Let's play a game. Let's pretend that you and I are drug addicts.
Say I'm a middle-class guy who played around with cocaine back in the 1980s and got hooked. I've got a job, a wife, some kids, two cars, a split-level home in suburban Baltimore and a $250-a-week habit.
Say you grew up in Murphy Homes or one of the other public housing projects in the Baltimore ghettos. You dropped out of high school, couldn't find a job, smoked some dope, got into trouble, spent a year in the pen and went back on the streets when you came out. Things seemed hopeless. So you tried some crack and got hooked. Now you, too, have a $250-a-week cocaine habit.
Here's the game. We both want to kick our addictions, but we don't know how. Let's see how long it takes each of us to get help. Ready, get set, go.
As you might expect, I get the jump on you. I've got a job. If my employer has an Employee Assistance Program, it'll carry me while I'm in treatment. My health benefits will pay for it. Of course, in the last few years my employer's health-insurance company has cut back substantially on in-patient care for drug addiction, so I may not qualify for a month or two at a residential detoxification center. But some experts think that out-patient treatment programs work fine anyway.
Maybe I'm not quite so lucky, however. Maybe I work for a small business which cannot afford an EAP. Maybe the company's health-insurance program skimps on medical care for substance abuse. Maryland law requires health-insurance companies to provide at least 30 days of in-patient care and $3,000 of out-patient treatment. But $3,000 goes fast. Anyway, those state requirements only cover the 30 percent of us who even have any health-insurance coverage. Maybe I'll find out that I don't have any coverage at all for substance abuse.
Suddenly I don't like this game anymore. My circumstances have thrown me into the same situation you've suffered all along -- Maryland's public drug-treatment system.
In April 1990, Suzanne Wooton published an award-winning series in The Sun that showed how the growing number of addicts has overwhelmed our chronically underfunded state system. The programs couldn't begin to cope with the drug epidemic of the last decade. Thousands of addicts languish for months on waiting lists. As one drug counselor told her, ''we're basically sending people back on the street who've reached out for help.''
