Series: Part 3 Of 5

ADDICTIONS HURT SOCIETY AND CHILDREN

There's an aura of bravado about Boyd Clark.

The "bad to the bone" T-shirt a size too small for his brawn. A
Harley-Davidson cap pulled just right to shadow the eyes. Impatience
imparting a "don't mess with me" attitude.

But the jaded veneer crumbles when you ask him about the kids.

"It tears your heart out," he said barely above a whisper, raking a
Rasputin beard with his fingers. "There have been so many. Those kids don't
stand a chance."

Clark, a narcotics sergeant with the Salt Lake Police Department, has seen
every kind of drug and every kind of addiction. He has seen parents when
given a choice between getting treatment or losing their children to state
custody choose the drugs.

He has seen the filth and squalor of addiction. He has seen the
malnutrition. He has seen the violence and crime.

But it all comes back to the kids. Kids who have no chance to escape the
cycle themselves.

"The best thing that can happen is for mom and dad to go away, and the kids
have a fresh start in a foster home," he said.

He catches himself, realizing it may not be politically correct to advocate
taking children away from their parents. So he adds a belated caveat: "If
the parents won't rehabilitate."

Those on the front lines of the war on drugs readily admit it is a war
without winners.

Police officers find themselves arresting the same people again and again.
Courts are overloaded with drug offenses, prisons with drug offenders.
Drugs are more readily available today - and cheaper - than they were 10 or
20 years ago.

Cops on the street have no illusions they are having much of an impact on
the drug problem. And most are frustrated by the vicious cycle of crime and
violence fueled by addiction.

And feeding the addiction has resulted in a web of interrelated crimes.
Burglaries, robberies, thefts of all kinds can be traced back to
addiction's doorstep.

In Ogden, narcotics officers now work closely with property crimes
detectives. The simple reasoning: Criminals dealing in drugs are the same
ones stealing to feed a habit.

Detectives joke they can usually tell when a new shipment of potent drugs
hits town because the crime rate rises sharply as addicts scramble to get
their piece.

Drug crimes are myriad. One addict told the Deseret News his preferred
currency to pay for drugs was Levi 501 jeans, shoplifted en masse and sold
no-questions-asked at a shop on Redwood Road.

Car burglaries and property thefts have become so common that in Salt Lake
City police have asked victims to simply report the crimes by phone.
Follow-up is unlikely.

Michael Findeis, director of substance abuse services for the Department of
Corrections, estimates 80 percent of Utah's 5,000 inmates are either
addicted or have a substance abuse problem at the root of their criminal
activity.

The cost to taxpayers of incarcerating those with drug problems is $88
million a year. And that's not counting the costs of housing thousands of
drug abusers incarcerated for petty crimes in county jails across the state.

It doesn't count the costs associated with the 13,000 people on probation
and parole - 80 percent of those also trace their problems back to
substance abuse.

Some 45 percent to 65 percent of those on parole will end up back in prison
- - about 90 percent of those for drug and alcohol violations.

Then add in the cost of investigating drug-related crimes and prosecuting them.

And the high cost of insurance premiums directly related to drug- related
crimes.

The result is that zero-tolerance and mandatory sentencing is being
rethought. "Slowly, states have recognized you can't just lock people up.
There has to be a treatment component," said Brent Kelsey, criminal justice
programs coordinator with the state Division of Substance Abuse.

Debbie Larson believes she had a sixth sense about when police were ready
to pounce.

Police pursued her from Logan to Las Vegas and back to Utah again, but
every time she eluded them. That is until that day about six years ago when
she stayed too long at a pharmacy in Ogden.

Debbie was ultimately sentenced to five years in prison.

She had done pills for 10 years, starting after surgery for a ruptured
appendix. "I was hooked when they let me out of the hospital."

"At first, doctors passed them (painkillers) out like candy," Larson said.
"I don't think some doctors realize the damage they are doing. I remember I
kept thinking, 'I'm not hooked on drugs; I'm just going to the doctor.' "

But soon Larson was doctor shopping and filling prescriptions at multiple
sites. She would go to the small neighborhood pharmacies when the larger
ones started rejecting her script for OxyContin or other potent
prescription pain medicines.

The worst part about going to prison, "other than embarrassing my family
and aging my mother, is that it wasn't any help at all. You can't function
when you get out, So you reach for a pill again."

Throughout the Utah criminal justice system, officials are coming to
recognize that drug addiction is at the heart of most social ills, and that
treatment - not only punishment - must be considered in public- policy
decisions. Increasingly, those on the front lines are coming to see
addiction as treatable.

Spurred by a federal grant about three years ago, multiple agencies along
the Wasatch Front organized a methamphetamine response team that includes
police, medical experts, social workers with the Division of Child and
Family Services, and representatives from the courts, treatment services
and health departments.

Holistic in approach, a police raid on a meth lab results in a response by
the entire team.

Margine Wood, a social worker who coordinates the program, said the
approach assumes that treatment is a fundamental component of addiction.
Addicts, if parents, are given a choice: If they want to keep their
children, they must enter immediate treatment.

In 75 percent of methamphetamine cases, children are removed from the home,
as required by federal law. But officials want to put together a program
whereby parents, in some cases, can keep their children while participating
in a rehabilitation program.

Interagency cooperation - about 30 different agencies are involved -
initially had skeptics among law enforcement, but no more. It's been so
successful that all agencies kept with the program after the federal grant
money ran out.

The biggest change in attitude has come among street cops who are
frustrated with the merry-go-round of drug crimes and ineffective criminal
justice responses that don't keep repeat criminals off the street.
"Officers are definitely seeing addiction more as a social problem, not
just a law enforcement problem," Wood said.

A methamphetamine addict, Carol stood before Judge Dennis Fuchs in stunned
disbelief.

"But judge, my father is very ill. I mean he could die in the next day or
two," the 50-year-old woman pleaded.

"I sympathize and I understand," Fuchs said. "But you're not doing your
father any good on meth. I just can't let you walk out of here. At least I
know you won't be using if you're in jail.

"You've kind of gotten off to a rough start," Fuchs told her. She had
recorded three "dirty" urinalysis tests for methamphetamine during the
previous week. "What's the problem?"

"I just made a few mistakes, and I was just under a lot of stress," she
responded.

"Well, I can't let you walk out of here breaking the law," Fuchs said.

Addicts like Carol constitute a large portion of the inmate populations
across the country, filling up jails and prisons at taxpayer expense -
about $22,000 a year per prison inmate, a little more for county jail
prisoners.

Keeping them out from behind bars is the motivation behind "drug courts,"
which have grown 50-fold in the United States since 1995. Utah has 14.

The concept is simple: Allow a judge to prod addicts to get treatment first
and then get punished later, if at all, and only if other options fail.

It is a formula built on plenty of patience, tolerance and reinforcement.

Fuchs leads the courtroom in a round of applause after a defendant in the
drug court treatment program announces how long they have been clean.

"I'm sure it's odd to people that someone would be applauded for being in
court," Fuchs said. "But many of these folks haven't had the slightest
positive reinforcement their whole lives. They need to be praised
immediately for staying with the program."

Drug court "is not a get out of jail free card," Fuchs said. "I've heard
every excuse. Usually it's that they have to take care of their kids. If
they were my kids, I sure wouldn't want that person taking care of them."

Jail time is a way to punish people, but it is also a way to get a handle
on how bad their addiction is, Fuchs said. Jail time by itself has no
corrective effect and "is more than unusually unproductive. They've got to
get clean and then get into treatment."

Salt Lake County 3rd District Drug Court began in June 1996. There are now
about 250 active participants, and 220 have graduated from the 52- week
treatment program. The average person takes about two years to actually
finish, and almost everyone relapses at least once.

To be accepted into Drug Court, participants first plead guilty to a charge
of felony possession of a controlled substance, a forged prescription or
possession with intent to distribute. The plea is held in abeyance until
the person completes the program. Upon graduation, the plea is withdrawn
and the criminal charges are dismissed.

The program is only open to nonviolent men and women who have had a prior
conviction and show a desire to enter treatment. In the four- phase
program, participants attend acupuncture sessions at least 10 times to help
reduce cravings, they enter 12-step recovery meetings and are given help
finding jobs.

Since the program started, only 15 of those who have graduated have been
rearrested on new felony drug charges.

Third District Court reports that those in the program cost the state
one-tenth as much money as it takes to jail someone. Participants can miss
one urine test and have one relapse. If they don't follow the program
exactly, the court can make several sanctions, including starting all over
or letting the criminal court take its course.

While addicts enter drug courts willingly, criminal court judges have also
been ordering defendants into treatment programs with increasing regularity.

Kelsey insists coerced treatment is better than no treatment at all, and it
is unquestionably better for taxpayers to pay for treatment on the front
end than incarceration on the back end.

"There is no bad use if you can get someone into treatment," he said. "If
you keep them clean for a couple months, they start seeing their way out of
it."

But court-ordered treatment has had ripple effects throughout public
treatment programs. In fact, almost all of those in publicly funded
treatment programs have been ordered to do so by judges.

"It turned into a situation where we treat the criminal population," said
Pat Fleming, director of the state Division of Substance Abuse, the agency
that administers the roughly $43 million annually that goes into state and
county substance abuse treatment and prevention programs.

The irony, he added, is that addicts who are not feeding their habit with
crime - and there are a plenty of them - find it difficult, in some cases
impossible, to get into public treatment programs already overcrowded with
criminal addicts ordered there by the court.

Mused one counselor, "If you want treatment, go commit a crime."

Prison may be the last rung on the criminal justice ladder, but for addicts
it is hardly safe haven from their addiction.

Utah's prison system has few resources to treat addicted inmates, and what
resources there are have been directed at inmates about to be released on
parole - too late, experts say, to address an addiction problem needing one
to two years of physical and psychological treatment.

The delay in addiction treatment is simply a prioritization of resources on
the part of the Department of Corrections, which lacks funding to pay for
treatment for all needing it.

In general, Findeis said, the department has not yet come to view addiction
as a disease that can be treated.

But attitudes are becoming more progressive. Findeis, a veteran of
addiction treatment in Utah County, was recently hired as "director of
substance abuse services," a new position in the Department of Corrections
where he will coordinate and oversee all substance abuse programs in the
department. The Department of Corrections is now working closely with the
Division of Substance Abuse, sharing resources and cooperating at an
unprecedented level.

That cooperation may one day extend to the supervision of the thousands on
probation and parole.

"I think there is a recognition on the department's part that we need to be
doing things differently," he said. "If we don't, we're going to see the
same outcomes."

Tomorrow: Illness or character flaw?