A CAUTIONARY TALE FROM A CHILD PRODIGY OF SUBSTANCE ABUSE

At 23, Tony Landecker is a college sophomore making up for lost time.
He's on the dean's list at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, an
amazing turn of events given his flagrant 12-year history as a drug
and alcohol abuser - drunk, crack smoker, paint huffer.

Landecker has two words tattooed on his back: "Never Forget." He was
a child prodigy of substance abuse. Now, living in special housing
for students in recovery, he is a believer in the 12 Steps. "If you
don't start having a higher power and start cleaning out the wreckage
of the past," he says, "you don't have a chance."

Landecker's downward spiral is a cautionary tale; it doesn't take
much to start a habit.

He grew up in a middle-class home in Minnesota's Breezy Point, set on
a lake in the north woods. His grandfather gave him his first beer
when he was 9, while on a family trip in Canada. "I remember
thinking, 'I'm one of the guys at 9 years old!'" he says. "And I was
slurring my speech and I remember everyone thinking it was kind of a
joke that I was feeling drunk."

Next came more drinking on family hunting and fishing trips; then,
cigarettes, shoplifting and mixing "Windsor-7s" - Windsor Canadian
Whisky and 7-Up cocktails - for his parents, Kim, a homemaker, and
David, a land surveyor.

"Pretty soon I started having friends over after school and we would
drink. One of the most memorable times was we got drunk before going
to the eighth-grade football game; we took a bunch of shots, then
played. It wasn't looked down on in my family, drinking."

Still, his parents saw red flags and enrolled him in an adolescent
treatment center in nearby Brainerd. "It was kind of hardcore that I
was in treatment at 14 and I definitely thought it was cool. ... As
with most treatment centers, you get what you put into it. And I
wasn't putting anything into it."

He spent eight days at the renowned Hazelden treatment center in
Minneapolis. Landecker complied only enough to "keep the heat off,"
then became an outpatient at a hospital clinic - and went straight.

He didn't touch alcohol for more than three years. He went to 12-Step
meetings, excelled in school, played varsity basketball. Still, "it
kind of lingered in my head that I'd never done drugs."

After 10th grade, while working for his dad's surveying business, an
employee "showed me how to huff paint, and I was instantly hooked. I
huffed paint, butane. And I smoked pot for the first time. And from
there it was off to the races: acid, methamphetamines. I'd be a spree
person: acid for four or five months, then Ecstasy."

During senior spring break, Landecker went with friends to Fort Myers
Beach, Fla. They promised themselves to drink only once, but got
drunk "four or five nights in a row." Back at school, he didn't stop.
Why bother? He was popular and a star athlete: "I hit the longest
home run in school history, drunk."

He was also a "menace": Landecker claims he introduced many of his
classmates to alcohol and drugs. He was pushing his mother around,
threatening his father, frightening his little brother. His parents
"would lock their door because they'd fear I was going to kill them."

Graduating high school in 2002, he won a scholarship to play football
and baseball at the University of Minnesota in Crookston and
immediately "got mixed in with people who got drunk, smoked, did
cocaine." He never went to class: "The only time I woke up to shower
was at night to go to the bar."

Having been through the 12-Step program as an adolescent, he only too
well understood the cycles of his dependency: "Every time I used, I'd
think about how stupid I was, how this was going nowhere but bad. And
every drug I used, I got addicted to. So I hated myself. And then to
stop hating myself, I used. And the more I used, the more I forgot
about what I was doing. It was a great escape route."

Back in Breezy Point during the summer of 2003, he worked in a marina
owned by alcoholics. "I was doing a lot more cocaine now, probably
$500 a week. And I'd start drinking at 8 in the morning, vodka Red
Bulls, and I wouldn't stop drinking until 2 or 3 the next morning. I
started having an enlarged liver - people could see it; you can see
it womp out when it's swollen. I was doing 1.75 liters of hard liquor
a day and pretty close to going to treatment. I'd always end up
getting drunk and forgetting about it."

At school that fall, he dealt cocaine and marijuana. "And, finally,
one day, I wrote like $2,000 in bad checks. My court fines (for a DUI
and underage drinking violations) weren't being paid. I called my dad
and told him that I needed help.

"They sent me to this place called Glenmore in Crookston, and I had
seizures while detoxing. It was a five-day process of puking and
waking up hot and cold and seeing hallucinations of little purple
men. It was just unbelievable, the depths of addiction I had in my body."

He transferred to Hazelden and landed in a halfway house. He didn't drink.

But he also didn't do prescribed chores or attend 12-Step meetings.
Instead, moving to a privately owned "sober house," he began visiting
casinos and strip joints.

School was history. He moved in with an ex-roommate and "started
smoking crack. I started drinking all day long again. And I had never
been to such a low point in my life. I was calling my parents drunk
from the highway."

In August 2004, his roommate took him to The Lodge at Hazelden. This
was the turning point: Landecker says he "had a spiritual experience,
really got in touch with the higher power. They take you on nature
walks. They make you pray in the morning and in the night and in the
day. And they made you fill out a list of things you were grateful
for, like having a family that actually cared about you, like having
friends who cared enough about you to take you to this place.

"And I've been sober ever since."

His relationship with his family is "outstanding. They want me to
come home. They trust me again."

His parents have banned alcohol from their lives; his mother is
earning a degree toward becoming a chemical dependency counselor.

In his first year at Augsburg, Landecker has a 3.66 GPA. "Football's
going exceptional," he says; he plays free safety. He hasn't missed a
class, avoids parties and is a rock-solid follower of the 12 Steps,
attending three meetings a week off campus. "I've never been this strong."

He's now a role model for the newly sober, because he was mentored
himself - and because he needs to "vicariously feel the pain" of
addiction, so he doesn't forget his own and slip back.

Landecker speaks about addiction in schools and clinics and is
helping to establish a national online recovery network to help
college students, especially athletes, find sober roommates and
maintain sober lifestyles.

Augsburg, a Lutheran liberal arts college with 1,700 day students,
has its own "StepUP" recovery program, with sober dorms, counseling
and regular community meetings for about 40 young men and women, as
well as StepUP alumni. The 12-Step philosophy is integrated into the
program. It all serves to reinforce Landecker's sobriety.

Yet he doesn't believe most treatment programs are effective, at
least not for stubborn young people: "Let's say my kids end up
alcoholic; I'd never even send them to treatment unless they were so
deep into their addiction that they needed to get out of there." He
is convinced that recovery comes only from the 12 Steps and what they
teach: faith in a higher power and "service to the newcomer who's got
one day of sobriety.

"In the end," he says, "no one could have told me to stop using drugs
and alcohol until I was ready. You just can't push someone to that."