A LIGHT IN HOPE'S WINDOW RECOVERY: OPEN FROM DUSK TILL DAWN

Dee's Place Helps Fill A Gap In Help For Drug Addicts.

Some arrive after spouses and children have gone to bed, to ward off the
loneliness and temptation that beckon them back to a world they worked
so hard to leave behind.

Others stop off when they finish their late shifts at work, or when
they're done with dinner, sometimes remaining until it's time for
breakfast.

A few show up from the streets, straight from the drug corners and crack
houses.

Dee's Place, the city's only seven-day-a-week, dusk-to-dawn drug
recovery center, has logged more than 21,000 visits from former and
current addicts since it opened in East Baltimore seven months ago.
Named for its matriarch and manager, Delois A. "Dee" Sparks, a longtime
community activist and former drug addict, the privately funded center
operates in borrowed space on a street where half the houses are boarded
and empty.

Gearing up as similar centers are winding down, it draws people to its
dozen Narcotics Anonymous meetings from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. They arrive not
just from the drug-laden streets of the east side but from throughout
the city and as far away as Washington and Philadelphia. Many come
several times a week.

Douglas Mitchell, who has been coming to Dee's Place since it opened in
December, calls the center "a blessing."

Mitchell often comes by after he gets off his job at 10:30 p.m. at a
local hospital where he transports patients for lab work and X-rays, or
in the middle of the night, when he awakens from a dream of getting high
and can't get back to sleep.

"Late at night - that's the most vulnerable time for recovering
addicts," said Mitchell, 49, a recovering heroin and cocaine addict who
says he has not used drugs for six years. "There's no better place to be
in the wee hours of the morning than with recovering addicts just like I
am."

And no place else to go. There are 250 Narcotics Anonymous meetings each
week in the city, but the latest begin at 9 p.m. weekdays, and 10 p.m.
or maybe midnight on weekends, said Frank Dyson of the organization's
Freestate Regional Service Center.

"It fills a gap," said Dyson of Dee's Place. "It's unique for this area
and for a whole lot of cities around the country."

The volume of traffic in and out of Dee's Place - in the nonprofit Men's
Center in the 2200 block of Jefferson St., just east of the Johns
Hopkins medical complex - has exceeded the expectations of its
organizers and founder and emphasized a point to health officials.

"It says that there's a big need for services at off-hours, where people
who are about to step off the wagon at 2 in the morning can go," said
Dr. Peter A. Beilenson, the city's health commissioner.

"Just from a gross numbers standpoint, clearly there's a need for the
center," agreed Dr. Pierre Vigilance, director of an East Baltimore
project for recovering addicts called ASSET, which stands for Achieving
Self-Sufficiency through Employment and Training.

Dee's Place is a key component of ASSET and was developed under the
auspices of the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition,
which saw a large need for the program. Of the 44,000 people in the area
served by the coalition, nearly one in four are believed to have
problems with substance abuse.

For Sparks, 52, an imposing woman with a firm but gentle manner who
kicked her addiction 11 years ago, the rationale behind the center was
simple. "The drug shops are open all night long," said Sparks, who came
up with the idea for the center. "Why not give people somewhere to go
where instead of copping drugs, they can cop a recovery meeting?"

That reasoning made sense to the France-Merrick Foundation, a local
philanthropy that is footing the bills for Dee's Place with an $800,000,
three-year grant.

While the state increased funding this year for drug treatment to
Baltimore, "the piece that needs attention now is the after-care side"
of drug abuse, said Jack Bovaird, director of East Baltimore services
for France-Merrick.

"Once a person is treated, then what happens?" asked Bovaird. "Going
back into similar environments and not finding support, the recidivism
rate tends to be high."

The original plan was for Dee's Place to be an around-the-clock
facility, with on-site child care for children of recovering addicts.
But when no suitable building could be found, Dee's Place scaled back
its planned hours and set up shop in the Men's Center.

Its hourly meetings are held in a narrow windowless room, with a fan at
the front and back and folding chairs set on a concrete floor with
peeling paint. Several weeks ago, Sparks broke her left foot when a
makeshift partition fell on her.

The surroundings don't seem to bother those who come to Dee's Place.
They're seeking emotional sustenance, not luxury.

One recent morning at 1, Pam Spedden sat with a dozen other addicts. She
silently listened to a recitation of Narcotics Anonymous' ritualized
12-point message of recovery, which emphasizes spirituality and mutual
self-help, and to fellow former addicts spontaneously describe the
experience and frustrations of staying clean.

"It's hard on the job to be diplomatic when you've never had to be
diplomatic," recounted one. "I don't like that I can't have a drink.
Just one. I don't like it," said another.

A frail woman of 45 who kicked a 24-year addiction to heroin and cocaine
during hospitalization in February for pneumonia, Spedden is wearing a
drug patch and is wracked by occasional bouts of coughing. She said she
came to spend the late-night and pre-dawn hours at Dee's Place because
she "just needed some peace."

"I didn't want to sit home by myself and think crazy things, just trying
to go to sleep. I don't sleep good," she said.

Spedden came from Pimlico in Northwest Baltimore with Paulette Jackson,
one of a regular group of attendees. Jackson gives her age as 43, her
years of addiction as 26, her time being clean as 7 months.

"Nights are very tough, since I'm so early in my recovery," said
Jackson, who has a medical disability. "I can stay sometimes all night
long. Since I'm not working and the doors are open 12 hours a day, I
have somewhere to feel comfortable. I don't have to worry about doing
drugs."

Others travel much farther.

Fahimah Shabazz makes the 1 1/2 -hour drive a couple of days a week from
her home in southwest Philadelphia, where she says the latest NA
meetings end about midnight, and remains for hours.

An out-of-work telemarketer "coming up on 7 years clean," Shabazz, 42,
often remains until the first light, driving home at 5 in the morning or
staying over with friends.

She talks about the "warmth" and "love" she receives from fellow
recovering addicts at odd hours, saying, "People here can identify with
a lot of things."

For some, the reasons for coming to Dee's Place are more specific and
spur-of-the-moment.

Gary Alsup, 46, last used drugs 12 1/2 years ago and now counsels
substance abusers and people with human immunodeficiency virus. But he
is not beyond sensing moments of panic in his life that raise the
specter of a return to the heroin and cocaine addiction that consumed
him for 20 years.

One such moment occurred about four months ago, after he gambled away
$1,500. "I couldn't sleep. The feeling of losing my money was
overwhelming," he said.

Alsup arrived at Dee's Place from his nearby East Baltimore home at 3:30
a.m. in his bedroom slippers.

"I'm not saying I necessarily would have used," he said. "But you never
know what you might do if you don't have people to talk to."

Though it is neither a treatment facility nor a drop-in center where
substance abusers can get a brief respite from the street, because of
its hours Dee's Place sometimes attracts addicts with no place else to
go. From January until last month, the center referred about 50 addicts
to treatment.

One was Jeffrey Dunham.

"I was out there getting high and I didn't know how to stop," said
Dunham, 35, who had a $50-a-day heroin habit. "Then I ran into a brother
who guided me along and brought me here."

That was in mid-December. Dunham sat in the front row and listened to
the meetings all night long, returning every night for more than a
month.

Dee's Place staff helped get Dunham into a nearby East Baltimore
residential recovery house, where he is nearly halfway through a
one-year stay that includes group and individual counseling. Last month,
he got his first job in years, as a night maintenance worker at a hotel.

Seeking all the support he can get, Dunham still comes to Dee's Place on
weekends and says he owes his recovery to the existence of the center.

"It was a place to be where I had people around me," Dunham said.
"Beside the street, this was it."