GROUP TO TOUR RALEIGH FACILITY FOR IDEAS FOR CREATING DETOX PROGRAM

DURHAM -- A group of Durham pastors, mental health professionals and county
officials will visit an inpatient substance-abuse treatment program in
Raleigh next week to see if it could be replicated here.

Doug Wright, chairman of the Mental Health Board, and Ellen Holliman,
interim director of the Durham Center, met with representatives of The
Healing Place of Wake County this spring. The program, based on Alcoholics
Anonymous, offers free alcohol and drug detox and support services for
homeless men, and is raising money to start serving women.

"[The] method was an excellent one, with tremendous results, something we
thought would work well in Durham," Wright said.

The pastors have favored reviving a detox program at Oakleigh, a Durham
Regional Hospital building that housed a 28-day substance-abuse treatment
program until it closed two years ago.

They won the County Commissioners' support for the idea in May, and
Commissioner Phil Cousin agreed to be a liaison between the group and Duke
University, which controls the building through its lease of Durham Regional
Hospital.

But some think the one-story building next to the northern Durham hospital
on Crutchfield Street would be better used as a crisis center for people
with mental illnesses and substance-abuse problems, Wright said. There is no
such a center in Durham, and many such patients end up being treated in
emergency rooms.

The programs available in Durham are disconnected, said Tony Mulvihill,
executive director of the Alcohol/Drug Council of North Carolina, a
Durham-based advocacy group. A crisis center could become a focal point for
referrals, he said.

As it stands now, alcoholics and other addicts treated in emergency rooms
often return to the situations that fed their abuse, only to end up in state
psychiatric hospitals. Durham can't afford to dodge its responsibility to
the community any longer, Mulvihill said.

"[The county] has to find a way to get people into the right place to meet
their needs," he said. "It needs to be a medical program where people are
detoxed, which is a medical process."

The Healing Place is modeled after The Healing Place in Louisville, Ky.,
which has received federal accolades. "We have replicated it very
faithfully," said Fred Barber, the Raleigh clinic's first board president,
adding that several cities have contacted the program about setting up
similar services.