By Clyde Haberman
Published in The New York Times, September 16, 2000

Darryl Strawberry, the recovering drug user, cancer survivor and sometime baseball player, was back in the news this week for all the usual reasons. He was in trouble with the law.

Mr. Strawberry's troubles came to the attention of a woman in Harlem named Thomasina, who found them of more than passing interest. How could she not? She has fought her own demons over the years, same as the women and men she lives with on East 121st Street, at a drug treatment residence run by Odyssey House.

Whatever the legal ins and outs of Mr. Strawberry's latest mess, people at the residence figured that his longtime romance with drugs lay at the core of his problem. They had differences, though, on the deeper meaning.

"Everybody was saying what a fool he was," said Thomasina, who agreed to a chat as long as her last name was not used. "But I think he's a very sick person, and hasn't gotten the guidance he needs. In a way, I consider him a very poor guy.

"As you can see," she said, "he started with drugs in his teens. And then he got older. It's a lot like us."

By "us," she meant 50 people living at Odyssey House in a program called ElderCare, geared to alcohol and drug abusers who are 55 and older.

A few are in their 70's. Obviously, they have a good many years on Mr. Strawberry, who is 38. But all have at least one concern in common: dealing with the burdens of growing older while also straightening out lives misshapen by booze, pills, heroin, crack, you name it.

Some did not begin to get hooked until they were middle-aged.

Thomasina was one of them. She was 50 and working as a hospital nurse, she said, when she started using heroin. this was after her two small children died in a fire in their Brooklyn apartment. Be happy to be spared the details. They would break your heart.

"I just got more and more depressed," said Thomasina, now 58.

"The father of my children used heroin, and I said, 'That's what I want to do.' I was a nurse, and I knew better than that. But I was so depressed. I did it, I guess, to kill myself."

She and a few fellow residents talked the other day about how they tumbled into the black hole of addiction at ages when people are supposed to have acquired some wisdom.

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