PUBLIC PROFILE

SUDDEN EXIT AS CLINIC CHIEF SENDS ADDICTION SPECIALIST REELING

THERE'S a whole lot of nervous pacing going on inside Dr. Alexander F.
DeLuca's feline-dominated apartment -- we're talking digs where pets
command one of the two bathrooms -- on the viewless side of Central
Park West.

Watch out for the prowling cat quartet (Frenzy and Beast are his; Kate
and Little Cat are his wife's) who used to have the place to
themselves all day. Now they share space with an addled, idled
addiction specialist who, until his dismissal two weeks ago, spent a
decade at the Smithers Addiction Treatment and Research Center and was
its director since 1998. "Frankly, I loved that clinic," he mutters.

Let's just say everybody's fur is ruffled, and when Dr. DeLuca, 45,
finally settles down at the rickety dining table, he can't sit still.
Instead, he methodically strips a real-life fruit still life of the
red grapes in its bowl as he vents dismay over his firing (make that
dismissal) and the "letter of recognition" (oops, he means
resignation) he says his superiors coerced him into writing.

Neither absence nor abstinence (he is an Alcoholics Anonymous veteran)
has made Dr. DeLuca's heart grow fonder of the St. Luke's-Roosevelt
Hospital Center officials who ousted him as chief and medical director
a day after the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation ran full-page
newspaper advertisements condemning his modernist methods.

Did Dr. DeLuca, who calls the clinic, which is no longer directly
linked to the foundation, "his baby," resign voluntarily in the wake
of the hospital's ire after New York magazine (and a New York Post
follow-up) depicted him as a radical bent on replacing zero-tolerance
abstinence with substance-friendly moderation management?

"I don't know what I ever did to earn their enmity," he muses. "But to
announce I'd resigned when I hadn't resigned yet, and to say that they
have a long tradition of abstinence-oriented treatment and I no longer
believed in that philosophy, do you know what that does in this small
pond? That makes me essentially unemployable!" Yes, unemployment of
the public, reputation-damaging sort is driving him to hysterics (but
not, he avers, to drink).

That's why he's beating his breastbone like Celine Dion at encore
time, why his laughter bounces off these prewar walls like shrapnel.
(Dr. DeLuca laughs the way he eats grapes: reflexively, and without
relish.) And it's why, though litigation-shy, he's hired a lawyer.
"We're on the side of the angels here," he told a Smithers colleague
shortly before the hospital, which confirmed his hiring in 1990 and
subsequent promotions but refused to elaborate on his dismissal,
placed him on the side of sacrilege.

I DIDN'T even get a chance to do my own damage control," he asserts.
"They did it. I'm it. That I gave an unauthorized interview, that's
for lawyers to talk about. But this idea that I changed Smithers into
a moderation management clinic without telling them about it is
absurd. I spent 10 years changing Smithers. I know what it takes to
turn around an ocean liner like that. Smithers was and is an
abstinence-oriented, abstinence-based treatment program. Abstinence is
the best way. It's the safest way. But it's not necessarily
everybody's way."

Did Dr. DeLuca deal with substance abusers who weren't ready to
embrace abstinence? Guilty as charged. Done, he says, in the spirit of
early intervention: "Better you should come in and talk to me and
still drink than not come in at all." Radical words, those. But
irrational? They're a product, he says, of research, not proof of
antipathy toward the benchmark approach: "My personal recovery was
through A.A.," he notes. "The whole nine yards."

One minute, the doctor is reluctant to rehash his personal history for
fear the details -- a druggie and drunkard by 16, an alcohol and
cocaine addict through medical school -- will distract from his
Smithers exit. The next, he's pouring coffee and reliving a risky youth.

The child of doctors and destined, at least in their dreams, to become
one, too, he attended Riverdale Country Day School and earned an
athletic scholarship -- swimming -- to the University of Chicago.
Trouble was, he was drinking heavily and in no shape to swim after
high school: "I thought my life was too easy, that I'd make my own
friction. I was going to take all the drugs and pass all the tests,
and I damn near died trying."

He attended Vassar. Then came the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
and marriage: he drank, did cocaine, denied he had an addiction until
he wrecked his car, and his first marriage, in 1986. He called his
mother, asked her to come get him because he was an alcoholic and
wound up going to his first A.A. meeting sponsored by "Jimmy the phone
repair guy." It seems Jimmy fixed the DeLuca phone one day, said no to
a beer because he was a recovering alcoholic, then left his number in
case they had more phone trouble.

A.A. worked, but in 1988, supervising the methadone program at
Montefiore in the Bronx, he fell off the wagon and checked himself
into a 28-day detox ward. He dropped out of medicine and into
computers for two years and, with his self-esteem invisible, answered
a classified ad in 1990 and was hired to direct the Smithers inpatient
detox unit.

"In addiction medicine, you're allowed to have had such a past," he
says. "You're allowed to be your nice, wacky self."

But maybe not at Smithers.