Drug Treatment

ALTHOUGH The Sun's two-part editorial on drug treatment earlier this week was fraught with errors and serious misrepresentations, I was pleased to see two of the conclusions: Baltimore is on the right track in its efforts to get treatment to all who need it, and the organization created to oversee the publicly funded treatment system, Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems Inc. (BSAS), should remain.No doubt, Baltimore has a serious substance abuse problem. Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and I realize that we cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

Yvonne Brown spent two years in a nightmare world, addicted to heroin and supporting her habit by shoplifting and other petty crimes.But since she came to a Timonium treatment center three years ago, the 38-year-old mother says the counseling, group therapy and daily shots of methadone she has received have put her on the right track. Now, she supports herself by cleaning offices and is heroin-free."It gets so you know exactly what to expect," she said of the program at Pathfinders Addiction Services.

A new public residential drug treatment center opened yesterday in Northwest Baltimore - the first new facility in 30 years - and city officials hope it will create more bed space for addicts wishing to become clean. The facility at 4615 Park Heights Ave. will hold 135 people. It will be run by Gaudenzia Inc., a 34-year-old company that has more than 40 treatment sites throughout Pennsylvania. The facility will offer outpatient and residential programs for substance-abuse treatment, as well as prevention and education.

Baltimore officials are seeking another $25 million a year in state funds for drug treatment, saying the crime and social breakdown caused by the thousands of addicts who can't get help is costing far more. "This is the crisis that's killing our city," Mayor Martin O'Malley said Friday. "Eighty percent of our homicides are drug-related. Too many people are wasting their lives on drugs." The $26 million to be spent this year on 42 city treatment programs is about twice the treatment budget of four years ago. But addicts without health insurance find they must wait weeks or months for a slot, particularly if they are seeking residential or methadone programs.

Vernice Harris, the Baltimore woman convicted of manslaughter after her 2-year-old daughter died of methadone poisoning, was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison for failing the drug treatment program that was required for probation. The sentence was the maximum possible. During a contentious hearing before Baltimore Circuit Judge Timothy Doory, Harris' attorney, Maureen Rowland, argued that her client deserved a second chance and that her infractions - writing love notes to a male patient - hardly warranted dismissing her from Second Genesis, a residential treatment program in Crownsville.

A dollar's worth of drug treatment is worth seven dollars spent on the most successful law-enforcement efforts to curb the use of cocaine, researchers say in a new study.The study by Rand, a California research organization that has worked closely with the federal government, was partly financed by the White House, which immediately rejected its main points.The Rand study is the first to quantify the relative merits of treatment versus enforcement, an issue that has been long debated in the search for an effective anti-drug strategy.

BALTIMORE DRUG dealers and former dealers, drug addicts and recovering addicts didn't vote for Bob Ehrlich in 2002. Check me if I'm wrong, brothers and sisters, but many of you either have felony convictions, which means you weren't allowed to vote, or you were incarcerated at the time of the gubernatorial election. Others were just "distracted," committing crimes to feed your addictions, and therefore not engaged in that grand thing we call democracy. And even if you were, you were not inclined to vote for a Republican.

The committee steering reform of Baltimore's courts warned legislators yesterday that a new program for speedy justice is doomed unless more drug treatment is made available for criminal offenders. In a report to members of the General Assembly's budget committees, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council predicted the program - scheduled to begin in September - will fail if more treatment and alternative sentencing plans are not put in place. But city officials say they can provide less than half the roughly $8 million the committee estimates is necessary.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm is among a diverse group of city officials who are backing proposed legislation that would force the governor to spend as much as $30 million annually for drug treatment in Maryland. In the past, drug treatment advocates have had to compete for funding with other groups as part of the annual budget process.

A recent poll suggests that a majority of Maryland voters believe that treatment is a viable alternative to prison for substance abusers and that the state's alcohol tax should be increased to pay for expanded drug treatment programs. The Open Society Institute-Baltimore commissioned the poll, which was released today. It comes as OSI prepares to co-host a national conference on successful drug treatment strategies that is slated to open this week in Baltimore. OSI hopes the poll's findings will persuade state officials to allocate an additional $30 million annually for addiction services statewide.