Pubdate: Sun, 28 Aug 2005
Source: Standard-Times (MA)
Section: Pg  B2
Copyright: 2005 The Standard-Times
Contact:  http://www.s-t.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/422
Author: Bob  Unger
Note: Author is Editor of The Standard-Times
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug  Testing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States)

THERE ARE NO 'SAFE' NEIGHBORHOODS

A few lifetimes ago, I was the editor of the daily newspaper in Holyoke, 
another old mill town where the jobs were going away, whites were selling 
their homes and leaving in droves, arson had given the city the nickname 
Holysmokes, and cocaine and heroin were sold openly on many street corners.

But I lived 10 miles north of the city in a safe little town, where almost 
everyone was white, had jobs and the freedom to cluck their tongues at what 
was happening in the city as they drove home to neighborhoods they knew 
were "safe."

I know  because I was one of them.

I had a wife, two beautiful daughters in the neighborhood elementary 
school, taught Sunday school classes at a historic old Congregational 
church on the common, hosted backyard barbecues and did a lot of volunteer 
work.

Perfect, right?

Ten years later, my wife was dead, my younger daughter was in the court 
system  and everything I thought I knew about my world was wrong.

Drugs had found us.

Andrea, my wife, had worked in a dental office. She found a way to call in 
prescriptions for painkillers for herself and got so badly addicted that, 
by the  end of her life, she was spending thousands and thousands of 
dollars of our personal savings to buy drugs from street-level dealers.

She was in and out of treatment programs for several years. The day after 
her last 30-day residential program ended, she swallowed two vials of 
painkillers  and died on her 46th birthday.

Our daughter Kate, devastated by her mother's suicide, ran off the day of 
the funeral, and for months her sister and I didn't know where she was. She 
found  relief in crack cocaine, formaldehyde-soaked marijuana, and heaven 
knows what  else. She and her infant daughter lived in an unheated 
apartment with some "friends" through a bitter Kansas City winter, often 
going days between meals.

There is more to tell, as anyone who has watched those they love be 
consumed by  an addiction knows, but that is enough. You need only know 
that, although I once  was certain that my family was safe from the 
epidemic of illegal drugs, the  truth is that we were as vulnerable as any 
of the poor who crowded Holyoke's  tenements in the neighborhoods that were 
the center of the drug trade, the gangs  and the violence that all but 
destroyed a once-proud community.

And so when New Bedford Mayor Fred Kalisz and School Superintendent Mike 
Longo  and others first presented their plan for a voluntary drug-testing 
program to be  administered through the schools, I had more than a 
journalist's interest.

I didn't like the thought that the public schools, for some children the 
only refuge from the disorder of the rest of their lives, would become a 
place where  the outside world's troubles would so readily find them. It 
seemed so...invasive...and so outside the real mission of the schools, 
which is to  teach our sons and daughters the academic and living skills 
they will need to be productive citizens.

Then I thought about my daughter, who today is a hard-working and happy 
mother  of three and glad to have me share her story. And I asked myself 
whether, knowing what I know, there were anything I wouldn't have done to 
have prevented  the worse trouble that drugs would mean for her.

I don't think the mayor's plan will make much of a difference in how many 
children in New Bedford ultimately use drugs, but it might let one or two 
or three parents know their children are in trouble while there's still a 
chance to help.

And I know that somewhere in this city is a girl just like Kate, just 
waiting for drugs to find her first.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman