ADDICTS FLOCK TO DELRAY BEACH TO CONFRONT THEIR HABITS. MANY NEVER GO HOME

DELRAY BEACH -- Whitney Tower, 56, a scion of the Whitney, Vanderbilt
and Drexel fortunes, squandered his trust fund and sold family
treasures to support a $1,000-a-day heroin habit before landing in a
tough-love facility near here seven years ago and never leaving.

"If I went back to New York I'd be dead in two weeks," he
said.

In some ways Tower, who spent three decades in and out of treatment,
remains a creature of his pedigree. He favors foppish linen suits and
drops names of the fast crowd he once ran with.

But his social life these days is dinner at home with sober friends
who have settled here in what experts consider the recovery capital of
America. He is studying addiction counseling, and he is an unpaid
intern at a local drug treatment center.

Delray Beach, a funky outpost of sobriety between Fort Lauderdale and
West Palm Beach, is the epicenter of America's largest and most
vibrant recovery community, with scores of halfway houses, more than
5,000 people at 12-step meetings each week, recovery radio shows, a
recovery motorcycle club and a coffeehouse that boasts its own therapy
group.

Recovery communities are springing up outside the walls of rehab
centers for alumni seeking the safety in numbers. Delray Beach is in a
class by itself, experts say, because of its compact geography and
critical mass of recovering addicts who cross paths daily in the shops
and bistros along Atlantic Avenue.

They fly beneath the radar of tourists oblivious to telltale signs of
addiction, such as unapologetic chain smoking. But they see one
another everywhere: On the patio at Starbucks, reading the "Big Book,"
the bible of Alcoholics Anonymous. At the Longhorn restaurant, pushing
tables together for Friday night gatherings. At the Crossroads Club,
the headquarters for 115 12-step meetings a week, where gossip is of
romance, overdoses, suicides and friends who have successfully moved
back home.

"This community is one big helping hand that is always open," said
Mike Devane, a new halfway-house owner, who lost his job and family in
New Jersey before coming south five years ago to get sober.

This society-within-a-society gets mixed reviews from addiction
experts. A few find it insular and cultish.

"Cutting off contact with the outside world, is that a sign of mental
health?" asked Stanton Peele, a psychologist and author who challenges
much conventional wisdom in the field.

But many more experts note that a recovery community like Delray Beach
may provide a promising environment for certain addicts. While such
communities have not been studied, there is consensus that substance
abuse is a chronic and relapsing disease, comparable to diabetes or
high blood pressure. It thus requires permanent lifestyle changes that
may be easier in a new environment. Relapse rates range from 90
percent, for short treatment programs with no follow-up care, to 40
percent when treatment is comprehensive and long-lasting.

And even then, new research shows that sustained addiction can lead to
changes in the brain that make relapse all but inevitable, experts
say. Success, for those entrenched addicts, is measured by longer and
more productive periods of sobriety and shorter and less damaging
periods of substance abuse.

A. Thomas McLellan, director of the Treatment Research Institute at
the University of Pennsylvania, said the way to judge the wisdom of
retreating to a bubble of sobriety like Delray Beach was to ask:
"Where were they before? This may be their best available option."

Harold Jonas, 52, kicked a heroin habit two decades ago in this
beachfront city, far from his native Philadelphia, and decided to
stay. He married a fellow addict, raised a family, earned a doctorate
and opened a halfway house for substance abusers making the transition
from residential care to independent living.

Steadily, Jonas and his wife, Dawn, expanded their cottage industry.
They organized an association of halfway-house owners and opened
KoffeeOkee, the coffeehouse-karaoke bar.

Devane was among 20 Delray Beach residents who gathered at the cafe
one recent night for a weekly counseling session. One "normie" --
their word for the 65,000 year-round residents -- wandered in unawares
and was allowed to stay. First-timers sat at the periphery of the
circle, avoiding eye contact with others.

But Jeannie Saros, a former addict and now a therapist who sees
private patients in a cottage behind KoffeeOkee, soon had everyone
sharing closely guarded secrets. One admitted resuming a "sick
relationship" with a drug-abusing lover. Another, although sober, said
she continued to steal from friends. Devane, his voice a whisper,
confessed to having been a bad father.

Many have lost custody of their children. Among them is Jennifer Boeth
Whipple, 53, a journalist who arrived in the clutches of alcoholism in
1998. Whipple said she "took to heart" -- during her third effort at
rehabilitation -- "that some people have to change their lives
completely to maintain sobriety."

So she stuck around, following a carefully phased program, known as
the Florida Model, from residential treatment to a halfway house and a
"recovery job" at Home Depot. Eventually she bought a condominium and
worked for an art dealer.

For six years, Whipple said, she "felt very safe here, surrounded by
people who'd been through what I'd been through" -- detoxing in the
same roach-infested apartments, cycling through recovery centers.

Then a year ago, "after I'd gotten my sea legs," Whipple returned to
New York City, where her son lives with his father. All is well, she
said, except she is lonely. She talks to her friends often.

"At times," Whipple said, "Florida still beckons."

It is difficult to count the recovery population here because only
residential treatment beds are licensed by the state. As of Nov. 1,
almost 3,500 people were being treated as inpatients in Palm Beach,
Broward and Miami-Dade counties in southeastern Florida, by far the
largest concentration in the state.

Halfway houses, by contrast, are unregulated. But Jonas said there
were about 1,200 halfway-house beds in this city alone.

Low-wage jobs for people in recovery are plentiful in a tourist
economy. Recovering addicts make smoothies at Ben and Jerry's and sell
housewares at Crate and Barrel.

"Just about every business in town has at least one of us, whether
they know it or not," said Susan Miller, sober for 13 years and
executive director of the Crossroads Club, command central for
newcomers seeking meetings, housing, transportation and legal help.

Typically modest bungalows, halfway houses provide structure and
supervision -- curfews, random urine tests, requirements that tenants
have jobs and attend meetings. Still, unscrupulous owners prey on
tenants by "flipping" the same bed, insisting on several months' rent
up front, then evicting someone for rules violations and re-renting
the room. Some owners also put rule-breakers out on the curb, with no
alternative housing, which can lead to crime and an outcry from neighbors.

A movement to ban halfway houses in residential neighborhoods has so
far been unsuccessful, with courts ruling that such restrictions
violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The association of
halfway-house owners is trying self-regulation, and its members are
required to find a placement for an evicted tenant, often at a
discounted rate in a motel that Jonas owns.

A bigger concern, said Detective Gary Martin in the Palm Beach County
Sheriff's Office, is drug overdoses -- 218 in 2006 and 241 during the
first nine months of 2007.

"I consider close to one overdose every 36 hours a big problem,"
Martin said.

The overdoses highlight the high risk of relapse. Claire Condon
arrived here at age 19, a six-foot beauty withered to 100 pounds by
heroin. But in Delray Beach she got sober, got a modeling job, a
normie boyfriend, a condominium and two dogs.

Then, a year ago, at age 27, everything unraveled. Condon battled
depression, smoked marijuana to take the edge off her misery, then
upgraded to cocaine and OxyContin. She text messaged friends from
recovery, urging them to stay away.

"I didn't want to be a tornado in their lives," she said. "But every
time they heard someone died, they thought it was me."

Condon resumed treatment, however, and returned to her regular
meetings at the Crossroads Club. Back at square one, she still hopes
to leave here one day.

"That's my goal," Condon said. "But what pulls on my heart is the
people here, the connections I made at a time of desperation."