on the issue --
treatment and privacy for his daughter, incarceration and public
humiliation for everyone else -- is part and parcel of the galling
hypocrisy that infects America's insane drug war on every level."

BUSH AIDE RESPONDS

The charges were quickly disputed in a written response from Bush's drug
czar, Jim McDonough, who argued that Bush has a compassionate approach to
drug policy that is "wisely balanced with prevention, treatment and law
enforcement."

McDonough said that state spending on drug treatment and prevention has
increased 60 percent since Bush took office, that the number of Floridians
in treatment has increased by 141,000, and that youth treatment has
increased by 67 percent.

The response by McDonough was remarkable not in his defense of the
governor's policies, but in his tacit acknowledgement that Noelle's
problems have become a legitimate matter for public policy debate.

"Wise in his understanding of the destructiveness of drug abuse and how it
affects Florida, the governor has implemented intelligent and compassionate
approaches to this horror," McDonough wrote. "And deeply loving of his
daughter, he has allowed her to have an equal chance -- along with
thousands of others -- to fight back from drug addiction in the fold of
those policies."