OFFICIALS: HEROIN CRIME WILL SHOOT UP IF $$ NIXED

It's been nearly a decade since John almost lost his arm to heroin, and an
angel in the form of a social worker sidled up to his hospital bed.

He was homeless at the time with an abcess on his arm the size of an apple,
the mark of an addict with a 20-bag-a-day habit.

Today, at 52, he has a full-time job in a hardware store and a two-bedroom
apartment he shares with a roommate. And it is all, he says, because of the
one thing he now stands to lose.

"Everything I've worked all these years for would go right out the window,"
he says of a plan to eliminate funding for methadone treatment that he and
other addicts need. "And the crime rate's going to go crazy. When you're an
addict, you do whatever you have to do to get your fix."

The $21.8 billion budget House lawmakers proposed last month would close
all 40 of the state's methadone clinics, which House Ways and Means
Chairman John Rogers (D-Norwood) said have become a "nightmare" for neighbors.

If the cuts go through, all 282 Boston Public Health Commission methadone
slots alone would be eliminated, and roughly 75 percent of the 10,000 slots
that are funded by Medicaid statewide would be in jeopardy, said Tom Scott
of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Division of Substance Abuse.

"The human impact would be devastating," said John Auerbach, executive
director of the Boston Public Health Commission.

Like heroin and morphine, methadone is an opiate that acts on the brain's
endorphin receptors. But unlike them, it prevents addicts both from getting
high and from going into withdrawal.

Because weekly counseling and random drug tests are mandatory in methadone
treatment, proponents say, it is also sometimes the last, best hope for
addicts who have tried and failed other ways of kicking a deadly habit.

More than 20 years after it first came into use, however, the idea remains
controversial. And with a total of $1.5 billion in cuts in the House's
proposed budget, the outlook for public funding for such programs in
Massachusetts is bleak.

Public health officials and police, however, warn that the alternatives may
ultimately prove more costly. Without methadone treatment, they say, many
addicts will invariably return to heroin and to sharing needles, thereby
increasing the likelihood of HIV infection. And many of those who now have
full-time jobs and pay taxes will almost surely resort to crime to pay for
their habit, said Lt. Det. Frank Armstrong, commander of Boston's drug
control unit.

"The question is: Are we robbing Peter to pay Paul?" Armstrong said. "If we
close the door on these people, we're going to end up paying the price."