ADDICTS BATTLING HABITS, STIGMA

DURHAM -- When Kimberly Wallace felt badly about abandoning her
husband and two children for crack cocaine, she'd seek solace in
another high.

When she felt ashamed at her inability to kick the habit, she did the
same thing.

"In addiction, you feel you should be able to stop on your own," she
said. "I was afraid to ask anybody for help for fear of what they
would think of me."

After 10 years in and out of prison, the 30-year-old Wallace gradually
is turning her life into a success story. She has only three months
left in a two-year-recovery program at Durham-based TROSA (Triangle
Residential Options for Substance Abusers).

But the shame and fear that kept her from seeking treatment for so
long was hardly hers alone.

According to The Durham Center, which oversees local substance-abuse
care, 19,000 Durham County citizens are addicted to alcohol or other
drugs, but only 7,000 seek treatment.

Bart Grimes, a substance abuse specialist at the Center, said the
stigma attached to substance abusers -- by themselves and others -- is
the biggest barrier to people getting help.

"There needs to be more openness in our society that addiction is a
medical condition that nobody wants," he said. "That it's treatable,
but the longer you wait to get treatment the less successful it is."

But addicts do wait, either denying they have a problem or, like
Wallace, ashamed to admit it.

"They don't want anyone else to know their secret," Grimes said. "In
order for a person to get better, they have to tell somebody, and
that's a very hard thing to do."

Lola Johnson knows that feeling.

She fell back into using crack cocaine in 2000, having been clean for
nine months after 15 years of intermittent drug use.

"I would hardly ever go to visit my family," the 45-year-old said. "If
I saw them first, they wouldn't see me."

Johnson completed a recovery program at Durham's Urban Ministries
earlier this year and has stayed clean since. But she concedes now it
took her far too long to seek help.

"A lot of shame goes along with being an addict," she said. "I was
called a crackhead, told that I wasn't any good."

Jesse Battle, director of men's programs at TROSA and a recovered
addict himself, has seen that time and again.

"Once somebody knows this is your background, they experience you
differently," Battle said. "They focus on the stereotypes."

Participants at TROSA are taught job skills in the organization's
moving, landscaping and catering companies that can help reverse those
perceptions once graduates return to the workplace. By then, employers
are "expecting to see one thing and all of a sudden they're seeing
something else," Battle said.

Still, TROSA can't make addicts overcome their own shame and seek help
in the first place.

Battle said about all TROSA can do is "get the word out that we are
here, that there is a place for individuals to come."

Grimes said regular advertising, like that for sodas and fast food,
has been very effective in promoting recovery programs. But, he said,
it is rarely used, because of a lack of funds and society's refusal to
acknowledge the problem.

"We're still in great denial that it's there," he said. "It's the huge
pink elephant in the room."

Teens who get a driver's license usually get a lecture about not
drinking and driving. But, Grimes said, the topic often never comes up
again.

"It doesn't get discussed until it's too late, until someone gets
killed," he said. "People need to be able to feel comfortable in
bringing up booze like they would anything else."

The Durham Center is trying to start that conversation, partly through
a 10-year plan to end substance abuse that includes an educational
campaign.

The Center -- which once provided treatment directly but now manages
private providers under state reform -- got slightly more than half
the $500,000 it asked for in this year's county budget to kick-start
the plan.

The money is split between individual case management for people who
drift out of recovery programs and assistance for service providers
through recruitment and business development assistance. The aim is to
move the latter funding to the service end later on.

The Center's efforts to dismantle some of the stigma with events
throughout September as part of the 17th-annual National Alcohol and
Drug Addiction Recovery Month may have seen some of that stigma rub
off on its attempt.

A substance abuse information center at Northgate Mall from noon until
8 p.m. Thursday originally was conceived as a free screening. But the
mall management said no.

Paula Harris, Northgate's marketing director, said there was no
"hidden meaning" behind the mall's decision and that Northgate
supports drug prevention. She said the problem was that The Durham
Center wanted to put a curtain around its community kiosk in the
middle of the mall to create privacy.

"We're not going to put a curtain around something in the middle of
the mall, where someone would look at it and wonder what's in there,"
Harris said.

She said Northgate does host health screenings, such as bone density
tests or blood pressure checks, during health fairs when visitors know
what to expect -- although there wasn't one this year for lack of interest.

Those screenings, however, take place in empty stores, which she said
now are full of Christmas merchandise.

"I respect the mall's policy, but I'm disappointed," said Center
spokesman Doug Fuller. "I think that screening could have potentially
helped some folks."

Screening instead will be limited to a recovery celebration block
party the following Thursday afternoon, Sept. 28, at Urban Ministries
on Liberty Street near downtown.

Lola Johnson doubtless will be there, ready to tell how she is beating
addiction every day.

"For anyone to have beaten that is amazing," Grimes said. "Those
stories often don't get told -- because of the stigma."