SIX WEEKS OF CLEAN CAN BE A GODSEND

She was a 9-year-old in a DARE T-shirt when police raided her
family's home for drugs. She remembers one of the officers stared at
her shirt and laughed at its anti-drug message.

"It was the first time I even knew drugs were around me," Lucy Hernandez said.

Three years later, Hernandez was using drugs and drinking enough to
be a preteen alcoholic. By 15, she was shooting up heroin.

"I wanted to be like everyone else," she said. "Drugs were completely
around me. I was going in and out of jail. I wanted to be the baddest
I could ever be."

Now, at 23, Hernandez says that era is over. This week, she will
graduate from Bridges, a transitional living program that helps women
end the abuses that led them into lockups.

For six months, she has lived with 11 other women in an apartment
complex in Albuquerque, N.M. They attended support groups, found
jobs, got counselors and carried one another through the worst.

Hernandez intends to resume caring for her 2-year-old daughter. She
hopes to improve her job situation, perhaps by beefing up her
computer skills, perhaps by going to college.

She has been clean, she says, for six months - "the longest ever in my life."

On paper, six months sounds like a blip. Close your eyes, and it's
gone. Hold it up against years of abuse, and which side wins?

"Six months is not so long," said Lisa Vaughn, a 44-year-old former
crack addict who will leave Bridges at the end of October. "But sit
in jail for six months, and, yeah, it is a long time."

It's a long time generally spent feeding the same addiction that got
you there in the first place. Few people kick their habits in a cell.
Most, Hernandez says, come out more addicted than when they went in.

"It's a revolving door," said Beatrice Narcisco, Bridges' executive
director. "Their conditions of release are always, 'No drugs, no
alcohol, get a job, get a place to live.' But they didn't receive
treatment; so nothing changed from when they went in until when they
came out."

How does a woman whose friends are all the wrong people find a place
to stay? Maybe steal something. Or sell drugs. Or sell her body.

"And then get high," Narcisco said, "because all of that doesn't feel so good."

Then and there, she violates the conditions of her release and sets
herself up for another trip to jail.

Narcisco's program, funded mainly by the city, has worked since 1995
to change that pattern, bit by bit. Narcisco used to work with
women's programs in the City-County Jail but last year moved to
Bridges. Since then, only two participants have returned to the
corrections system.

On the scale of human endeavors, she said, "kicking an addiction is
very hard. It takes a lot of support, a lot of education. It's also
hereditary. There's a lot we're still learning about why one person
becomes an addict and another doesn't."

When the women in her program gathered in a meeting room, their eyes
were clear, their spirits buoyed by hopes for a better, sober life.

"I could have paroled anywhere," said Lucy Maes, 41, a former
alcoholic who first used heroin while serving a prison term. "But I
chose to come here. I was so scared I would fall down and start
drinking again."

The former lives she and the others describe seem distant and murky,
like something seen through the ice on a wintry lake. For now, for
the first time, they are standing on top of that ice, firmly planted
on the safe side.

But ice can crack, and if it did, they could plunge again into the
chilling depths.

"The fear factor," Vaughn said, "sometimes gets a little
overwhelming. But the one thing we can rest assured about is, if we
need help, we can always come back here and ask for it. We're never
alone."

It took years to build her addiction, six months to break it. As for
staying sober, she said, "By the grace of God, it's not that hard.
One day at a time."