Tchort
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For the first time in her career as a social researcher, Kathie Kane-Willis senses momentum shifting in America's war on drugs. She sees government officials vowing to steer addicts to treatment, not prison, and it is as if her life's work has begun to bear fruit.
But the movement still feels tenuous, needing every push it can get. So, Friday morning, she tried to give it one.
At a drug policy conference at Roosevelt University, Kane-Willis, 40, stepped before a packed meeting hall to reveal her own descent into heroin addiction, a two-year spree of self-destruction that she escaped -- by her reckoning -- largely because of advantages that many addicts don't have.
The crowd included her husband and 12-year-old daughter, as well as colleagues who knew nothing about her past. Going public was no easy decision: She viewed that dark time with shame and regret, and even though it was far behind her, she still feared being scorned as a junkie.
Yet she believed the contrast between what she was and what treatment allowed her to become was so strong, so persuasive, that it had the potential to affect lives and sway policy.
"I'm telling my story because I feel as though the tide is finally turning," she told the audience, her voice quavering slightly. "I hope and pray that I'm right about this feeling, that the war on drugs really might be coming to an end. This social justice movement is gaining strength, and I want to add my voice, my story and my face to it."
Kane-Willis was a sensitive, bookish student at Hinsdale South High School in the late 1980s, smart enough to earn entrance into highly selective Sarah Lawrence College, just north of New York City.
An aspiring writer, she loved the school's moody, creative atmosphere. But before her freshman year was half over, a long-smoldering family dysfunction that she prefers not to detail ignited, and she suffered an emotional breakdown.
Neither a hospital nor her school provided her much help, and her friends seemed to recoil from her trauma. The one place she found acceptance was with an edgy art crowd, who bolstered their outsider status by scoring heroin in the scuzzy streets of Manhattan's East Village.
Some of the youths used the drug casually, treating it as a fashionably transgressive accessory to their William S. Burroughs paperbacks and Velvet Underground albums. But heroin was no pose for Kane-Willis. It was exactly what she had been seeking.
"How I would tell that I was high is I would think about ... the most painful thing, and I could think about it in this purely intellectual way," she recalled. "My stomach wouldn't hurt. I wouldn't cry. I didn't feel that pain."
The drug dulled her misery but didn't end it, so she quit Sarah Lawrence for what she hoped would be a happier life in San Francisco. But there, settling into a neighborhood sodden with narcotics, falling for a boyfriend with his own taste for heroin, she fell into full-blown dependency.
Kane-Willis financed her drug buys with an intricate credit card scam, inventing fictitious people and running up charges in their names. In 1989, she finally was caught in a department store, and though she spent only one night in jail, the arrest convinced her that she needed help.
She went through a painful detox, and then her father, Don Kane, paid for her to enter a 28-day treatment program in Chicago. It didn't take: After a brief confinement in a psychiatric ward -- the result, she said, of her questioning the program's methods -- she walked out of the hospital and made her way to Los Angeles.
Her flight felt like defeat to her father. Kane recalled that someone at the hospital "told me I would be going to emergency rooms the rest of my life. I think he was saying that when you're into this kind of drug, you're a lost cause."
Things did get worse when Kane-Willis returned to California. As her heroin use escalated, she squatted in an abandoned restaurant with her boyfriend and continued her criminal schemes until she was arrested for shoplifting.
She was jailed for two dehumanizing weeks in a Los Angeles County lockup -- she still blanches at memories of strip searches and lice spray -- but it proved to be pivotal: She returned to Illinois soon after her release and, with the help of her father, entered psychotherapy and a privately run methadone clinic that, unlike most public programs, had no waiting list. The treatment set her on the path to her ultimate sobriety.
Her brief incarceration also stirred her social conscience. She saw that almost all of her fellow inmates had addictions and that almost none of them was white, as is she. How just were the nation's drug laws, she thought, if the mass incarceration of poor blacks and Hispanics was a result?
Her belief was fortified a year later, in 1991, when she entered a federal courtroom to plead guilty to her credit card scam and was initially mistaken for a lawyer. She took that as a sign she would be treated with leniency, and indeed, she feels that she received unusually light punishment: two years of probation after her father paid $25,000 in restitution.
Kane-Willis went on to earn a master's degree in sociology at Roosevelt University and work as a researcher in the school's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs. She specializes in issues of drug abuse, feeling driven to explain the world she once inhabited and to correct what she sees as its abiding injustices.
"Anybody with their eyes open who goes through the system understands [its unfairness]," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based group that advocates treatment rather than incarceration. "What's important is to have people speak out and become committed to reforming the system in the way that Kathie has."
A study that Kane-Willis and her colleagues are about to release shows that Illinois trails only Mississippi in the rate of imprisonment for drug possession -- about 60 inmates for every 100,000 residents -- and that the state locks up more than four blacks on drug charges for every white, the largest racial disparity in the nation.
She is hopeful, though, that things are changing. The number of people imprisoned for drug offenses in Illinois has declined since 2006, a promising though unexplained trend. Meanwhile, President Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, is shunning the term "war on drugs," saying narcotics should be treated as a public health problem, not just a criminal one.
That helped convince Kane-Willis it was time to tell her story of addiction and recovery. She spoke for 10 minutes, concluding with the reflection that while she had been a junkie and a felon, she was now a wife, a mother, a friend, a teacher and an advocate.
How many others could redeem their lives with the same opportunities she had been given?
The room exploded in a standing ovation. After the hugs and tears, Kane-Willis said her fear had given way to liberation.
"If people want me to speak again, I would be happy to do that," she said. "I would be thrilled to do that."
6/13/09
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-confession-bd-14-jun14,0,4399112.story
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