Drug Addiction

Barbara Harris, the Orange County woman who paid two drug-abusing women $200 in exchange for their agreement to undergo sterilization, held a news conference Wednesday to introduce a third woman willing to make the same type of deal. Outside the El Monte Planned Parenthood Center, the 29-year-old drug user described herself as a homeless mother of two living in a van in La Puente. She said she has used speed, has been pregnant eight times and given birth to seven children.

The number of Soviet drug addicts has risen to about 46,000, an eighteenfold increase in two years, the Kremlin said today as it acknowledged that a problem once considered purely Western is spreading in the Soviet Union. Interior Minister Alexander Vlasov gave the new figure in an interview in the Communist Party daily Pravda. The last official statistics on drug abuse, released in May, 1984, put the number of Soviet addicts at 2,500.

This historic fishing port with its trawlers and luxury yachts, fish-processing plants and cliffside mansions has spent the last decade in a frustrating battle against a rising tide of heroin addiction. A modest force of 51 patrolmen covers this city of 28,000 people and 32 square miles with no more than an average share of violent crime, break-ins and drunk driving.

Gov. Pete Wilson has struck a responsive chord with most Californians by taking steps to make a controversial new birth control implant widely available to teen-agers and drug-abusing women of childbearing age, The Los Angeles Times Poll has found. A majority of people interviewed by the poll approve of providing teen-age girls with the device. Further, six in 10 people think it should be mandatory for drug abusers.

Once a week for the last several years, I've driven to skid row to visit a friend. I get depressed about the area at times because it's such a depository of the unfortunate and the forgotten. But then I'll catch a warm greeting, or see a sign of hope in someone trying to crawl out of a hole they thought they'd never escape. The friend, by the way, is Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the ever-devoted musician who inspired the book and movie "The Soloist. " In the process, he helped inspire another movie, "Lost Angels," a documentary that opens Friday night at the ArcLight in Hollywood.

She spent her last days at the Van Nuys jail pleading that the pain was overwhelming her frail body. Kathleen Barkley was going through heroin withdrawal, and it was driving her crazy. Dora, a woman housed in the neighboring jail cell, said Barkley had begged jail officers to get her medical treatment. Police, who acknowledge that Barkley asked for assistance, said they did provide Barkley some medical treatment, although they decline to specify what is was. Even so, sometime before 3 a.m.

Ernesto Camarena, brother of slain U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena, is facing deportation to Mexico as an undesirable alien because of a longstanding drug addiction and lengthy criminal record going back to when he was a teen-ager. Chief Patrol Agent Dale Musegades said Thursday that Camarena, 41, is being held at the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center in El Centro on $3,500 bond while awaiting a deportation hearing.

Iran's drug users took their last fix Saturday before addiction becomes an offense punishable by internment in labor camps. Officials vowed to arrest 55,000 drug addicts in an initial crackdown starting today under a tough anti-narcotics law enacted in January. The law had granted a six-month grace period. The Islamic Revolutionary Committee said agents would set up checkpoints in many towns and cities to round up addicts.

"Junkie" was a scary label in the '50s, when "A Hatful of Rain" premiered in New York City. Just the mention of the word, usually in a whisper, was enough to evoke demons, danger, shame and loathing. In "Hatful," when Johnny says the word in a writhing confession, it's supposed to rip the lid off a problem that has been ignored for years--which indeed was the effect in 1955 when this was one of the first dramas to explore drug addiction.

Remember the scene in "Rocky" in which the hero prepares for his title match against Apollo Creed by pounding his fists against slabs of meat in a frozen locker? Pure Hollywood hokum? A scriptwriter's imagination out of control? Difficult to say because in the unorthodox world of the heavyweights, reality and hokum often merge. In a training camp, anything goes. Especially when the publicists are as important as the pugilists. Take Michael Dokes, for example.