HELPING ADDICTS REBUILD LIVES

South Richmond facility gives men the chance to beat substance abuse

There are many paths to addiction recovery but few shortcuts. At The
Healing Place, a residential recovery program for homeless men that
opened in South Richmond this year, the men find that out soon enough.

It is 10 a.m. on a Friday in the renovated Dinwiddie Avenue warehouse
where the program is located. About 80 men are in "community," a
group meeting to confront rule breakers and to air concerns. At the
facility, men sleep dozens of bunks to a room depending on the stage
of recovery they are in. They do the laundry, cook the food, and
handle housekeeping and security tasks. Living so closely together,
there is little tolerance for somebody who violates rules that are
designed to keep order.

J.C. gets singled out this time. He's been late to mandatory classes
on addiction recovery principles. He has been sleeping in class and
not paying attention or doing the opposite - rattling on and hogging
the conversation. After one class, he went to the teacher twice to
ask about the same assignment. Someone accuses him of picking up a
five-month sobriety chip when he's been sober for four months.

The group spends more than a half-hour talking about his
transgressions. He has been quiet through most of it.

"I was in class. . . . I was trying to share," says J.C., his arms
crossed over his chest. He says he has been addicted to crack
cocaine. He is interrupted before he can say more.

"Why do you feel you have to be the center of attention? You just
have to be the center of attention," one man says.

Someone else doesn't like his "smirk" and warns him, "It's cold outside."

Before it's all over, community members have come up with a long list
of possible consequences. Someone suggests a psychological exam.
Another thinks he should have to write 2,000-word essays on several
of the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous principles and pen written
apologies to specific staff members. In the end, the group votes,
deciding on a list of about 10 actions. J.C. can agree to do them or
he can leave the program. He says nothing and walks out of the room. . . .

It's like that at The Healing Place, a program for men trying to
rebuild lives in ruin from substance abuse. The program started
taking clients in March.

"A city of Richmond task force recommended something like this," said
L. Robert Bolling, development director for The Healing Place.
Homeward, an agency that brings together groups that provide services
for the homeless, followed up the city recommendation with a study
that zeroed in on The Healing Place model, started in Louisville,
Ky., in 1989 by a group of doctors in that city's local medical
society, Bolling said.

In Richmond, like other urban areas, drug use, addiction and crime
are often interrelated. Addicts rob and steal to buy drugs. Help
people with their addictions, and you help clean up the city.

"There was the sense we have this problem. It seems to be getting
worse," said Michael Christin, executive director of The Healing Place.

Money to get the Richmond Healing Place up and running came from the
Jenkins Foundation - a local organization that supports health-care
programs, which donated $1 million - and other corporate and
individual contributors, including Ukrop's and Performance Foods
Group. A $5 million capital campaign has raised more than $4 million,
Christin said.

It took some convincing to get residents of nearby Blackwell, a
community formerly known for the crime-ridden public housing project
there, to come around. In recent years, the housing project has been
replaced with single family homes, apartments and townhouses. Pauline
N. Hymes, Blackwell Civic Association president for the past eight
years, said they didn't want to backtrack.

"Because it is a poor area, we felt like it was used as a dumping
ground," said Hymes, who has lived in Blackwell most of her life. She
changed her mind when she went with a group of city leaders in
February to visit a Healing Place operating in Raleigh, N.C.

"I went down and came back with tears in my eyes," said Hymes, who
now works as volunteer coordinator and community liaison for The
Healing Place. "I knew this would be something that would change the
lives of a lot of men." Civic association members put their support
behind the idea. In exchange, the men help with community projects
such as the neighborhood cleanup in June. Hymes said usually she
struggles to get volunteers. The men helped.

"I had over 75 of them meet with [us] at 16th and Maury Street," said
Hymes. "They cleaned up the entire area without the seniors having to
lift a finger."

The Healing Place is not one program but three. There is a 20-bed
overnight shelter that takes in intoxicated men who could be in the
city jail instead. There is a state-licensed 18-bed detox unit. And
there is the 128-bed residential recovery program that takes about a
year to complete. So far, about 20 men have completed the recovery
program and are peer mentors.

Christin said they expect that about a third of the men who enter
will not make it through the first phase, a two-month period that
requires them to sign a contract and demonstrate willingness to change.

"Treatment requires you to work on yourself," said Christin. "We are
training them to understand what they have is a problem, a disease,
that is treatable."

Treatment means change. Some of the men get it. Others struggle. . . .

Bryan Ford, 38, has struggled through recovery programs before, only
to relapse. He was one of the first to enter The Healing Place. He
had used marijuana, crack and powder cocaine, but heroin was his drug
of choice. He is now an assistant staff person, earning a small
stipend for serving as a peer mentor and teaching classes on recovery
principles. He is transitioning slowly back to life outside. The
Healing Place is still home for now.

He was living with his mother, Ruth Ford, at her Chesterfield County
home last spring when he got on his knees at the end of her bed and
prayed with her, he said.

Bryan Ford, who grew up in Blackwell and South Richmond, said he was
using drugs daily. "I would come to the city, score and go back," he
said. He would get the drug money from stealing. Or some old dealer
friends of his would hook him up.

"I used with tremendous obsession," he said. "Even though I knew I
was already high, I would continue to do it."

That obsession, he said, is part of his having a disease that makes
him among the "one in 10" adults estimated to be at risk of addiction
to alcohol or drugs. Federal survey data from the National Institute
on Drug Abuse estimates 19.5 million Americans 12 or older were
current users of an illicit drug, including marijuana, in 2003.

Bryan Ford said he was just 12 and in the sixth grade when he smoked
his first marijuana joint. Later, he started selling pot. Ruth Ford
was stern, no nonsense, he said, but she could not keep an eye on him
all the time. A single mother, she worked the night shift at the
Philip Morris plant. Unsupervised, he got in trouble.

"I would see him in clothes I didn't buy for him, but you're still
not thinking your child is into drugs," Ruth Ford said.

Bryan Ford said he remembers using powder cocaine for the first time
on the night he graduated from high school. He didn't get into it
heavy, he said, until later. He had enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth
University, planning to study art. His dream was to design sneakers.
In high school, he'd won accolades for writing a rap song,
Flunkbusters, about staying in school. But after a semester at VCU,
he dropped out. College, he said, was a "beautiful experience," but
he couldn't afford the commercial art supplies, which back then were
about $1,300.

So he dropped out.

"I started selling drugs. I worked odd jobs," Ford said. Within a few
months, he was also a regular user. The next years were up and down.
There were times when he worked legitimate jobs. Or worked legitimate
jobs and sold drugs on the side. There were periods when drug dealing
was his main occupation. He has served prison time on drug
distribution and robbery charges.

"Over the years it just got worse and worse," said Ruth Ford, who
tried to get him help. "At one time I even apologized to him,
thinking it was something I had done. He said, 'No Ma, it's just me.'
Sometimes when he was locked up, I was relieved . . . You still
wonder what you did wrong."

It's not that simple.

As an only child, Ford said he wanted acceptance from other people.
He admired drug dealers in the neighborhood because they had nice
things. He has a good relationship with his father now but resented
his absence when he was growing up. His half sisters, Tara Wilkins
and Tyra Wilkins, say that as an adult he has been in relationships
with women who wanted material things he could not give them and that
bothered him.

"I think its important that he is staying at the Healing Place, so he
can work on himself," said Tyra, who grew up in a separate household.
"It's definitely a stepping stone."

Ford said he is healing. It is a journey that has taken him inside
himself and that has him peering into others. . . .

Ford was at the community meeting when J.C. was given options, and he
said he'd been in that position himself many times during his first
two months in the program.

"I was just trying to do things my way, figuring they needed some
help fixing things," he said. Like J.C., who eventually rejoined the
group that Friday and agreed to the actions taken against him, Ford
accepted his consequences.

"The disease is centered in your mind. It's like a learned behavior,"
Ford said. He is retraining. "In order to put something else in, I
have to clear up some space. It's about being receptive to something new."

New for him are plans to get additional training in recovery
principles and become a licensed counselor. As a peer counselor, he
has a caseload of 13 men whom he helps guide through the program. The
most gratifying moments, he said, are "when you look in the guys'
eyes and see understanding" like he must have shown when hearing
things that changed his life. They include things like how addiction
affects family and community and even learning that addiction has
been around since the beginning of time.

"At one time they were just putting people in asylums. I have been
afforded a real blessed opportunity to be in a facility and get some
help. Even though there is no man-made cure, we have some answers
now, some things that help," he said.