Pubdate: Mon, 05 Dec 2005
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA)
Copyright: 2005 Richmond Newspapers Inc.
Contact:  http://www.timesdispatch.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/365
Author: Tammie Smith, Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman