RECOVERING ADDICTS FIND HOME ON THE FLORIDA COAST

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. -- 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 Mr. 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 works as 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 the country'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.

The prototype community is in Minnesota, near the Hazelden clinic. But
recovering substance abusers are also sinking roots in Arizona,
Southern California and the Gold Coast of Florida -- places with more
sizzle and better weather. Lindsay Lohan spoke hopefully of finding
eternal rehab in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, near Provo, where some
graduates of her latest drug treatment center have moved.

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

Mr. 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 town folk -- 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 onetime 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. Mr. Devane, his voice a whisper,
confessed to having been a bad father.

Many here have lost custody of their children. Among them is Jennifer
Boeth Whipple, 53, a journalist who arrived in the clutches of
alcoholism in 1998. Ms. 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, Ms. 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
familiar to New Yorkers, like Silver Hill or Four Winds.

Then a year ago, "after I'd gotten my sea legs," Ms. 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," Ms. 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 in-patients 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 Dr. Jonas said there
were about 1,200 halfway house beds in this city alone. With rent
averaging $175 a week, these businesses generate almost $11 million a
year.

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. Among the current worker bees are
an executive chef and a professional baseball player, both busing tables.

"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 -- for those with
too many D.W.I.'s to drive -- and legal help.

Typically modest bungalows, halfway houses provide structure and
supervision -- curfews, random urine tests, the requirement 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 neighborhood homeowners.

A movement to ban halfway houses in residential neighborhoods has so
far been unsuccessful, with courts ruling that such restrictions
violate the Americans with Disability 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 Dr. 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," Detective Martin said.

The overdoses highlight the high risk of relapse. Indeed, even owners
of halfway houses fall off the wagon, leaving tenants like Katrina W.,
28, clean for a few months of a heroin and crack cocaine addition,
suddenly in charge. One resident, testing Katrina's limits, came home
smoking crack and blew smoke in her face. Katrina got the resident out
without incident and managed to hold on to her fragile sobriety.

Sobriety is the tightrope addicts walk, even years into recovery.
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. Ms. 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."

Ms. Condon resumed treatment, however, and returned to her regular
meetings at the Crossroads Club. Back at Square 1, she still hopes to
leave here one day. She misses the mountains and the seasons of
Connecticut.

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