Drug Treatment Programs

A shootout in the Murphy Homes project Monday night dramatized the out-of-control nature of the city's drug crisis. Two plainclothes officers, responding to a tip, entered a fifth-floor hallway and identified themselves. They were met by a hail of .357 Magnum shots. The officers survived unhurt, but the shooter died and four other people were wounded in the fusillade of return fire.That shootout, and the alleged drug dealing which provoked it, involved adults, as did a Christmas 1991 incident which killed two women.

There is no conclusive evidence that abuse of narcotic prescription drugs is out of control in Maryland. There is, however, evidence that many Americans are undermedicated for pain. A federal study recently urged doctors to pay more attention to adequate pain relief for patients after surgery. The problem is also acute among cancer patients. Why, then, is the state health department planning to spend $500,000 to create a new bureaucracy to monitor prescriptions of drugs that have sound medical uses but a high potential for abuse?

The fourth annual Will Barrow Memorial Flag Football Tournament will be held Saturday at Virginia's historic Lambeth Field with proceeds going to the UVa HELP Line, a nonprofit, student-run crisis hotline. Play is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Established in memory of Barrow, a former Cavaliers defensive midfielder who was found dead of an apparent suicide in November 2008, the UVa HELP Line is an anonymous, confidential telephone service for residents of Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia.

One of the nation's most controversial drug treatment programs has opened in Columbia amid protests, picket lines and legal wrangling over whether the facility will be allowed to operate in Maryland.Sixprotesters carried picket signs Monday outside Straight Inc.'s office in the Oakland Ridge Industrial Park, denouncing the drug rehabilitation program for youngsters as violent and abusive.The protesters said they expect to be picketing the office, whichopened July 29, every Monday and Friday.

Eighty-five percent of the crimes reported in Anne Arundel County last year were drug-related, a fact that has renewed the old debate of whether treating drug addicts is more effective than jailing them for the crimes they commit to support their habits."

FOR NEARLY two decades, police have been rousting drug dealers from corners, wiring up for undercover buys and busting down doors to disrupt the narcotics trade in this town. As cocaine and crack joined heroin as the drugs of choice, the violence intensified. The scourge took lives, those in the drug business and those caught in the cross-fire crackling through city streets. Police commissioners have deployed their troops in various ways over the years, but the focus often returned to the corners because of the public's demand to end the drug violence engulfing neighborhoods, homes and families.

UNHAPPY with the work of Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems Inc., Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III is withdrawing $4 million from the nonprofit group that coordinates the city's drug treatment programs. "I'm losing the city right now," Mr. Henson said of the drug scourge in Baltimore where one out of eight adults is estimated to be an addict. "BSAS is not focusing on communities, BSAS is focusing on process. The clinicians seem to have control of BSAS." The threatened 12-percent loss in the agency's $33 million budget next year has sent BSAS scrambling to find replacement funding.

Whoever said being mayor is simply patching potholes, plowing snow and playing politics has not been to lunch lately with Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.If they had, they would know that mayoral concerns these days have more to do with the human tragedy that abounds in pockets of Baltimore than with what once were considered the nuts and bolts of government.As part of a series of public lunches he recently began as he gears up for next year's re-election campaign, Schmoke yesterday spent an hour at Lexington Market listening to his constituents.

City Council President Sheila Dixon and Councilman Kieffer J. Mitchell Jr. introduced a bill yesterday to expand the city's ban on drug paraphernalia to outlaw the sale or possession of pipes or glass tubes used to smoke crack cocaine and other illegal substances. Before submitting the legislation at last night's City Council meeting, the council members held a news conference in front of a liquor store at North and Monroe streets on the city's west side, in an area overwhelmed by the illegal drug trade.

WASHINGTON - In an apparent response to congressional charges that it was ignoring methamphetamine abuse, three high-level Bush administration officials went to a Tennessee drug court yesterday to offer "innovative solutions" to combat a problem that has spread rapidly across the country. "The scourge of methamphetamine demands unconventional thinking and innovative solutions to fight the devastation it leaves behind," said Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. "I have directed U.S. attorneys to make prosecution of methamphetamine-related crimes a top priority and seek the harshest penalties."