THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412080196
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ron Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
``If you have never had a crack addict in your family nor have ever been around one, you don't know the meaning of hell.''
I hope that painful plea rings through the halls of Congress, the statehouses, the boardrooms, the barbershops, the kitchens of our nation in the next few months.
Our country is heading down a different road as Republicans take charge of our future - and let us all pray that they'll come up with a way to deal with the drugs that are destroying our nation.
For years we all covered our eyes and pretended drugs weren't a problem for most of us, not in our nice neighborhoods. Drugs, we told ourselves, were something those people in the inner cities did.
We created bumper-sticker slogans (``Just Say No'') that we slapped on our cars and went contentedly on our way, confident that the plague would be limited to the poor devils in the bowels of the big cities.
It wasn't.
Ask the chairman of the Camden County Board of Commissoners, Larry Lamb. The quote at the top of this piece came from him. So does this one:
``Crack cocaine is the worst thing to ever happen to this country. It's not (just) in New York. It's not in Raleigh. It's here. It's right here in Camden County.''
And right in the home of Larry and Georgia Lamb, who operate a store and marina along Highway 158.
Lamb announced at a commissioners' meeting Monday that his 29-year-old son is a crack addict. The son has been charged with robbing a jewelry store of $52,000 in rings.
The Lambs' story, which they courageously shared, is every parent's nightmare: A kid hooked on drugs.
It's a common story in the inner cities, and it is becoming common in places that most of us thought would never be hit. Lamb said he knows of several families in the county whose happiness has been destroyed by crack cocaine.
And if the people in the Lambs' neighborhood aren't immune, nobody is. Camden County is about as rustic as it gets. There are no incorporated towns in the county, populated by only 5,900 people, many of them farmers and fishermen who trace their roots back to the colonial days.
Over the centuries, people didn't lock their doors, and some probably still don't. Nobody would think of walking in - unless they were desperate for drugs and needed money to buy them.
Most law enforcement officials say a majority of the crimes committed in America involve drugs - the influence of them, or the hunger for them that drives addicts to commit crime after crime to pay for their habit.
Lamb said his son has been hooked for five years, and whenever the telephone rang at night ``we fully expected to be called from the morgue - wanting us to identify his body.''
As Lamb said, that is a living hell. And we're all becoming victims of drugs, because the people who sell them and use them have instilled fear in the hearts of the boldest among us. We lock doors. We don't go out at night. We don't talk to strangers. We don't pick up hitchhikers. And we worry that it will get worse.
It will, if we don't consider taking drastic measures. Maybe legalization, so nobody would make money from pushing sales. Maybe life in prison for selling. Maybe a big, big hike in the minimum wage so unskilled jobs would be an alternative to high-paying jobs in the drug business.
I hope when Republicans rearrange the nation's priorities they will put dealing with the drug problem at the top of the list.
It is not going to go away, not as long as there are big bucks to be made in dealing drugs. by CNB