Pubdate: Tue, 17 Jan 2006
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: B03
Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Susan Levine, Washington Post Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Marion+Barry
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

BESIEGED ADDICTS FIND PARALLELS IN BARRY'S PLIGHT

Longtime Users Say Fight to Stay Clean Never Ends

They've been there, these two men, in the low, desperate place they
say an addict inevitably goes. They've lied and thieved for their
highs, gotten caught, gotten jailed, struggled to stay clean and
repeatedly failed.

Tom Canady and James Gaither have, in essence, walked the same walk
that a failed drug test indicates Marion Barry is facing once again.
No one understands better the pull of cocaine, crack or heroin than a
fellow addict. The same holds true of the daunting effort it takes to
break away. How hard? How constant? Ask someone who succeeded -- or is
still trying.

"It's every day with me," said Gaither, a soft-spoken man who has been
entangled in drugs for 36 of his 54 years. He's now counting six
months without them, but every morning, the urge to use starts anew.
"It's the situations I face on a day-to-day basis that I don't want to
feel," he said, "that I don't want to deal with."

Despite the vast differences between where he and Canady have gone in
life and where life has taken the Ward 8 council member and two-time
mayor, it is easy to connect their account of the escape that drugs
provide to Barry's recent past, with its increasing health worries and
federal tax troubles. After pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax
charges, Barry tested positive for cocaine in a court-ordered drug
screening. The other men wonder: Did Barry feel that his problems were
all coming back? That the feds, as Canady put it, "were starting the
whole mess again?"

As their histories illustrate, the fault line between recovery and
relapse is often exceedingly unstable. The 58-year-old Canady has been
clean since the late 1990s. And yet . . .

"It's a struggle for me every day," he acknowledged.

For several hours last week, in the comfortably furnished living room
of a District rowhouse where people straddling the fault line live,
Canady and Gaither recounted their journeys and what they have learned
along the way about themselves. Their words and tone sought no sympathy.

The two D.C. natives know each other from RAP, as Regional Addiction
Prevention Inc. is commonly called. The nonprofit organization has
been their salvation and that of the thousands of addicts enrolled in
its treatment programs since its founding in 1970. Walls of RAP's
central offices in Northeast Washington are covered with photo
collages of some of those clients and with pictures of the many
prominent guests who have stopped by. Among the celebrities: Marion
Barry.

Canady's distance from drugs today is a marked accomplishment for
someone who started on heroin at 16. His father, he said, was his
first supplier.

At 17, he was arrested for armed robbery, a crime that became murder
when the store proprietor he had shot died. By his math, over the next
three decades or so he served almost 27 years behind bars on that
conviction and various drug charges. LSD, acid, pot, hashish -- he
would try anything.

"I could take a week explaining this," Canady said, his neat sweater,
slacks and genial politeness at jarring odds with his account. And it
requires some explanation because the thrill for him was never the
high, which over time diminished in potency, but the buying, stealing,
lying and sneaking that preceded it. "I was addicted to the
lifestyle," he said matter-of-factly. "I didn't have the heart and
nerve to do these things unless I was high."

Canady suspects a parallel with the District's most famous elected
official, who always has seemed to thrive on the intoxicating
combination of politics and power. Without that, "Barry's just an old
warrior," he suggested.

"I'm think I'm settled now. I don't fight me no more," Canady said. He
is not sure whether Barry would say the same.

Beside him on the sofa, Gaither nodded his agreement. He knows from
experience that drug rehabilitation allows little backsliding: "If
you're lucky enough and you come to your senses after you use [drugs],
you call someone and say, 'Man, I messed up.' " With his last relapse,
he wasn't so fortunate. Its trigger was an argument with one of his
sons, who angrily -- and accurately -- accused his father of missing
most of his children's growing up. Gaither couldn't take the
criticism. He found refuge in crack. A "dirty urine" sample exposed
him at his parole office.

Gaither's criminal resume nearly equals Canady's. At one early
sentencing, he remembers, a judge called him "a walking drugstore." He
came from just as meager a childhood but graduated from high school,
held a job for a couple of years at the U.S. Treasury Department and
managed, after his first prison term, to receive an associate's degree
in accounting. That was a long time ago and the best it got.

These days, if Gaither suddenly feels vulnerable, he calls someone
such as Canady for support. Beyond the common denominators of their
past, both are grandfathers who say they feel compelled to do better
and be better for family this time around. Gaither has two more years
before he could be finished with parole, and "the only way I can get
off is to keep on giving them clean urine."

He has to believe that is strong enough motivation.

"We have a saying" in treatment, he said. "If you keep on doing what
you did, you're going to keep on getting what you got."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake