Pubdate: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 Source: Newsday (NY) Copyright: 2001 Newsday Inc. Contact: http://www.newsday.com/homepage.htm Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/308 Author: Jimmy Breslin WHICH DRUG WAS WORSE? The bus driver sat with a beret pulled over his eyes and the newspaper spread out on the steering wheel. This was at a little after six yesterday morning. The bus was there to take a group up to Albany for a demonstration against the Rockefeller drug laws. The story the bus driver was reading in the paper was about Darryl Strawberry, who had been missing in Florida for a couple of days and now had turned up and was in a hospital in Tampa. He was put under arrest and a sheriff was put on guard at the door to his room. Two weeks ago, Strawberry left a drug rehabilitation center where he was staying under court order and went to St. Joseph's Hospital for chemotherapy. It is the only other place the courts will allow him to be. He is a sick man. He had a kidney removed at Columbia Presbyterian in Manhattan. Then the cancer appeared in his colon. The normal chemotherapy drugs cannot help him. He is on an experimental chemotherapy. The paperwork for experimental drugs usually states the side effects of the drug: loss of hair, difficulty in breathing, constipation, death, burning eyes... The only experimental chemotherapy for colon cancer is oxaliplatinum. It is a miserable, highly toxic drug. In the way it interrupts cell growth and division it causes weird reactions in patients. Strawberry's wife, Charisse, told people yesterday, including a doctor who is a friend of this corner, that after taking the treatment at the hospital, he came out to the van and immediately started to throw up. His wife said that they had been prepared for this and had three plastic buckets in the car. As they drove Strawberry back to the drug rehab house where he has been assigned by the court, he threw up so much that he filled three buckets. He has also thrown up before they put the needle into his arm to start dripping the drug into him. This is not uncommon in cancer. I've known two people who threw up the moment the car turned the corner and the hospital was in sight. This time, Strawberry could throw up no more after the van ride and he went inside the drug rehab center and stayed there sick for the next six days. He got one sort of good day and then was supposed to go back for another chemotherapy treatment. Suddenly, Strawberry had a brilliant thought. He liked cocaine better than chemotherapy. Cocaine made him feel good. Chemotherapy made him desperately ill. Sometimes, these people with cancer can go to the core of whatever life they have left. Strawberry walked out and got himself some cocaine. People thought he was a suicide or kidnapped. Then he came back. And now he is in the hospital and he can have his chemotherapy. After that, he can throw up in a sheriff's van taking him back to court in handcuffs. Society is angry with him because he ran away and took cocaine again. One of these official women in Tampa, a prosecutor, said that because he took cocaine again he should be given prison time. If it takes until the end of his life, she will teach him that that he should take only the drug chemotherapy and never cocaine. To show how much they believe in this, the prosecutor should sit right down next to Strawberry in the hospital's infusion room and let a nurse slap a vein into view and hit it with a needle and let her have a good jolt of oxaliplatinum. It might give them a few things to think about. One of the things to think about is the thought of letting this sick, depressed Strawberry go off into some corner as he waits for this thing in his body to do it for him. This is something the law doesn't know anything about. The drugs have become such a large part of the criminal justice system that most are afraid to touch the rules and customs of drugs. There is overtime for cops, work for prison architects and prison guards, prosecutors, judges, court clerks. Drugs are the best thing to happen since prohibition almost a century ago. Strawberry has sheriffs at the door, deputies driving him in the vans, then prosecutors and clerk typists and judges and cells and maintenance men cleaning up the van after he is sick in it. When the bus driver was through reading abut Strawberry yesterday morning, he opened the door to people like Hilda Garcia, who is 73 now. She wore a knit cap and heavy coat and walked with an aluminum cane. She was going to Albany to protest the safety deposit box of criminal justice, the Rockefeller law, which sends people away for up to 15 years and more for the possession of as much as a stick of marijuana. Her husband had been a lookout on the block for a drug gang in Washington Heights. He never hurt anybody, but he got 10 years for that. Two years ago, the priest from Green Haven called Hilda to say the husband was dead of a heart attack. In his honor she goes to demonstrations against the law that held him. She started yesterday at five in the morning in her apartment in Washington Heights. She took the 9 train down to Columbus Circle and got the bus with Sara Ratner, Bill Kunstler's daughter; Randy Credico, and a busload of others like Hilda Garcia. I've never seen anybody big in crime in jail under the Rockefeller law. The driver stuck the newspaper into a handle and drove off with the story of Darryl Strawberry's chemotherapy at his side and his ears filled with stories coming out of the seats told by women whose husbands are serving long years for nonviolent crimes, but nevertheless serious crimes because they are against the old rich man's tradition of punishing the poor as fiercely as possible. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek