Mark and his wife Alice are active drug reformers in Vermont. As the directors of the Vermont Harm Reduction Coalition, they fight for the rights of persons struggling with addiction and for increased public health programming (in particular an expansion of the drug treatment system) to address the spread of disease and other harms arising from drug abuse.

I always knew that I didn’t feel like the other people I saw. I wasn’t happy- I had no desire for life. I put together a plan as young as eight years old, that as soon as things got bad enough, I would take my own life. I think research is going to find that there are people that are non-producers or poor producers of endorphins or dopamine.

Maybe it would be diagnosed as depression today. Back then, I just thought, Jesus, there’s something wrong with me. I found alcohol first, which was okay, but I didn’t like the stuff. I found heroin and marijuana shortly thereafter. I didn’t particularly care for marijuana either, but heroin- it was a fit. It was amazing. For the first time in my life I felt like I had a chance of being somebody.

For the rest of my life, I went through periods of using and not using. I was lucky enough that when I was 19, I had an uncle who was a master builder. He came out of retirement to apprentice myself, and his own son who was also my age. I lived with him and had to live by his rules. He was a master in virtually every art trade there was. He built cliff-hanging houses that were incredible, really fabulous places. He was also an artist. He had a lithographic press and did sculpture and welding. I lived with him for three years and did all that.

My brother, who went to West Point , was down in Colorado Springs . I had these construction skills, and we thought, let’s build homes. I went down to Colorado Springs and started building homes. He had friends, all officers in the Army with loans- we built homes for all of them. I was drinking.

I come from a family of six sisters and four brothers. One of my sisters had come out to work as our receptionist. I found her dead, she aspirated on her vomit after a night of drinking at home. About six months later, my older brother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and he died within a year. But while he was alive, in his last six months of life, his doctors were having cases of narcotics, cases of injectible morphine and Delotid, shipped to his house. And there I was, operating this big construction business alone. My brother was dying, my sister had just died. I got into it heavy. I got back into street heroin also. My brother died within a year of diagnosis. I lost the business. My wife divorced me. I didn’t see my son until he was 18 years old. I lost everything. I basically went homeless for the next five years. I was homeless on the streets of Seattle as an addict.

Seattle was the place I did my apprenticeship to my uncle, so I knew the town quite well. They had a huge homeless population. They also had some welfare programs that were fairly innovative at the time- they would pay for methadone and things like that.

But the methadone clinics up there, as today, will throw you out in a heartbeat if you don’t have the money- upfront. You pay for every month of treatment. If you can’t pay for the next month’s treatment, they will detox you. It’s basically not a detox at all. It’s throwing a person into withdrawal. We coined a name for it, “feetox.”

What happened was, I kept getting feetoxed. So I would go out and work like a dog all day- only for people who would pay cash at the end of the day. And at the end of the day, I would go to my connection and give them all my money. The connection was my heroin dealer. And that was because I had been thrown off the methadone program. I kept getting thrown out of the clinics for not having the money.

I went through this cycle of homelessness, from flop house to homeless to flop house to homeless for about four years. At one point I decided to go back to Colorado Springs . When I got there, I just had like $200 worth of food stamps. Food stamps are good anywhere for fifty cents on the dollar. So I went to this methadone clinic I had been to before. I don’t know how many inpatient treatments, outpatient treatments, thousands of NA meetings I have been to. I have been to NA meetings in at least five to six states. There were periods of time when I went to two meetings a day.

In Colorado Springs I was hanging around the methadone clinic looking for someone to cop from. I hadn’t been there for years, but I knew some of the guys coming out. I asked where to cop around here and they said you couldn’t- there was nobody dealing. He said the clinic had changed. They were giving a therapeutic dose and they had lowered their fees. There was a new director who had changed everything based on this new principle called “harm reduction.”

dosed me that second, it was just something that was never done. He told me he’d see me tomorrow, we’d have a counseling session tomorrow.

It turns out he was roundly hated by the rest of the staff because they were 12-steppers who didn’t believe in methadone treatment in the first place and hated the changes he had made: giving addicts a higher dose, treating them like human beings instead of criminals, lowering the fee. He lowered the fees to $20 a month from $180. Those $20 could be paid for with tickets from counseling sessions. If you went to four sessions a month you had your $20. He introduced me to harm reduction. After a few years he became not only my counselor but a very good friend, which is also verboten in methadone clinics.

Many clinics are still run on a 12-step basis and don’t believe that their patients are maintaining abstinence or are in recovery at all.

Now you have to have a master’s degree, but it used to be a fairly well paid job that you could get with very little schooling. And you had this incredible authority over people’s lives - life or death authority. Methadone becomes your lifeline and people like to tug on others’ lifelines. Some people get a real kick out of that.

It was because of him that I finally got my first years of sobriety. While I was homeless I made most of my money through honest labor. But I did make money by shoplifting also. Probably every Sears in the country had my picture. I was caught at it a number of times, but I was very aware of the line between a felony and a misdemeanor and never broke that line. The only felony I was ever charged with was when the Police stuck the drugs in my hand and busted me. Felony possession of cocaine. I had a friend set me up so he could get a lighter sentence. In fact, they told me the same thing, but I said I’d rather rot in jail. They held me in jail for 45 days. Not only was I homeless, but I was completely estranged from my family. Nobody gave a damn. I had nobody to call. I had burned all my bridges. I was just a homeless addict.

They sent me to a drug camp in Seattle . It was minimum security, like going to camp. The zero tolerance way that we have been dealing with drugs and drug users has repeatedly proven itself to be valueless and detrimental to our society. We’ve been fighting this war on drugs for 20-some years now. Things are worse than when we started. We need a compassionate, science-based approach to the problem. This is a disease. It should be recognized as a disease. Dealt with as a disease.

Q: You are saying zero tolerance has failed, but what are parents supposed to tell their children? How can we have anything but a zero tolerance approach?

I feel that it’s important to educate children about the dangers of drugs but make absolutely certain that you do not use the kind of scare tactics in project DARE- kids know when they’re being lied to or being fooled. It makes it very easy for them to dismiss all of the information because they know someone who has smoked marijuana. Telling kids using marijuana once will destroy their lives is counter productive. It’s more important to educate kids on the realities of drug use and the risks involved rather than hand them a fictionalized scare story.

Q: So if you could change something specific right now, what would you do first?

I would eliminate mandatory minimums first thing. Then, I would try to release anybody in our prisons who is there for drug use. People who are chronic users, I would start them in treatment before they are released. I would have treatment programs in prison- realistic treatment programs, medication-assisted programs with methadone and buprenorphine.