Pubdate: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 Source: Sacramento Bee (CA) Copyright: 2000 The Sacramento Bee Contact: P.O.Box 15779, Sacramento CA 95852 Feedback: http://www.sacbee.com/about_us/sacbeemail.html Website: http://www.sacbee.com/ Forum: http://www.sacbee.com/voices/voices_forum.html Author: Diana Griego Erwin TALE FROM TRENCHES OF WAR ON DRUGS Heidi Moore is not a professional speaker nor is she a politician. She's a 34-year-old mother of three from Carmichael on a mission. And so this morning, she rose early and boarded a plane for Los Angeles with a convention speech in tow. She's there at the invitation of a shadow convention happening alongside the Democratic National Convention. She'll talk about drugs, but her story has little to do with the politicized war on drugs we hear so much about every time an election year rolls around. Instead, hers is a powerful, poignant tale from one of the battle's front lines and it happened right here, in our community. Unlike those at the national convention worried about how every word uttered will play with voters, Moore's only hope is that people will listen with open minds. She'll be telling it like it is, she says. She knows because she lived it. First you need to know that Moore's husband, Brad, the late vice president of Moore Van & Storage, was an addict. "People hear that and they think of scummy, bottom-of-the-barrel people, but that wasn't Brad," Moore said. "He was a great father and his addiction was under control." At this time last year, he and his wife were having a home built in Carmichael. What not everyone knew was that Brad Moore was a recovering heroin addict who had mostly managed his disease with methadone, a synthetic narcotic that supplants the craving for heroin. Skeptical at first, Heidi Moore became an enthusiastic supporter of the treatment when she saw how it normalized her husband. "I saw the results immediately," she said. "Immediately, he was himself and we had our life back." That all ended Dec. 15 when Brad Moore died of a heroin overdose at age 34, 60 days after being ordered off methadone by Nevada County's Drug Court. Heidi Moore says it was the second time a professional's non-medical opinion of methadone brought Brad Moore trouble. He also had relapsed into the world of illicit drugs and out-of-control behavior in January 1999 when a psychologist helping him after his father's death told him to get off methadone. "Within a week he was doing heroin again," Heidi Moore said. Drug use during that time ultimately landed him in Drug Court. But he was back in methadone maintenance and doing fine by the time he actually entered the program, which demands that participants be drug-free, including methadone, 90 days before graduation. Heidi Moore understands well the societal stigma surrounding methadone. "Many people think it's just trading one drug for another," she said."Had I not lived this, I'd probably be one of those people. But I saw it work. For us, it was the only answer." After Moore's death, Dr. John McCarthy, executive director and medical director of the Bi-Valley Medical Clinic, wrote the judge twice to explain how the court's handling of Brad Moore's case had failed the man the court sought to save from illicit drugs. Patients on methadone are not addicted to it, he wrote, just as diabetics are not addicted to insulin. It doesn't produce an altered state. In fact, he wrote, it normalizes the brain. "There seems to be almost total ignorance about this aspect of opiate physiology," he wrote. "Why, otherwise, would drug courts or law enforcement have any biases against the use of methadone when it produces no high, no intoxicating opiate effects and merely makes the brains of addicts normal?" Heidi Moore wants the public to hear her story because she believes the drug court's lack of knowledge about methadone killed her husband. "It was so unnecessary," she said. "It's pretty sad that judges are making medical decisions. His only other option was jail." And so she'll stand up today and try to make people understand a world hidden from most of us. "I'm hoping, for one, that the drug courts will change their rules, specifically in the way they view methadone," Moore said. "Methadone was helping Brad. This didn't have to happen." - --- MAP posted-by: John Chase