ADDICTION CENTER REVAMPED

Friends said he got mean. His boss fired him. The law told him to
straighten up. But it wasn't until Matthew Towner walked away from a wreck
that left his blue Honda Accord a burned-out shell that he admitted he had
a drinking problem.

"I went off the side of the road, took out a couple trees...and almost hit
somebody's house," he says. "That's when I realized, OK...you have a
serious problem."

Towner, 23, spent five months as an outpatient at Greenville County's
addiction services program and credits their new approach to treatment for
his sobriety for nearly a year.

Formerly the Greenville County Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, the
agency has been rehabilitated, in a way, as The Phoenix Center.

And with a new building on Cleveland Street, it marks a new era of
addiction treatment that's been a long time coming, says Greenville County
Councilwoman Lottie Gibson.

"It's a great improvement," Gibson said. "There is such a need in the
community."

The new center has been a dream of executive director, Kat Rice, since she
moved to Greenville three years ago.

For decades, she says, the agency had administrative offices and a
detoxification unit in an inadequate building on Old Buncombe Road. Other
treatment services were provided on the other side of town. As a result,
clients who needed it typically spent three to five days in detox, then
made an appointment for follow-up care. But few showed up until the next
time they needed to dry out, making treatment little more than a revolving
door.

Now, with most services under one roof, adult clients will be assessed when
they arrive, go to detox, and begin follow-up care before they leave,
enhancing the likelihood that they'll continue treatment.

"On a daily basis, more people are incarcerated at the Detention Center
whose crimes are drug related," said Gibson, "and that in itself speaks to
the fact that we need to do something to provide treatment on a long-term
basis, not just temporarily at the detox center, so these people can return
to the world of work and be tax payers instead of tax receivers."

Besides the new detox center, the $1.8 million three-story building sports
separate areas for adults and adolescents, new counseling rooms and
offices. It nets the program another 5,000 square feet of space and saves
$5,000 a month in rent, says Rice, adding an open house is planned for late
May.

"Now our outsides match the changes we're making inside," says Linda Doud,
director of treatment. "We really have come a long way."

The changes are organizational and therapeutic as well as cosmetic.

For instance, the old detox unit had 10 beds for men in one room and six
for women in another, Rice says. So if there were more men than women, as
is usual, they had to be turned away. The new unit has 16 beds, two to a
room, which allows more flexibility in placement.

The adolescent program was "dying on the vine," says Doud. Groups were full
and there was always a waiting list. Since the addition of a new
coordinator and another counselor, she says, about 130 boys and girls
attend group sessions each week or individual counseling. Plans call for
hiring another counselor too, she said.

Rice has even bigger dreams for that program. Blueprints have been drawn up
for a $7 million campus that would provide comprehensive adolescent care,
including a residential treatment facility. But that dream depends on
finding funding, she says, although she hopes it can be up and running in
about two years.

Gibson calls it a great idea.

"We continue to need residential care for adults," she said, "but we also
need it for youths."

Future plans also call for incorporating Alcoholics Anonymous, Rice says,
along with a 12-step program for teens, programs for family members,
developing a relationship with faith-based organizations, and an employee
assistance program for Upstate businesses. Another goal is to get
recovering clients back into the workforce.

"It's critical when people stop using drugs and alcohol that they replace
it with something else," Rice said, "and we hope to replace it with AA and
work or school."

The treatment philosophy also has been revamped, says Doud, to focus on
helping clients deal with the emotions that led them to drugs and alcohol.

Towner says that's what helped him face the demons that made him down a
quart of vodka on his lunch break, that brought him to the emergency room
drunk, and finally led to his accident and DUI. He'd tried to quit drinking
by himself, but eventually took up the bottle again.

"I was focusing on not drinking. But they focused on why I was drinking,"
he said. "They helped me identify feelings I had inside me that I had no
idea about. You drink those feelings down. But I wasn't getting rid of them."

Treatment, he says, was like going through layers of an onion to reach the
core problem. And for him, he says, it's made the difference between life
and death. Now he volunteers at the YMCA, attends church regularly, and
hopes he can save the career he worked so hard for.

"I put a big black mark on my career because of this," said Towner, who
graduated from nursing school last December and now must appear before the
state board of nursing before taking his exams.

"I'm hoping they'll see me for who I am now," he adds. "That that's who I
was, but realize that I'm recovering. That with the right treatment, you
can come out on top of things."

Wanda Baker, a member of the nursing faculty at Greenville Technical
College, says Towner was an excellent student who successfully navigated a
stressful and demanding curriculum.

"If he made it through that," she says, "he's got some promising attributes."

Rice says she hopes the changes at The Phoenix will help change public
attitudes about the organization and encourage more people with drug and
alcohol abuse problems to seek treatment.

"Attitudes play into the fact that there are so few services here, and the
public perception of us was horrible," says Rice. "We are finally going to
be the commission that people need and want."