Recovery A Constant Challenge For Barry

Late one night in 1996, suspicious that Marion Barry was using drugs again, boxing promoter Rock Newman sat him down and told him that he should resign as D.C. mayor and focus on beating his addiction. Newman said Barry cried in his arms.

He remembers Barry telling him: "I love you, man. I know I betrayed your friendship." Barry agreed to leave town for a while and take a second stab at treatment. But he wouldn't give up politics. "He felt if he wasn't the mayor, he wasn't nothing," Newman said.

Newman is out of Barry's life now; he dropped away after questioning the sincerity of Barry's efforts to stay sober and clean during his fourth and final term as mayor. A few years later, Barry's wife, Cora, left him, too, after he derailed a comeback council campaign by getting caught with a $5 rock of crack cocaine in his car. By 2004, when Barry won the Ward 8 council seat, many of his old friends had abandoned him.

For 25 years, Barry has, by his own admission, battled addictions to drugs, alcohol and women even as he repeatedly sought and won election to public office. He found relief in New Age healing and spiritual guidance as well as medical treatment. But whatever strength he drew from those sources apparently didn't last. In November, a court-ordered urine test came up positive for cocaine, the drug that pulled his life apart and sent him to prison.

Now, Barry faces the possibility of another jail term and the potential loss of the political prominence he fought hard to regain. Some longtime friends doubt that he was ever fully committed to his own sobriety. However he came to use cocaine at age 69, Barry is not unique. More than 50,000 people over age 50 sought treatment for illegal drugs in 2002, the leading edge of a trend that is expected to worsen as the Woodstock generation ages.

Other people might be humiliated by revelations of drug use, especially if they had, like Barry, traded publicly on a record of recovery and redemption. Last week, Barry called a news conference. He emerged defiant from Howard University Hospital, where he was treated for diabetes and hypertension, and chastised the reporters who had gathered in the rain.

"I don't wish these things on me. I wish I didn't have them," he said of his illnesses. "So I wish y'all would stop sensationalizing the human frailties of human beings."

Barry refused to discuss the drug test, saying, "I don't want to talk about that." His health is good, he said; his spirits are "high and great." Barry pleaded guilty in October to two misdemeanor charges of failing to pay federal income taxes, and the drug test was part of a routine screening process for defendants awaiting sentencing. Sources said Barry has entered a private treatment program in hopes of persuading a judge to grant him probation.

Yesterday, Barry asked a Washington Post reporter to meet him at Temple of Praise in the Washington Highlands neighborhood in Southeast, where he was attending services. In an interview at the church, he said he is trusting in God to help him weather "a storm."

"I think all of my life and all of everybody's life we have had struggles," he said. "You can act like the storm doesn't exist, you can go through it or you can go above it. I have chosen to ride above the storm, and God will carry me over to the other side."

Barry again would not talk about the drug test, saying that "for legal reasons, I can't discuss my own situation at this time." He said he is attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings two or three times a week. "When we talk about recovery, 90 percent of the people lapse one or more times," he said. "It is the nature of the disease."

Darryl Colbert, who has served as Barry's sponsor in recovery for more than a decade, said Barry has called him almost every day since failing the test.