They found Delmont Williams' body in an alley off Harlem Avenue, lying under the bald branches of a withered willow tree, staring up at the afternoon sky through dead eyes on "check day."
He had enough alcohol and heroin in his veins to intoxicate three men.
And you paid for it.
The homeless Army veteran overdosed with money from a Social Security program that doles out monthly checks to 8 million people who are too old or disabled to work. But 250,000 of them are believed to be hard-core substance abusers who routinely squander the cash on drugs and alcohol.
Beginning Friday, the new Republican-led majority in Congress will examine the problem in hearings on Capitol Hill. Some are already vowing to give addicts the ax.
But they will soon learn that it's easier said than done because of one little-known fact: Most of the addicts and alcoholics on the rolls -- perhaps as many as three out of four -- are retarded, blind, crippled or suffer from some other disability that would still entitle them to the $458 monthly checks.
And Congress has refused for two decades to provide treatment for addicts in spite of a chronic shortage of even the most basic rehabilitation. Fearing that any appearance of coddling drug abusers would invite voter backlash, the nation's lawmakers have ignored social workers and drug counselors who say that intensive long-term treatment is the only answer.
"The first reaction of right-wing conservatives will be to gut the program completely," says Dr. Sally Satel, a Yale psychiatrist. "And the real liberal types won't want it touched. But either of those courses would simply perpetuate this crisis."
Says Pam Rodriguez, a Chicago drug counselor: "We have never seen a population like this before. For years, Social Security saw its job as to simply write checks. Now, we're getting [people] and they're ruined. We don't even know where to start."
Checks for the drug abusers are costing taxpayers $1.4 billion a year. Most are alcoholics. The vast majority are men. Almost half are black. Their average age is 42. And few ever kick their habits. Rather, they usually end up dead or in prison within seven years of receiving their first check.
The case of Delmont Williams is typical.
A bearded father of two who drifted from North Carolina to Baltimore, his medical records show that Social Security knew he was a hard-core alcoholic when it mailed him his first check in 1987.
His liver was swollen from years of heavy drinking. His heart was congested. Half his teeth were missing. And his skull -- bashed in years earlier in a drunken brawl -- was webbed with cracks like a piece of glued-together pottery. He suffered from seizures and mental illnesses.
There could be little question that he wasn't capable of holding a job, or that he would squander the money Social Security gave him for his fractured skull and manic depression unless he got off drugs and alcohol. But the agency offered him no help. Just a check.
"Delmont knew he was dying," says Curtis Mann, a drug counselor at the Health Care for the Homeless free clinic on Park Avenue. "All the dealers came circling around him on check day like vultures. A week later, he'd crash from whatever dope he was using and feel terrible.
"Those were the times that he'd go looking for help. The problem was that we could never find it for him before that damn check came in the mail on the first of the month and the whole cycle started all over again."
In a city with some 2,400 addicts on the disability rolls and the highest per capita rate of heroin-related emergency room admissions in the country, there is not even short-term treatment available for nine out of 10 addicts, the nonprofit Abell Foundation found last year.
And the kind of in-patient care that removes hard-core addicts from their drug-infested haunts long enough to learn a new way of life is not available at all in Baltimore.
Time and again, Delmont Williams was confronted by waiting lists of up to a year, then headed back out onto the street to blow his aid money on blinding binges that ended in trash-strewn alleys, jail cells and hospitals all over the city.
On the afternoon of June 1, police came upon his corpse in a West Baltimore alley wrapped in a filthy red polo shirt. Just four hours earlier, he had picked up his last $446 check from a mail drop at the clinic and cashed it at a nearby liquor store.
Delmont Williams died homeless, stoned and alone at 49.
"With his history, there's no way he should have been walking around with that much money in his pocket," says Lauren Siegel, a social worker at the free clinic. "But they gave it to him anyway. Every month, no strings attached, the check would come and Delmont would spend it on drugs and alcohol. Until it finally killed him."
The money came from a program known as SSI, for Supplemental Security Income -- a plan set up by Congress two decades ago with little deliberation or debate. The idea was to provide food, shelter and clothing to disabled poor people.
It is one of two such programs for the disabled run by the Social Security Administration. The other is called DI, for Disability Insurance. Since 1956, it has let workers who have paid into Social Security's retirement trust fund draw benefits early if they become injured, ill or addicted.
Both programs are in trouble.
Contradictory law
Envisioned as modest proposals to help a few million aged and disabled Americans, SSI and DI now cost $65 billion a year --
fueling the national debt and sapping the fund that retired Americans rely on to pay their bills.
Both are covered by the same set of 1972 disability rules.
Even then, thousands of recipients were known drug addicts and alcoholics. But the rules placed few controls on how they spent the money -- except that they could not use it to buy drug treatment until they first paid their rent, utilities and living expenses.
In a glaring contradiction written into the law, Congress deemed that letting handicapped addicts spend their checks on treatment would violate the philosophical underpinnings of the aid program: to provide for the basic needs of those who couldn't work.
That decision set blind, retarded and mentally ill addicts adrift in lives of despair because it effectively cut them off from private clinics, where treatment is generally available to anyone who can pay for it. And the prohibition has remained unchanged for more than 20 years. Further, tucked inside the law was one sentence that said addiction alone could qualify as a disabling disorder, making it possible for virtually anyone hooked on dope or booze to get a monthly check even though they have no other disability.
Before then, an addict or alcoholic had to prove that his substance abuse was so severe that it had caused disabling brain or liver damage, conditions that usually took decades to develop.
But under the 1972 rules, an addict has only to prove that his drug abuse is bad enough to keep him from holding a job -- opening the door for thousands of young substance abusers who aren't physically disabled and who probably never would have qualified for aid under the old rules.
They are men like Ernie Hernandez.
The 34-year-old heroin addict and father of two sits in the brown grass outside the San Joaquin County drug clinic in French Camp, Calif., a desolate farm town east of San Francisco.
He fidgets with his beefy hands as he describes his six years on SSI.
A one-time cannery worker and farm laborer, he has no apparent physical problem that would keep him from working. He is lucid )) in conversation. And at 6 feet tall and 225 pounds, he's built like a weight lifter.
"I admit it," he says. "I don't look sick."
But he's collecting $458 per month in SSI, which qualifies him for a $200 supplemental payment from the state, bringing his tax-free monthly take to $658 ' about the same amount that the average retiree gets from Social Security after a lifetime of labor.
"The money definitely changes you," he admits. "I just ain't going to risk losing that money by working at some minimum-wage job. Next thing I know, I get too stoned, I lose the job. Then what am I gonna do to feed my kids?
"You can tell them congressmen, if they stop SSI, the crime rate around here is going to go through the roof. It's all a lot of us have."
And Ernie Hernandez knows about crime. He says he's been using heroin and cocaine since he was a teen-ager, landing in prison at least nine times.
He'd like to get himself clean and back to work -- if for no other reason than to get his family off his back and to "be able to spend a weekend in the mountains without having to come home early because I ran out of dope."
But he has never been able to rehabilitate himself. Even when he wants it, there is little in the way of intensive treatment available.
On this sweltering day in July, he wants it in the worst way.
Jittery from a dose of black tar heroin he shot into his leg the night before, he considers his options as he fingers a small, gummy "booger" of heroin in his pocket.
'I'm really gonna kick'
Cheap and plentiful, black tar has spawned a plague of #i addiction in the cities and towns along Interstate 5 that has helped make California -- with at least 34,000 addicts on the aid rolls -- the "Disability Capital" of the nation.
"You back again, Ernesto?" asks Floyd Brown, the chain-smoking assistant director of the clinic.
"Yes, sir," Ernie Hernandez replies, hoisting himself up from the grass. "I want to get on the waiting list. I'm really gonna kick this time."
Both men know his chances of getting off heroin are nil. Since he's been on SSI, he's been in and out of the clinic so many times that they've both lost count.
He is one of 6,000 heroin addicts in the valley who rotate on and off the out-patient treatment program throughout the year. In a region that has become a hotbed of disease, many of them suffer from tuberculosis and AIDs. Three out of every four are getting disability checks, according to a recent county survey.
"They'll test positive for heroin and we'll flunk them out of the program," Mr. Brown says. "Then they'll sign back up on the waiting list and the whole thing starts all over again. I can honestly say that in my 21 years in this business, I have never had a disability recipient successfully complete the program."
When Congress first decided to let addicts like Ernie Hernandez get aid for merely being addicted, it ordered Social Security to herd them into treatment as a condition of their getting checks.
Any addict who refused was to be cut off -- except for DI addicts, because Congress deemed that they had "earned" their benefits when they were working and should be free to spend them as they saw fit.
The treatment rule was supposed to keep poor addicts on SSI from simply using the money to feed their habits. But former agency officials and legislative aides say they warned Congress as early as 1969 that there were nowhere near enough in-patient treatment slots for them. And no one expected out-patient treatment to work.
But the nation's lawmakers were less interested in accountability for addicts, the aides say, than they were in insulating themselves against outraged taxpayers should the program go wrong. Then-Sen. Russell Long, the legendary Louisiana Democrat, was the prime mover.
"He told us there was no way in hell he would support giving checks to dope addicts without at least making it look like we were getting tough with them at the same time," says Tom Joe, a Washington social policy analyst who helped write the disability rules. "Every-body knew that they probably wouldn't be able to actually find treatment."
Then, or now.
Today, a minimum of 3.2 million addicts and alcoholics need help, ac-cording to federal, state and private estimates. But there are slots available for less than half. And at least 100,000 people are on waiting lists for those slots at any time. For others, there are no lists.
Consider North Carolina, a state with 6,200 addicts on the federal disability rolls and few publicly funded in-patient
treatment slots.
In Asheville, a small town in the pine-blanketed foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a downtown Social Security office draws scores of disabled people from the surrounding countryside. Many are illiterate, hobbled by years of hard labor in mines and lumber mills, and suffering from addictions to rot gut wine and moonshine.
"We're basically telling them to get treatment when there isn't a treatment facility within 200 miles of here," says Sharon DeLong of the American Federation of Government Employees, who represents local caseworkers.
"We try to push them into Alcoholics Anonymous or something like that. But how long can they last when all they're getting is a couple hours of group therapy before they head back out to sleep in the woods with a dozen other alcoholics? It's utterly demoralizing."
Her frustration is echoed by caseworkers and drug counselors from Baltimore to Seattle who say Congress and the Social Security Administration have never been serious about rehabilitating addicts -- or in understanding how treatment works.
Counselors surveyed by The Sun say programs like the San Joaquin methadone clinic and Alcoholics Anonymous that bring addicts in off the street for a few weeks of detoxification or a few hours of group counseling every day are the least likely to succeed with hard-core substance abusers.
"It amounts to drive-by therapy," says Dr. Satel, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania who has worked with addicts for seven years. "It may work fine for the early stage addict who still has a home, a family and a job. But that's not who you see on disability.
"These people are seriously debilitated drug abusers, and they need months of heavy-duty residential care that cuts them off from their addict friends and their old hang-outs, and teaches them a new way of life."
And it is precisely this kind of treatment that Congress has refused for 20 years to provide to the destitute substance abusers on federal disability. Today, there are only 68,000 federally funded in-treatment slots in the entire country.
"It's one of the terrible ironies of the disability program," says Dr. Satel. "Congress tells addicts, 'You have to be in treatment, but we're not going to give it to you -- and you can't use your check to buy it on your own.'"
Under the rules set up by Congress, Social Security is required to stop checks to addicts who are caught spending them in a residential program.
Adding insult to injury, counselors say, Congress ordered Social Security last summer to carry out a plan to cut off addicts' checks after three years. The agency says the move will trigger ** $275 million in notification, processing and legal costs -- enough to buy residential treatment for 35,000 addicts.
"Instead, we're spending it to shove these people back out onto the street in 36 months," says an exasperated Jack Gustafson, who represents state rehabilitation directors in Washington. /^ "We'll buy their drugs for them for three years, but we won't give them in-patient treatment. It's insane."
Nor will the crackdown achieve the results that Congress promised to taxpayers when it vowed to purge addicts from the rolls. That's because most of them suffer from other physical or mental disabilities that will still qualify them for aid.
"The fact is that drinking and drugging is usually just part of the problem," says Joe Manes, a Washington mental health activist. "They usually have a complex of ailments that may or may not be related to their substance abuse."
Willard Redpaint is a walking illustration.
'Pints away from dead'
Most mornings, the 42-year-old Dakota Indian can be seen stumbling down Larimer Street on the graffiti-scrawled industrial fringe of downtown Denver, a bottle of Wild Irish Rose wine in his trembling hand and a glassy film across his bloodshot eyes.
At 10:30 on a bright, clear morning in August, he is already drunk. So drunk that when he blows into a Breathalyzer at a nearby homeless shelter he registers a potentially lethal .42 blood alcohol level -- four times the amount to be considered legally intoxicated.
"God almighty, Willard!" blurts Bob Cote, director of the shelter. "You're about two pints away from dead!"
He breaks into a heated lecture, brow-beating, accusing. He reminds Willard Redpaint that at least 41 men have killed themselves on Larimer Street with disability aid money in the past few years.
"You knew a lot of those guys, didn't you?" Mr. Cote demands. "You want to end up like them?"
"I like my wine," Willard Redpaint replies sleepily. "I like to drink."
Reeking of urine and garbage from four nights of sleeping in an alley, he says he can't remember how long he has been getting disability checks. Court records show it has been at least since 1985.
But alcoholism is far from his only problem.
Willard Redpaint is mentally retarded. And his brain is damaged from a car accident that sent him hurtling through the windshield of a pickup truck when he was a child. He signs his name with an "X" because he cannot read or write.
When he was 4, a gang of thugs strangled his father during a robbery. A few years later, his mother was taken away to a mental institution. By the time he was 15, he was drifting the Western high country alone.
His earliest arrival in Denver is recorded in court files at age 25, when police found him stumbling drunk down the center of a six-lane interstate in the middle of the night. Since then, he has been arrested 16 times in alcohol-related incidents.
In 1988, he beat another homeless man to death with a slab of concrete over a stolen radio. Convicted of manslaughter, he served three years in prison, feeding his habit with homemade potato wine.
"It gives you a hangover in the morning," he says of his drinking. "And I'll end up dying. But that's the only bad part."
Each morning, he goes to a homeless aid station where social workers dole out his monthly check to him in $10 installments.
"I can buy four bottles of wine with that much," he says. "That's a lot of wine."
Left without treatment, counseling or supervision, Willard Redpaint receives just enough money every day from U.S. taxpayers to drink himself to the edge of death.
And the crackdown launched by Congress last summer with much election-year rhetoric will do nothing to stop him. If Social Security cuts off the checks because of his alcoholism, all he will have to do is reapply, citing mental retardation and brain damage.
Nor do drug counselors and social workers expect any of the other measures Congress passed in August to have much effect. Among the mandates were orders for Social Security to force addicts into treatment programs that don't exist and to hire special inspectors to make sure they don't misuse their checks.
But the agency has had inspectors in 18 states for years. And they say they have been consigned to failure by a lack of funding.
Little supervision
In California, Social Security monitored addicts so poorly that it continued to send checks to 119 of them while they were in prison, the state attorney general found last year. And in Illinois, a Chicago firm lost track of 7,000 more because Social Security never provided a list of their names.
And Social Security does not expect to be able to tighten supervision with the money Congress wants to spend on the job. Rather, private firms will be paid roughly $600 per addict to monitor their whereabouts and make sure they are signed up on waiting lists until their checks run out in 36 months.
"Obviously, one long-term goal is to rehabilitate people," says Commissioner Shirley S. Chater, the agency's head. "And the way we do that is to have these monitoring agencies encourage the addict's sense of individual responsibility to find treatment for himself."
But Social Security estimates that the majority of substance abusers on disability -- perhaps as many as 200,000 -- will continue to get checks and go untreated long after the three-year cutoff because of loopholes in the law.
As many as three out of five are exempt because they have other disabilities. And another two out of three are collecting DI checks that can't be cut off until three years after they are actually accepted into a treatment program because Congress decided they "earned" their benefits.
Meanwhile, new addicts continue to pour onto the rolls. Social Security estimates that the number drawing checks today will almost double by the turn of the century.
"It's insane to go on giving them cash," says Dr. Satel, the Yale psychiatrist. "But it also makes no sense to just take that money away and plow it into some other program. Congress has to wake up to the fact that we need hard-nosed treatment to interrupt this cycle of addiction, crime and punishment that is costing taxpayers a fortune in more ways than one."
Estimates by the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors are that every dollar spent on drug treatment saves $14 in police, court, emergency room and prison costs.
But so far, Congress and Social Security have been unwilling to spend the money -- even in the case of men like Delmont Williams who desperately want treatment and will surely die without it.
"It's not our job to solve the problems of the addict population," says Deputy Social Security Commissioner Larry Thompson. "Our job is to write checks."