CENTER'S FIRST 'GRADUATES' MOVE CAUTIOUSLY INTO A DRUG-FREE LIFE

Recovery Group Offers Help With Jobs, Family Restoration

They are called "graduates" - the few, the proud, the 27 men and women who
have gotten off drugs and into jobs, reconciled with long-suffering
relatives, and begun to repair their lives.

But these first successes of a program called Recovery in Community know
that you never entirely graduate from addiction. The chance of relapse is
always there, especially in this patch of West Baltimore, where oblivion in
the form of a bag of heroin or a vial of crack cocaine is always for sale.

That is the thinking behind the program, which marked its first graduation
last week with a standing-room-only celebration in a church basement.

Addicts who return from treatment to the streets, jobless and alienated,
often relapse quickly. Recovery in Community attempts to surround the
addicts with support for a year or more, helping them find work and
smoothing the return to their families.

"Basically they helped save my life," said graduate Chauncey Clifton, 42, a
beefy, somber man. After six years on crack, he has been clean one year and
is learning to repair cars at a West Baltimore garage.

"I tried crack, and I fell in love with it," said Clifton, who worked as a
roofer before his habit cost him his job. "It became my everything - my
woman, my kids, my life." Now he is reunited with his wife and three
children, he said.

For Ernest Murphy, 52, the affair with drugs lasted far longer. He shot
heroin for 35 years, spending his days scrambling for a fix and working off
and on.

Then, one day last year, he saw one of Recovery in Community's outreach
workers sitting on the steps of the old stone rectory of St. James United
Methodist Church on Monroe Street, which has been converted to a drop-in
center for the new program. He became one of the program's first
"associates" - a term the program uses to suggest the addict's
responsibility for getting better.

After a month at a residential treatment center in Western Maryland, Murphy
returned not to his old haunts but to daily classes and counseling at the
Recovery in Community center. He learned to face each day sober and earns
$8 an hour as a banquet waiter and kitchen worker through a temporary
employment agency.

The recovery program has become family, he says. "If I get off work before
they close, I always stop by," he says.

In a black suit and bow tie, Murphy walked across the stage to receive a
certificate marking his first year in the program from Rep. Elijah E.
Cummings, a West Baltimore Democrat. Cummings' speech exhorting the
graduates to stay clean for the sake of their children brought many of the
200 family members and friends in the audience to tears.

Recovery in Community has been embraced by three neighborhood organizations
and numerous churches, as well as police and probation officers. Addicts
speak highly of its services, which include home visits by counselors, help
with housing, classes on job readiness and anger management - even
acupuncture and tai chi.

Its 13 staff members - all but one of them former addicts - have become a
familiar presence in the neighborhood, whose frenetic commerce in drugs was
documented by David Simon and Edward Burns in their 1997 book "The Corner"
and the HBO television series based on the book.

But experts say it is too early to

judge the cost-effectiveness of the program, financed with $2 million from
the Abell Foundation.

Since it opened in June 1999, 388 addicts have gone through the process.
Nearly a third did not formally enroll, perhaps daunted by the program's
emphasis on personal responsibility. Of the 277 addicts who enrolled,
agreeing to stay active for at least one year, 100 are still active -
including the 27 honored last week for completing at least 10 months in the
program.

Most treatment programs have a high dropout rate. One national study showed
that 44 percent of people who enrolled in methadone programs are still on
the rolls a year later. But because Recovery in Community strives for a
close relationship with addicts and their families, its backers may not be
satisfied with just an average retention rate.

"That's clearly the big challenge for the program - the retention rate,"
said Tom O'Connor, who heads a Silver Spring research firm that is
evaluating the initiative for the Abell Foundation. "But the program's
still in its infancy."

The program, which operates under the administrative oversight of Baltimore
City Healthy Start, has suffered other growing pains. Its first director
was dismissed in April, and his replacement has not been chosen. Counselors
have not completed the formal training they will need if the program is to
be state-certified and eligible for public funding.

But Recovery in Community has made a strong start, said Joyce C. Smith,
former executive director of the Franklin Square Community Association and
a longtime neighborhood resident.

It was Smith who first pitched the idea of a treatment program with deep
community roots to Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation,
and Jan Harrison, the Abell program officer who helped design Recovery in
Community.

"Most programs just want to treat the addiction," Smith said. "But
addiction goes along with a lot of other problems - homelessness, no health
care, no job, troubles with family. This program is trying to make the
person whole."