Pubdate: Wed, 30 Jul 2003
Source: Peoria Journal Star (IL)
Copyright: 2003sPeoria Journal Star
Contact:  http://pjstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/338
Author: Pam Adams

VIEWS CHANGE WHEN DRUGS ARE CLOSE BY

All illusions about drug use in small-town America should have disappeared 
some time around the Reagan era.

For hold-outs who hold onto that tired it-can't-happen-here mentality, I 
take you to Spring Valley, population 5,200, where 150 people turned out 
recently for a community meeting on heroin use in the area.

In the last 18 months, heroin has become a problem in the Illinois Valley 
area of Spring Valley, LaSalle-Peru, Ladd, Depue and surrounding farm 
towns. Authorities have recorded a few heroin-related deaths and made a few 
heroin-related arrests, which hints at a larger problem. As in the big 
cities, newer, purer strains are replacing marijuana, cocaine, crack 
cocaine and methamphetamine as the drug of choice.

Spring Valley, like a lot of places, has been slow to realize what's 
happening in its backyard. The problems that kept city officials busy 
tended to be too-tall grass, potholes, barking dogs, and unsightly fences.

"I'll be blunt, a lot of it was just bull," says Jim "Uda" Taliano, the 
alderman who called the meeting.

But Taliano's tone about the drug problem, and apparently the tone of the 
meeting, hint at a newer, purer response to that worn-out war on drugs. 
Surprisingly, reports of Monday's meeting contained absolutely no mention 
of the military metaphors Peoria leaders love to throw around when they're 
talking about combating drugs.

Nobody talked about lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key strategies. Nobody 
referred to users as small-town vermin or mentioned taking up small-town 
warfare against small-town terrorists. Substitute "urban" for "small-town" 
and you have the tone typically employed by officials describing inner-city 
drug problems.

In fact, the Spring Valley meeting treated drug use more like a public 
health problem than a crime problem, which is an amazing turnaround from 
typical war-on-drugs rhetoric.

The news story described parents devastated by a child's drug use. There 
was a mother who told of the horror of watching her child go through heroin 
withdrawal; there was the mother whose child went from straight-A student 
to straight addict. Most tellingly, there were the small phrases Taliano 
used during the meeting and later in an interview:

"This is not a witch hunt against users."

"It's like a disease out there."

"I don't know if we can cure this cancer, but we can sure control it."

Taliano's use of terms like "disease" and "cancer" tells me he takes a 
personal perspective on the area's drug problems. It's not someone else's 
child in some other neighborhood; it's their children in their 
neighborhoods and the solutions don't necessarily lie in tougher laws, more 
police and bigger jails.

We've been down that road and we're paying for it. Dearly. As states 
grapple with record budget deficits, they're finding they can no longer 
afford the unprecedented prison-building boom fueled primarily by this war 
on drugs. So we have newly-built prisons standing empty, construction 
companies griping about not getting prison construction contracts, lower 
crime rates and more prisoners than ever before.

Money problems, more than a sudden dose of good sense, are forcing state 
and federal governments to re-evaluate prevailing strategies in the 
so-called war on drugs. But old habits are hard to break. Some of that is 
still evident in the Spring Valley area. There's still an undertone of 
blaming the big bad city, in this case Chicago. Taliano would like to see 
random drug testing in high schools, albeit with parental consent.

Still, Taliano and Spring Valley seem to understand there are no winners in 
a war against drug use and that's a good sign. But isn't it funny how drug 
users we know need help and drug users we don't know need jail time?
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens