ADDICTION CENTER'S DIRECTOR QUITS IN TREATMENT DEBATE

The director of the Smithers Addiction Treatment and Research Center of St.
Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan resigned yesterday, as a feud
erupted over the center's decision to include so-called moderation
management, which limits, rather than bans, the use of alcohol or drugs by
patients.

The center and the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation, whose benefactor, R.
Brinkley Smithers, created the treatment program 30 years ago, are no
longer directly linked. The foundation has long advocated abstinence.

The moderation approach has been heavily criticized by other rehabilitation
clinics, including the Betty Ford Center. More recently, the founder of the
method, Audrey Kishline, pleaded guilty in March to two counts of vehicular
homicide after she killed a 38-year-old electrician and his 12-year-old
daughter after a drinking episode that left Ms. Kishline's blood-alcohol
level three times the legal limit, prosecutors in Washington State say.

The Smithers center was started in 1970 with a $10 million donation from
Mr. Smithers, a philanthropist and recovering alcoholic who believed
strongly in the 12-step approach used by Alcoholics Anonymous. The approach
encourages alcoholics to give up drinking entirely and to rely on a group
support system of other alcoholics.

But the center's director, Dr. Alex DeLuca, recently decided to steer the
clinic, a 44-bed center within Roosevelt Hospital, toward an approach that
advocates controlled drinking. The new direction for the center was first
disclosed in the July 10 issue of New York magazine.

Dr. DeLuca denied yesterday that Smithers had abandoned its emphasis on
abstinence. "Our treatment programs never changed," he said. "We are an
abstinence-oriented treatment program, and our treatments are geared to
have people maintain sobriety. I was only suggesting that you could engage
people in a kinder, gentler manner rather than telling them that they had
to sign up for a goal of achieving abstinence from the beginning."

Immediately following the report in the magazine, dozens of calls began
flowing into the offices of the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation, named
for Mr. Smithers's father. Although Mr. Smithers, who died in 1994, made
the original gift to the center from private funds, the foundation has
given smaller gifts in recent years.

On Sunday, the foundation placed a full-page advertisement in The New York
Times denouncing the moderation management approach and stressing that the
foundation no longer has a direct connection to the center. The
advertisement, which also appeared in The New York Post yesterday, read in
part: "The Christopher D. Smithers Foundation's philosophy and mission is
rooted in the conviction of R. Brinkley Smithers, our founder and
benefactor of the program at St. Luke's-Roosevelt, that alcoholism is a
disease that requires abstinence-based treatment, and that controlled
drinking, under any name, whether it be "moderation management" or "harm
reduction," is not possible where the disease of alcoholism exists."

Yesterday, the hospital released a terse statement that said that the
Smithers center had a "long and proud tradition of treating alcoholism by
advocating total abstinence. Since Dr. Alex DeLuca does not support the
program philosophy, we have accepted his resignation." Any changes to the
program away from that philosophy would be immediately reversed, a
spokeswoman said.

This is not the first dispute between the foundation and the hospital. Mr.
Smithers's widow, Adele Smithers-Fornaci, recently sued the hospital over
its decision to sell the Upper East Side Art Deco townhouse that housed the
program for years.

The hospital, which has been heaving under a pile of debt for several
years, got $15.9 million for the home, which the hospital acquired in 1973
for $1 million. The Supreme Court of New York dismissed the case this
spring, and her lawyer has appealed.