The System Helped Her Kick Drugs-and-Welfare Habit

I first met Connie on Christmas Eve to do a column on her apparently successful comeback from cocaine dependency. She talked about spending Christmas of 1989 in an Anaheim motel room in the midst of what turned out to be a monthlong coke binge that didn’t end until after New Year’s. She’s been cocaine-free for the last three months, she said.

Sitting across the kitchen table from her, it was hard to picture this blond, bespectacled young woman with the well-spoken openness as a cokehead. She looked more like any of a countless number of Midwestern farm girls I remember from my youth. Still only 23, she talked happily of escaping cocaine’s clutches and of getting on with her life, which now includes a job as a filing clerk with the county and of trying to reclaim her 20-month-old twins from the Orangewood Children’s Home.

I saw her story as uplifting and that was the thrust of the column. The newspaper business being what it is, that normally would have been the end of my dealings with Connie.

Yet, an undercurrent from our conversation on Monday has been on my mind ever since.

She told me matter-of-factly about how she’d spent much of her public assistance money in 1989 and part of 1990 on dope. Oh, she made sure her twin babies were clothed and fed, but most of whatever was left over went for drugs. She and her boyfriend lost two apartments; that’s how they ended up living in a motel room last Christmas.

Is that the gnashing of your teeth I hear? Are you saying that what Connie did with her welfare money reinforces your worst fears about people on welfare?

Based on Connie’s own confessional and her observations of other people she knew on welfare, you’d be right. She ripped us off. You were out working your butt off and she was getting high. You spent last Christmas trying to buy presents for everyone without breaking your budget, and she was taking her welfare money and having a monthlong party.

But before you mutter yourself into a stupor, also consider:

The county’s welfare system may also be largely responsible for getting her back on her feet, no doubt saving you and me who knows how much in future public assistance. The county welfare system placed her in a drug-recovery program that succeeded where a private clinic had failed. Her social worker directed her to a homeless shelter that has eased her housing needs while she recovers. The county has given her a job, planning to take some of her salary to repay some of the welfare money she has recently received.

And finally, Connie is off public assistance now, except for food stamps. She told me Thursday that she has told the county to cancel her food stamp payments after this month.

Connie feels bad about her time on welfare. “I feel guilty, because it’s not right to use welfare money for drugs.”

Dianne Edwards, who directs adult and employment services for the county’s Social Services Agency, knows better than most about the failures and successes of welfare. I asked her how she sleeps nights knowing some people are spending their welfare money on drugs.

“The way you sleep at night is to continue to strive to make a difference in as many lives as you possibly can. Federal and state laws are set up to give (welfare recipients) discretion over public assistance grants. . . . We have no direct control, but where we are able to identify an abusive situation, we intervene.”

For a mother of two, the county rate for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is $560 a month. Edwards said programs that offer educational and job-training skills have proved effective in breaking “the cycle of dependency and keeping people from going through the revolving door” of welfare. However, the state’s budget problems may cut into those programs, she said. Programs like that stand a good chance of converting people like Connie into productive citizens.

After reading this, perhaps you’re still muttering. Perhaps you’re saying people like Connie never should have tried drugs in the first place and that the rest of us shouldn’t have to bail her out.

I wish she hadn’t ever met cocaine, either. So does she. I wish nobody had. I also wish I were a millionaire and looked like Mel Gibson.

But welcome to the real world. People take drugs. They get hooked. If they don’t get off drugs--well, I won’t insult your intelligence. You know the cycle as well as I do.

So, while I may join you for a little teeth-gnashing over welfare money that winds up buying nose candy, I can, like Dianne Edwards, still sleep nights.

Because if you had listened to Connie talk on Christmas Eve about getting back on her feet, you’d most likely chalk her up as a welfare success, not a failure.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.