FREE AT LAST GIVES NEW LIFE TO GRADUATE

DURING our first conversation, Felicia Jackson mentioned more than once
that she was an alumna of the Free at Last drug rehabilitation program in
East Palo Alto. She said it with the air of someone who might have
graduated from the Sorbonne.

That's how she feels about graduating from Free at Last, which today is
celebrating its fifth anniversary with fanfare and visits from dignitaries.

And why shouldn't she be proud? Drugs took away everything. Now, thanks to
46ree at Last, she has it back.

She lost her children to county foster homes. She also lost her husband and
her house. When the couple went to jail, their possessions were put on the
street for the garbage collector.

Losing the children was the wake-up call.

``I said, `Oh no, this is not the life I want for myself and my children,'
'' Jackson said.

Now, nearly three years clean and sober, Jackson, 36, her husband and four
children are back together. The family is renting a four-bedroom, 2
1/2-bath home with a big yard in San Jose.

She works at Free at Last in the Whiskey Gulch area of East Palo Alto.
Thursday the phone was ringing off the hook, and the well-spoken Jackson
was cheerfully directing callers and giving information.

She holds a second job in Menlo Park as a chef at the Recovery Inn.

ALWAYS feeling she had a talent for cooking, Jackson took the culinary arts
course at Opportunities Industrialization Center West's job training center
while in the drug recovery program.

``I'm OK with who I am today and who I have become,'' she said happily.

One thing today's event will celebrate is a federal grant from the Center
for Substance Abuse Treatment for a men's residence and four more beds for
women.

The money is administered through Yvonne Frazier and the Alcohol and Drug
Administration of the County of San Mateo.

For 10 months, Jackson lived at the tidy Free At Last residence called
Malaika House which houses women who have children six years and younger.
Another residence is for single women.

But the need is great.

``We are very concerned about the number of people who remain out of
treatment because the outcome of treatment is very good,'' Frazier said.

Substance abuse treatment is also viewed by her agency as a preventive
measure against HIV.

Priya Haji, who was a Stanford student volunteering for the San Mateo
County AIDS Program in 1992 when East Palo Alto was wracked with
drug-related violence, co-founded Free at Last with David Lewis, a former
addict. They organized a core group.

Haji said East Palo Alto represented 75 percent of new HIV cases in San
Mateo County last year, and 97 percent were directly related to substance
abuse.

BUT she expressed great optimism about the city.

``East Palo Alto is developing and changing and becoming a part of the
future of the Silicon Valley,'' she said. ``What is exciting is that Free
at Last is making sure that its most struggling and stressed people get to
be a part of the best things that are going to happen here.''

Now Jackson and her children can be a part of that as well, she said.

People will look at an addicted person in Palo Alto and say, ``Let's get
them treatment,'' she said, but they will look in East Palo Alto and will
say, ``Let's arrest them and send them to jail.''

And the reality is, said Haji, that Jackson embodies that contradiction.
Treating her as a criminal problem broke her family, but treating her
addiction as a medical problem healed it.