The shirtless, knife-scarred man pushes a shopping cart round the Southwest Baltimore street corner, propelled by a heroin high and the need to get some things off his chest. Halting before the sneakered feet of city Councilman Norman A. Handy Sr., he lets loose a nonstop rant.

"I hustle. I steal. I cheat. And I shoot dope," the man shouts. "I use it because I like it."

Handy isn't hopeful, but he passes the man a card instructing him to seek drug counseling. He'd like to offer more than a card with a phone number, though. He'd like to give the man heroin -- daily doses through a government-sanctioned program. At least that way, he reasons, hard-core addicts wouldn't have to steal or commit other crimes to feed their habit.

Handy knows about junkies. For 10 years, he was a heroin addict.

His story is not much different from many young men in Baltimore's ravaged neighborhoods. He began many days with a needle in a vein. Ferried drugs from New York to Florida. Broke into houses and cars for cash. Betrayed his family. Ended up doing time in a Georgia prison.

Today, more than 20 years later, the 54-year-old man with the gray dreadlocks and dashikis is a Methodist minister and respected community leader. And if he keeps speaking up about doling out drugs to addicts, he could become America's loneliest politician.

Being perceived as condoning drug use is, of course, one of the great taboos of contemporary politics, and Handy has come perilously close. When Johns Hopkins Hospital doctors recently proposed a trial program to give heroin to addicts, Maryland's elected officials couldn't denounce the idea fast enough. Even Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who favors needle exchange programs, kept his distance. But Handy said it was worth trying.

His willingness to talk about his unlikely path to public life also sets him apart. Hardly any politicians confess to anything more serious than youthful "experimentation" with marijuana; It's a career-killer. Handy, though, is on a mission to offer hope to torn families and struggling communities.

Trespassing boundaries

"Winding up in prison was the thing that saved my life," he says. "The only way I stay drug-free is that I keep reminding myself that you never get over the temptation and you never get over the pain."

Handy is ashamed of the man he used to be. He can't explain his descent. Partly it was the times, he says. Partly, it was the undeniable pleasure; he knows all too well heroin's appeal to that addict on the corner. Partly, it was the money. It amazes him how easily he trespassed moral boundaries.

"I kept saying to myself that no one understands," Handy says. "I was going to school, I was employed and I was entitled to it."

Elected in 1995 to represent the 6th District, Handy relishes his role as voice for the powerless.

"There is a category of addict for which treatment has not worked," he told fellow council members in June. "I know a lot of brothers and sisters who would have opted for heroin maintenance instead of the grave or the life of crime."

He is soft-spoken but unrelenting. For months, the Democrat's treatises on drugs, inadequate housing or black empowerment would clear the council chambers faster than the pound of a gavel. His colleagues once gave him an ovation for not getting up to address them.

That sort of response doesn't faze him. He's lucky. He got off drugs. And now he can tool around the city on his Harley-Davidson. He can enjoy his grandchildren. He can choose what he puts in his body. "Meat is poison," he warns.

'So secretive'

Handy grew up in northeast Washington, the son of an alcoholic cab driver and a stay-at-home mother. He was a standout at St. Cyprius, the neighborhood Roman Catholic school. By the time he was 12, his parents had split up; he moved with his mother and four brothers to Prince George's County. At Fairmont Heights Senior High, Handy graduated in the top 10 percent of his class and was elected senior class president.

But he'd begun drinking regularly, a pattern that continued at Morgan State University. "It was not unusual for me to be intoxicated," he says.

And he threw himself into the tumult of Baltimore's civil rights protests, spending more time staging sit-ins at the Northwood Shopping Center than studying. He dropped out, went back to Washington and enlisted in the Air Force in May 1964 to avoid the draft.

It was in Vietnam that he first used drugs, Handy says. Serving as a communications specialist in Pleiku, away from any combat, he tried marijuana and hashish, just as others on base did during off-duty hours.

By the time he was discharged in 1968, he had graduated to heroin.

"When he came back he was so secretive," Vernon Handy, his older brother, recalls. "All he would do is sit in his room. He didn't say anything."

Handy says he would sneak out at night to get drugs; he was injecting heroin daily. After about a year, Handy managed to cut back on his drug use. He married in 1970 and had a son, Norman Jr. He started driving a cab in Prince George's County.

He describes that time as "the good years." Says Ronald Nash, a friend: "Drugs hadn't ruined his life yet."

Family falls apart

He attended the University of the District of Columbia and bought a fish market with his wife, Jackie. After a while, he got a job as a counselor at Boys Village, a residential facility for troubled teen-agers in Prince George's County.

He would use the cab, though, to pick up packages of heroin in Baltimore and take it to dealers in Washington. A couple of times a month, Handy would fly to New York to pick up drugs for dealers. On occasion, he'd deliver as far as Florida.

"I was making an average of $1,800 a week," he says. He was spending it, too: on a new car, a nice apartment, clothes, gifts. "As long as the money was flowing, there was no effort to get me off" drugs, he says.

His heroin habit escalated. He convinced himself his drug use was a form of "super militantism": "For a certain number of us, this was the moment of our social protest mixed with the drug culture and ideas that we could change the world," he says.

Toward the end of 1974, the money could no longer mask the problems. The fish market went under because he used the rent money for drugs. The cab company fired him for disappearing for days. His Volvo was seized and the family was evicted.

Handy became so reckless that his 5-year-old son witnessed his father and friends snorting cocaine one day. "He came in and told Norman he hated him because of all his drug use," Nash recalls. "Norman forgot what was important to him."

Soon after, his wife left, taking the boy with her.

"It took years for us to develop a relationship," Handy laments. His son, now 28, works as an accountant in Florida. "Every time we get on the phone, we talk about how drugs had ruined our relationship."

Handy lost his counseling job a month after his family left. By then, he'd been lying and stealing from friends and relatives and couldn't turn to them for help. The courier jobs were over: He had cheated the dealers, too. For five miserable months, he slept in Washington's shelters.

"I couldn't find a friend to give me a $10 bag of heroin," he recalls. "I lost everything, including my sanity. Half my teeth had rotted, my skin was pale gray and pock marks were all over my face."

Desperate for money, he and some old drug buddies headed to Florida to pick up some heroin. On a whim, he stole typewriters and calculators from Westpoint High School in LaGrange, Ga., right off Interstate 85.

It was laughable. "I had one of my officers check the van behind the school and they were sleeping" in it, recalls William Bozeman, the detective who handled the case. Handy was sent to state prison for 18 months.

Religion and recovery

He found God there, Handy says. He was fed up with his life. For the first time in years, he could think clearly because he wasn't in a drug haze. One day, he attended a sermon by a visiting minister, the Rev. David Wilkerson, who had written a best-seller about his work with New York gangs.

"Before I knew it, I was on my feet," Handy recalls. "I was dancing, leaping, shouting. It was an experience I never had before. To this day, I never touched another drug."

He returned home to Washington a different man. His family was skeptical at first.

"I was wondering if he was using religion just so he could get out zTC of prison earlier," says Vernon Handy. "But Norman started going to church every Sunday."

Handy finished his bachelor's degree, and by 1985 had a master's of counseling in divinity from American University. Four years later, he became pastor at Unity United Methodist Church in Harlem Park.

Handy condemns drug use, he emphasizes. He reminds his church members -- sometimes to their embarrassment -- of his disgrace and redemption. Even ministers at some other black churches are uncomfortable about his history, Handy says, and won't invite him to speak.

Dabbing sweat from his face on a recent Sunday, Handy stood before his congregation.

"Too many young black men arrive into adulthood D.O.A. because they put drugs into their veins," his voice booms. "You don't hear me?" he asks in mock indignation.

The drug dealers rule the corners near the church; virtually no family in the congregation has been untouched by drugs. There's no consensus there on heroin maintenance.

"I just don't know about giving out heroin," says Lorraine Johnson. "How would you control it? But I know something has got to be done."

Controversial notion

Among public health experts, the notion of dispensing drugs to hard-core addicts is controversial. A recent Swiss study reported a 60 percent decrease in crimes committed by addicts who were given heroin injections three times a day. If Hopkins does a research study in Baltimore, it would be the first such trial in this country.

Those favoring maintenance programs say they are being realistic. Offering controlled doses might cut crime, they say, as well as lure some addicts into a setting where they can get health care and counseling to kick their habit.

But that argument is not persuasive to many. Indeed, less radical steps than heroin maintenance are under fire. Despite evidence that needle-exchange programs reduce transmission of disease, including acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the Clinton administration has refused to fund them. New York's Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is threatening to shut down clinics dispensing methadone, the long-accepted alternative to heroin. He argues that addicts should go cold turkey.

While the debate goes on, hard-core addicts will continue to steal for their heroin, Handy says. And what of that junkie ranting on the street corner?

"He never came back for help," Handy says. "Nobody has to tell me that he's still out there and high on heroin."

Pub Date: 8/03/98