Pubdate: Tue, 15 Aug 2000
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2000 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  P.O.Box 15779, Sacramento CA 95852
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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."  
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