FEW ARGUE ABOUT NEED FOR DRUG TREATMENT -- BUT MANY ARGUE ABOUT WHERE

Pikesville will not be sending out the Welcome Wagon. Drug-treatment
advocates want to open methadone clinics in the Reisterstown Road corridor
of northwest Baltimore County, and the community goes ballistic. Who could
blame them. The shadow of drug abuse was supposed to end at the city-county
line, instead of landing right on people's sunlit suburban doorsteps.

Instead, in recent weeks, the specter of two methadone clinics within a
half-mile of each other has been raised, and County Council members and
residents have responded with anger, with political maneuvering and, not to
be overlooked, much rhetoric that is beside the point.

Drug clinics will bring parking problems, they declare. Or they'll bring
traffic congestion. Zoning restrictions are launched as pre-emptive hits.
It's not that these arguments are unimportant - it's that they're
legalistic distractions that miss the very heart of the dread, and the
philosophical conflict it accompanies.

None of us wants drug addicts flooding into our neighborhood. Is this news
to anyone. We are now about 40 years into this so-called War on Drugs,
which has given us crime beyond imagining, and family destruction, and more
people wasting their miserable lives behind prison bars than previously
imaginable in a democratic society.

Everyone with an ounce of sophistication knows we cannot go on like this.
Prison time for the chemically addicted removes them from society - but
only for a little while. In the long run, they create new generations of
the dangerous and disaffected, who continue to prey upon the vulnerable.

Thus, everybody agrees that treatment is the way to proceed. But what kind
of treatment. Those backing the methadone clinics have offered some
misleading arguments of their own. They mention 60,000 addicts - as though
those are Pikesville's addicts. The figure refers to the whole metro
area's, and the vast majority of it comes from the city.

And they also suggest that methadone clinics do not bring crime to a
community - that the people taking methadone as a substitute for heroin
addiction should be seen as any medical patients trying to rid themselves
of a sickness.

The problem is this: We measure the life of any community with more than
crime figures. In the heart of the city, for example, there are now
wonderful plans to resurrect the Charles Street corridor, including the
area around Penn Station and the area around North and Charles.

But a few blocks above North, there is the long-standing Man Alive drug
treatment program. Those who run the program have been good citizens for
the last 30 years - as good as they can be. But you can drive through the
area and see people congregating on street corners who do not exactly look
like the Chamber of Commerce.

They look like what they are: people struggling with their lives, and some
of them become prey for dealers who can spot a vulnerable soul at 50 paces,
and the daily sight of this puts a chill through the area.

As it would in Pikesville - or any other community nervous at the thought
that, if the clinics are blocked in Pikesville, who knows where they might
wind up.

"Our concern," says Alan Zukerberg, president of the Pikesville-Greenspring
Community Coalition, "is some of the testimony we've already heard. They
intend to move 75 people an hour through these clinics. They're for-profit
clinics. Any business that's for profit, they're gonna seek a higher client
base.

"So you go from 75 people an hour to who knows what. And they say they'll
only do it in the morning, but the state has regulations that provisions
have to be made for any patient's convenience. So, when you have people
doing night work, they have the right to demand night hours. So then you're
dealing with traffic around the clock.

"The argument is made," Zukerberg added, "that these clinics don't hurt
neighborhoods. We sure haven't seen evidence that they help them. If this
was a small-scale operation, like a doctor's office, and there was
anonymity - no one would know or care. But these are gas-and-go operations,
high volume stuff. And that's intimidating for any community - particularly
one that doesn't see itself with a significant drug problem. You bring
addicts into a community like this, and you deter people from wanting to
stay here."

And there's the nub of the problem: Fear that takes on a life of its own,
and causes people to get out in anticipation of problems and leaves gaping
holes in a community - empty buildings, and empty places in the spirit.

It shouldn't be that way. If we believe in treatment of addicts, then treat
them in a doctor's office, in a community of patients with all kinds of
problems - so there is anonymity and not social stigma, and scores of
addicts aren't herded into one place, hour upon hour, and communities that
are models of civility don't ultimately become models of deterioration.

In Zukerberg's view, city and state politicians should have seen this
coming. And, he notes, this is an election year.