E-Mail This Article to a Friend Drug follies, continued
	Related Links Office of National Drug Control Policy The Massachusetts page of the White House’s official drug office. Click on the links for analyses of statewide or citywide statistics on drug use and abuse, and prevention efforts. Hope and Recovery An interesting South Boston grassroots organization helping fight drug and alcohol dependency. Check here for useful info and area events. Boston Public Health Commission Did you know that Paul Revere was the city’s first health officer? More relevant info on this site includes info about local health and substance-abuse programs. Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration This agency under the Department of Health and Human Services coordinates grants and assistance for local and state programs. It also compiles useful data and reports.

GOOD INTENTIONS, LITTLE ACTION

Despite the nearly complete absence of crystal-meth production in the Bay State, the top piece of drug legislation on Beacon Hill is one that seeks to deter meth production by forcing state residents to sign their name when buying Sudafed and other cold medicines that contain ingredients for making meth.

The Southie story has given the bill life, but perhaps only temporarily if past is prologue. After the Herald’s drug-death-in-the-park binge, when the paper screamed COMMON DISGRACE in a series of horrified articles, pols promised action that was quickly forgotten. City Council president Michael Flaherty called for patrols in all Boston parks — a remarkably ambitious endeavor given that we have 215 city parks and 1300 uniformed officers already overstretched in policing the city. Menino made a one-day show of marching police officers through the park, shooing away anyone with a syringe. The junkies, many of whom were in the park because a police crackdown had moved them out of Chinatown, briefly shifted over to the Back Bay. As for a long-term solution, his honor launched one of his marvelous non sequiturs: an anti-litter campaign would discourage drug use in the Common, he proclaimed — as though addicts by nature shun tidy surroundings.

Then the story disappeared, the Herald has barely mentioned heroin since, and nothing has changed on the Common or elsewhere in the state.

Likewise, OxyContin addiction has grown worse, but it has mostly vanished from discussion since pharmacies altered their practices to discourage robberies.

To their credit, many politicians seem to appreciate the problem, including the mayor, who recently found city money to support 14 neighborhood grassroots organizations that have put together such things as an anti-drug Youth Day in South Boston, which the Mayor attended the weekend the meth story broke.

For its part, the state’s legislative leadership gave a promising sign early this year, when it created the new Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse — the first time substance abuse has had committee-level attention. Unfortunately, the committee has yet to deliver much substance — not a huge surprise in a legislature that has actually been stingier than Governor Mitt Romney with substance-abuse funding in annual budgets. There may be light on the horizon, however: in November the committee approved a bill that would appropriate an additional $50 million for substance-abuse treatment. The bill, S.1143, now heads to Ways and Means.

And where has the governor been as his state’s opiate-death rate has soared? After two and a half years in office, Romney can lay claim to only one real accomplishment on this score: the creation of an Interagency Council on Substance Abuse and Prevention, to replace the old Governor’s Council that Romney had disbanded. Its plans include the creation of two soon-to-open "sobriety schools" for recovering addicts in middle school and late-elementary grades; and a plan for student drug testing. Both will be paid for largely out of a three-year, million-dollar grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services. The new group has not gotten its name in the daily papers once in the six months since it was created.

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey also announced in spring 2004 that the state would no longer fund local DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) programs, because her Commission on Criminal Justice Innovation had declared it ineffective. But that conclusion had been based on a very old study of DARE programs using a since-replaced curriculum. And she offered no substitute.

More to worry about

What Bill Carrick, director of the 50-bed CAB Boston Treatment Center, calls the "drug du jour" phenomenon is taking energy, attention, and resources away from very serious ongoing local problems, like heroin and OxyContin. Massachusetts has the worst heroin problem in the country, based on emergency-room visits caused by the drug. Increasingly, the gateway to heroin is OxyContin. "We have a silent epidemic of opiate addiction, through OxyContin," says State Senator Steven Tolman, chair of the substance-abuse committee.

"It’s now accepted as routine to see OxyContin-dependent clients coming in for treatment," says Carrick. The cycle is familiar to anyone in the local treatment industry. Users begin taking Oxy pills, then graduate to snorting the powder to get a better high. The expense of the drug — a four-pill-a-day habit costs close to $700 a week — drives them to snort heroin, which comes at a fraction of the cost. Soon that leads to injection. "I’ve never met an Oxy user who doesn’t become a heroin user over time," Carrick says. The state needs more services like Carrick’s, that put addicts’ lives on track, not a photo-op heroin chase through the Common.

But Boston has other substance-abuse troubles that get even less attention, including a very serious problem with benzodiazepines — sedatives like Klonopin and certain "date rape" drugs. Boston has the highest rate of benzo-related emergency-room visits among 21 metropolitan areas tracked by the US Department of Health and Human Services — nearly as high as the city’s heroin ER-visit rate. Club drugs like ecstasy are also a real problem.

But the current king of forgotten drugs is crack cocaine. Crack faded from public discourse after the street violence surrounding it dropped in the early ’90s. But the drug never went away. In fact, usage is now higher in Boston than it was 10 years ago, according to Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates. Eighty people died in Suffolk County of cocaine-related causes in 2003, compared with 20 from heroin. The HHS study found 40 percent more ER visits for cocaine than heroin in Boston in 2002. And Boston Municipal Court officials have estimated that as many as two-thirds of arrestees are crack addicts.

Yet cocaine is low on the Boston Public Health Commission’s priority list, concedes BPHC executive director John Auerbach — and the same is true of other agencies.

Auerbach points to the fact that only seven percent of detox admissions are for cocaine. But, as Carrick and others point out, detox centers like his don’t normally accept cocaine abusers for treatment; unlike alcohol and heroin, cocaine withdrawal does not cause physical symptoms that qualify as a medical condition. "If we could open up to cocaine, we could see a more diverse population, including more African-Americans," Carrick says. As it stands, Carrick’s clients, like most in the Boston area, come primarily from South Boston, East Boston, and Charlestown — while the bulk of drug arrests take place in Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester.

The city’s disinterest in helping crack addicts may have less to do with race, and more to do with novelty — nobody pays attention to news about crack anymore. Consider, for instance, the arrest this July of 11 alleged ringleaders of a gang that provided crack cocaine to Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Mattapan, and the South End. The group was earning $450,000 a month, and owned $4 million worth of houses, cars, jewelry, and guns. They were allegedly cooking 30 kilograms of cocaine into crack every month for Boston distribution — enough for 1000 people to support a four-rock-a-day habit. That story received a day of coverage in the dailies — a fraction of the response to the supposed meth lab in Southie, despite the much higher count in wrecked lives.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com.