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Introduction

Playing for Keeps
Taking money and property has become a major part of the War on Drugs. Who is it helping?

One mother's experience with crack doesn't offer any easy answers

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Kim is holding a child, her child. His name is William and he's a fair-haired 14-month-old in short blue overalls. He's asleep now, a bottle with a little milk left in it still loosely held in his small hands. Kim holds him close and tight, like she's afraid he'll disappear if she lets go. She rocks him. She watches him breathing.

"I just can't imagine life without my baby," she says, then looks up with a half-smile. "And I used to say that about drugs."

Kim is 34 years old and pretty, her hair cut short with deep blonde highlights. That she and her son are here now, are alive at all, is at least improbable and maybe something like a miracle. Because for 17 years, half of her life, Kim did everything but kill herself. A crack addict and a street prostitute in cities from here to Florida, she turned tricks and smoked cocaine with a single-minded ferocity that whirled her in and out of jails and hospitals and places you probably don't want to know about. Now she's been clean for more than a year and a half.

But if she's a model of success in the social wrangle with drugs, she's a complicated model. It's true Kim had a lot of help, but that help came from an underfunded program with a long waiting list. And talking to her, you realize she also had something less tangible, something that the degradation and abasement and abuse didn't crush.

That much was clear back in January, when she was getting ready to leave the Great Starts program. Great Starts is based in a little apartment building on Keith Avenue, notable mostly for its small fenced-in playground. Kim looked a little different then, with colored plastic beads strung into her bleached bangs. She had been clean for 10 months, and even she couldn't quite believe it.

"This program has taught me to have patience," she said, sitting in the small office of Great Starts director Judy Pack. "It's taught me to love me for myself, it taught me to get clean for myself. At first I was just doing it for my son. I didn't want him to have the life I had."

No one would want the life Kim had. She told it in gales of words and gestures, non-stop talking, sometimes shaking her head in amazement at herself. "My family is all messed up," she began. Her mother lives in Florida. She was an alcoholic who got married eight times by Kim's count, three of them during drunken blackouts. Kim and her siblings were at best unsupervised and often much worse; some of the men who paraded through the family were abusive both physically and sexually.

"I've got seven years of my life where there's no pictures of me growing up," she said. "It's like, where was I?"

Those kind of questions disappeared when she found drugs. She was about nine years old. At first it was alcohol, then quaaludes and LSD. As a teenager, she still had things somewhat under control, at least to the extent of holding down jobs. Then came the cocaine. It was a great party drug, she thought, but nothing more, nothing to devote her life to. Until she smoked it.

"I have never shot up in my life, and snorting, you can only snort so much up your nose," she said. "But crack..."

The high was faster and stronger and took her farther away from herself than anything she'd ever done. She was 17. Her life, for the first time, had a purpose—getting the next hit.

It's not hard to imagine the rest. Like most crack addicts, Kim would do pretty much anything for money. Sometimes that meant robbery or assault, but usually the easiest thing, especially for an attractive young woman, was sex. It wasn't a safe life. She was beat up repeatedly on the streets; one time her throat was cut. She was "in and out and in and out and in and out of jail," mostly on prostitution charges. She served six months in Key West, doing drugs the whole time she was behind bars—"You can get drugs in prison a lot easier than you can on the street." When she was released into a treatment program, she waited for the officer escorting her to turn his back, and then she took off running. "I had $183 in my pocket, and I wasn't ready for a drug program."

Feeling too well known in Florida, she followed some connections she had to Knoxville. Soon she was a fixture, working the curbs as well as escort services. The cops knew her like they knew all the streetwalkers, and some of them tried to help her even when they were arresting her, offering to refer her to one program or another. Sometimes she would go. "It would be like drying out, going to detox, getting some rest, catching up on your sleep," she said with a smile. "Because what can you learn in 10 days?"

Even on the street, Kim had some sense of pride. She always wanted to be the prettiest one out there, the one with the most business and the most money. When she went to buy drugs, she showed off her roll of bills—fifties and hundreds, not fives and tens. Looking back, she shook her head. "I was buck wild."

Then, two years ago, she was pregnant. Not for the first time, of course, but this time she discovered it too late to do anything, at least anything legal. And something, some kind of light, went on in her head. She was in her 30s. The life, which wasn't even a life but just a kind of daily survival, had stopped being fun a long time ago. When she saw the first ultrasound pictures, she realized to her surprise that there was something inside her that wanted to live.

She knew enough not to trust herself. When she went looking for help, she found Great Starts. There was a waiting list to get in (as there still is). But Kim was the rare case of a self-referral rather than one sent by the courts, which impressed the program's director.

"The ones that keep calling and contacting us shows they're interested," Pack says. Great Starts began in 1991 as an agency of Child and Family Services Inc. Funded with a 10-year grant from the federal Department of Health and Human Services, it was set up strictly for drug-addicted mothers and their children. Pregnant women get top priority.

It's a six-month intensive residential program. Children go to day-care while their mothers go through treatment and job training. It currently houses 22 women, with 40 trying to get in. Pack says about 40 percent of the women who enter the program complete it, compared to about a 10 percent rate in regular treatment regimens. Then there are follow-up visits for 90 days.

It has been praised but only sporadically copied. Pack, who can talk both tough and tender as needed to keep her residents in line, remembers Gov. Don Sundquist visiting during his first campaign. "He said, 'This is a great program. Too bad we don't have the money to emulate it.' My point is, we can't afford not to emulate it."

It costs a little more than $700,000 a year to run, most of it still coming from DHHS. But when that grant runs out in 2001, Pack says the program will have to fend for itself with a combination of state, local, and private money. As of the end of 1998, 189 women and 236 children had come through Great Starts.

This year, Kim became one more of them. "When I first got here, I said, 'Six months with no dope? Oh my God, I'm never gonna make it,'" she said in January. "The last couple of months has really been where I've put the tools together, and just the damn determination. I don't ever want to leave."

Now, eight months later, she's back at the Great Starts office—but just to pick up William, who still comes to day-care here. After a couple of months of complications finding housing, she got a subsidized apartment, a two-bedroom townhouse in Northwest Knoxville. She is buoyantly cheerful. She just bought a 1987 blue-gray minivan.

"I love it, love it, love it," she enthuses. "I just feel good, I'm just climbing, I'm going and going and going."

It hasn't been easy. There were complications getting a Social Security card — "I've never had anything in my name other than a police record". She had to kick out a boyfriend when he started using drugs again. She watched a woman she knew from Great Starts take back up with the men and drugs that had put her there in the first place. She reconnected with her mother, but that relationship is still an uneasy one marked by distrust and anger. But she is close to her sister, who lives in Chicago, and in sporadic touch with her brother.

Work was tricky at first. Placed in front of a computer at a telemarketing job, she froze up, overwhelmed by the pressure and technology. Housecleaning was equally hellish for different reasons. But she went to the Salvation Army store one day to buy clothes for William, and a woman there offered her an application. She's been there nine weeks sorting donations in the warehouse, and she beams when she talks about compliments from her supervisor. It's minimum wage, but she's up for a raise this month, with benefits to follow.

"I just love my job," she says, keeping a close eye on William as he toddles about the room. "I'm worn out, I sleep at night, I'm not up and down all night. Every night I go to bed at 9 o'clock."

She doesn't go out much and never after dark. She took William to the Tennessee Valley Fair one weekend. The last time she was there, she was high and marveled at the lights. This time, the two of them walked around and went home early. "I just, you know, we had a good day," she says. "It was fun."

It's not that her old life doesn't tempt her sometimes. But she still goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings regularly, and she talks the 12-step talk with conviction.

"You've got to do the step work, and it's not gonna come easy, you know what I'm saying? And I'm not gonna lie to you, there's times, like when I bought the van, there's all this money and I was like, 'Well, who's gonna know?' You know what? I'm gonna know. And when the money's gone, I'm gonna know where it's gone. And then I know what happens—there goes my jewelry, my TV, my stereo."

Her son was born without any drug dependency. He's never seen his mother high, and Kim's determined that he never will. He sleeps with her at night in her king-sized bed. When they're at home alone, she keeps up constant conversations with him.

So why has she made it this far? What made the difference? Kim shakes her head.

"You've got to want to," she says. "But you know, it's hard. You don't love yourself, you don't think you can do any better..."

She's seen both prison and treatment programs, and she's not sure that either one can overcome determined self-destruction.

"You can never stop drugs from being in this world, ever," she says flatly. "I don't ever see it. You can say it's people from bad homes and like that, but you've got movie stars, you've got people who come from great homes with both mother and father, who get into drugs."

Now, William's asleep and Kim's ready to take him home. The van's been acting a little funny, making noises. She hopes it's something she can fix cheaply. But if it's not, she'll deal with it, one day at a time just like the drug counselors say. She didn't used to think she could do that.

"I said, 'How do people live that way, being clean? Not being high and having to deal with life?' This was how I was going to die, with a pipe in my hand," she says. "And it took him, this baby, to really make me see that, how precious life is, how valuable everything is. It's a gift. And I don't want to die. I want to live forever."