STARTING SOBRIETY YOUNG

Adolescent Addicts Face Same Challenges As Experienced Adults

BLOOMINGTON - On May 25, Brent, an 18-year-old from Milford, will
leave Chestnut Health Systems after a stay of 87 days, a stretch of
time that will mark the beginning of a lifelong fight to bury his
addiction to drugs and alcohol in his rocky, blurry past.

The next day he will graduate, on time, with the rest of the Milford
High School Class of 2006.

Talk about a fresh start.

"I feel good about where I am right now," Brent said recently inside
his Chestnut counselor's office. "And I haven't been able to say that
for a long time."

While there is a path to substance abuse rehabilitation that is more
familiar - start young, slowly grow the addiction to where lives
crumble and crash, hit proverbial rock bottom and then seek help at
age 30, or 40, or 50 - Brent's story of adolescent addiction is

hardly unusual.

The treatment of teenage addicts is a challenge that runs parallel to
the challenges of treating older addicts - counseling, group therapy
and 12-step programs are central to both - but cannot be identical
because of the differences in life experiences.

Identifying and treating the illness early in a person's life can
preclude the decades of chaos and sorrow that usually settle like fog
on the family and friends of those who are addicted to alcohol and drugs.

But first you have to get them to rehab.

"Teenage addicts don't usually know the pain of hitting bottom -
losing jobs, losing family, losing everything," said Mychele Kenney,
director of youth services at Chestnut, where most of the 52
residential beds are filled with adolescents referred by the juvenile
justice system. "So what we do is bring the bottom up. Our goal is
always abstinence, but if there's decrease in the amount and
frequency of use and we get those things accomplished, we're still pleased."

Here are some facts and numbers from the federal Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration. Alcohol is the No. 1 drug of
choice among children and adolescents. In 2002, about 2 million youth
ages 12 through 20 drank five or more drinks on one occasion, five or
more times in one month (and more than 7 million reported this level
of consumption at least once in the survey month). Also in 2002, 1.5
million youth in that same age group met criteria for admission to
alcohol treatment, although only 120,000 actually received treatment.

Drug abuse statistics are equally, pardon the pun, sobering. A 2001
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse indicated that 10.8 percent
of the 12 to 17 population were current drug users, a number that
grew by nearly a full percentage point from the year before. There is
no evidence that the trend has slowed since the survey.

"There appears to be a certain fairly constant percentage of people
among us who are predestined to try drugs and alcohol and get
addicted," Kenney said. "Our work is aimed at helping pick up the
pieces after that has happened to a young man or woman."

Snap decision

Brent started drinking beer in eighth grade and smoking marijuana in
ninth grade when he ditched whatever "just-say-no" lesson he had
heard on his very first real-life test.

"One day after football practice one of the older guys on the team
asked me if I wanted to smoke, and I said sure," Brent said. "That's
how it started for me."

His freshman B's and C's became sophomore C's and D's as his
addiction took anchor and grew. When six or eight beers no longer
satisfied, he drank 12 to a case of beer. He started snorting cocaine
and stealing money to pay for it. A couple of times a week became
five times a week then every day of the week. His mother confronted
him often about his obvious downward spiral.

"She'd be yelling at me, and I'd just walk away and go do it again,"
Brent said.

He decided not to go out for football his senior year.

"I figured it would get in the way of my partying," he said.

Inevitably, cops, lawyers and judges entered Brent's life, and in
short succession he was arrested twice for criminal damage to
property (in one instance he smashed the window of a teacher's car in
the school parking lot), twice for illegal consumption of alcohol and
finally for residential burglary. He and a friend made a drug-fired
snap decision to break into a friend's house to steal drug money.
Within minutes of entering the house, the owners returned home. They
all waited around for the police to arrive.

The burglary got Brent sent to a juvenile facility in St. Charles and
then off to a boot camp setting in Murphysboro, where he stayed
almost four months. He thought the rough experience of incarceration
changed him for the better.

"I thought I got the message," he said. "I was using within two weeks."

Beer, pot, cocaine, pills, mushrooms.

"Heroin was never around," he said. "Meth was around me, but somehow
I was smart enough to stay away from that."

On Feb. 7, Brent was kicked out of school for being intoxicated. On a
short legal leash because of his previous transgressions, he had few
options. Something was different, however, about this patch of
trouble. Brent said he had finally tired of the lifestyle.

"I looked back at my life and saw I was 18 years old with nothing to
show for it and nowhere to go," he said. "A lawyer and my parents
thought it was a good idea to come for treatment."

Brent was 60 days sober the day he was interviewed for this story.

His days at Chestnut are filled with school, group therapy sessions,
more school, then more group therapy sessions. There is also physical
activity inside the gymnasium, and privileges like movies and
community outings can be earned by good behavior. Many of Chestnut's
youth residents come from wildly dysfunctional families, and
counselors often need to work on more than issues of addiction. Most
of the cost of the treatment for Chestnut residents and outpatients
is borne by Medicaid.

"We work with the (Alcoholics Anonymous )12-step program, but we do
it in a kid-friendly way," she said. "Some of the steps are pretty
abstract, and we really work to make them concrete ideas in their
minds. We make them think about the bad things that happened to them
while they were using and to recognize what might be triggers to
starting up again when they get back home."

Alternate path

Jimmy Malone of Peoria took a slightly different route to sobriety at
Proctor Hospital's Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery. Because
Proctor does not take Medicaid payments, most of its adolescent
residents and outpatients are covered by a private insurer and are
more likely to come from families that are at least financially
better off than Chestnut families.

"Most of our referrals are self-referrals of kids who are getting in
trouble in school and in their families, but are not necessarily in
trouble with the law," said Phil Scherer, the clinical coordinator at
the institute. "It usually comes after a series of incidents that
trigger parental alarm."

Malone started smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol during his
sophomore year at a religion-affiliated school in the area.

"I liked it," he said. "I liked how I felt and I liked the rebellion
part of it, too."

The habit quickly expanded from weekend-only status to an everyday
event. Malone became masterful at hiding his burgeoning addiction.

"I had four different facades," he said. "My parent facade, my
nonsmoking friend facade, my school facade and my work facade. I was
the first to volunteer to pray. My first thought every day was, 'How
can I hide this?' "

The act fell apart one day in school. A secretary followed Malone
outside when he asked permission to retrieve his lunch from his car
but really intended to smoke pot. When he got to the car - no lunch.

"I told her I must have forgotten it," said Malone, now 20, whose
Proctor rehab stay was a little more than two years ago, the length
of his current run of sobriety.

Red flag.

"It raised suspicion," he said. "And my principal followed me out to
my car later in the day and searched it and found a bag of pot, some
pipes and a lighter, shot glass. He called my parents and gave me an
option - withdraw from school or be expelled. I withdrew."

Malone agreed to an addiction assessment at Proctor, thinking all the
time that he'd do a quick outpatient program that would allow him to
quickly resume smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol. He was
surprised when Proctor recommended a residential stay.

"Even then I wasn't thinking I was ready to quit," he said.

Proctor has up to 20 beds dedicated to the adolescent residential
rehab program. Malone slept in one of them an attitude-altering 29
nights before he was discharged to outpatient status. He continued
with after-care for 16 weeks, a service he credits with cementing his
sobriety. The feeling of being clean and productive trumped the urge
to get high.

"Just about everyone I knew who skipped after-care relapsed," said
Malone, who graduated on time at a different area high school than
the one he left. Currently he has a job and is taking classes at
Illinois Central College on his way to Illinois State University and
a career in elementary education.

Difficult steps

While the Proctor setting differs from Chestnut, the programs are a
similar combination of 12-step work, group and family therapy and
continued schoolwork. Counselors focus on making the 12 steps easily
understood by adolescent brains.

"They think they're invincible," said Ed Betzelberger, a counselor in
the young adult unit at Proctor. "We bring their recovery down to
their level of understanding and give them real life tools and
specific tasks they can do to prevent relapse. They need to learn
that if they are not moving forward in recovery they are moving
toward relapse."

Shortly after leaving Proctor and after returning to regular high
school classes, Malone said he found a bag of pot in the parking lot
of the school.

"I picked it up and looked at it for a while, opened it up and ran my
fingers through it," Malone said. "A lot of (stuff) went through my
mind, like how proud my parents are of me now and how good it felt to
be clean. It was quite a temptation though."

Malone dumped the bag on the asphalt, got in his car and drove off in
the direction of his future.