Drug Help Inc. Aims At Creating 'factual Perspective'

'LAST OF m ARTICLES) n? igs are not inherently good or bad. Rj; can be used either badly or wisely. IEi s is a significant difference between use and drug abuse. R is, in essence, is the guiding philosophy of Drug Help Inc., a maturing, twoyear-old "grass roots" operation which now involves more than 100 volunteer workers. Located at 502 E. Washington, the clinic deals in drug crisis intervention, drug education and information, and drug problem counseling. Gail Johnson, one of five coördinators at the clinic, says its program creates a diverse array of misconceptions among the community. "People have to realize Drug Help is not run by a bunch of drug-crazed freaks. We don't dispense drugs here. "But then sometimes people think we're magie, like when we go into hospitals and get bad trippers on their feet, walking around, when the nurses couldn't seem to reach them." Although its activities and concerns are branching out to include new areas, one of Drug Help's primary services remains providing aid over the telephone to persons on drugs. "When you get a crisis cali," says volunteer Jan Fred, "you have to communicate over the phone that you're there and that you care. You try to set up some trust and find out what kind of 'jjfcjt is. Is the person seeing monsters? Does he have physical symptoms? Is he out of touch with reality? His environment and the people he's with can also figure in." "A lot of times just by changing some of his elements, you can change his bad trip into a good trip," adds Marty Butzen, another Drug Help coördinator. Generally, however, "Each person working the crisis phone develops his own kind of style. It's what you feel comfortable with," Fred notes. "Testing a caller's comprehension of reality is important. You might ask him, 'Have you tripped before? Have you come down? You'll come down again.' " According to Matt Lampe, one of Drug Help's founders and a familiar figure to most of Ann Arbor's street community, reality disorientation "is often a component of the bad trip and refers to the mental confusión that is occurring in the tripper's head. He may lose total contact with reality - especially with the 'delusional' drugs - or he may fade in and out between various realities." In a booklet on drugs which Lampe authored, he cites an actual case of a bad trip on psychedelics : "Tripper repeating phrases (a sign of his disorientation), 'Motorcycle . . . Linda ... Hawaii . . . Linda . . . bitch motorcycle.' Motorcycle was a convenient entry word. After the third time of being asked if he had a bike, he stopped the repeated wanderings and said yes, then he slipped back. "The next time he said it, I asked him again, and this time he answered a few more questions about the bike, how big it was, what kind, what color, etc. Using this technique to get back in touch with his own reality, he soon completely snapped out of his wanderings. Motorcycle was used as the part of his wanderings that I had the most familiarity with, the topic I feit most confortable discussing." If when a tripper calis Drug Help and he cannot be "brought down" or his anxieties relaxed over the phone, a mobile on-call team with psychiatrie backup assistance is sent out, providing the tripper is capable of telling the crisis phone worker just where he is. "As people take more and more drugs, more and more first aid training is needed," Johnson says. "Different skills are required to deal with drug problems stemming from different drugs." One of the major objectives of the Drug Help staff is to destroy the "fear mystique" which surrounds all drug forms in the minds of some. Explains Butzeri: "Drugs can be taken for four purposes - medicinal, recreational, experimental and compulsive. What we want to do is put drugs and these reasons for taking them into a realistic and factual perspective. I don't think you can scare kids into not taking drugs. They need to know the facts." Johnson agrees, and offers an example of how parents sometimes attempt to get Drug Help to join in the propaganda parade. "Mother might find some grass in her daughter's room. She gets all worried and calis us. She'll say, 'I want to bring my little girl down there and have you teil her not to use marijuana. If she doesn't stop, we're going to send her to a juvenile home.' This has happened. Talk about throwing away your children!" Nancy Lessin, a Drug Help volunteer, says, "Parents and adults have to give kids the truth about drugs. Say a kid hears from his folks that marijuana is bad, period. No further explanation. Then later maybe the kid smokes some dope and it doesn't seem bad. He feels good from it. "Now this kid thinks, 'They lied to me about grass. It's not bad.' Then the kid remembers that he heard heroin was the worst drug in the world. He thinks, Til bet they lied to me about that, too. I'll bet it's the best drug in the world. I'm going to try it!' What happens then?" If the youth were to begin taking heroin and become addicted to it, and Drug Help should be contacted concerning the problem, the addict would be referred to Octagon House, Washtenaw C o u n t y 's hard drug treatment and rehabilitation center with offices in Ann Arbor (219V& E. Washington) and Ypsilanti (11 N. Hamilton). The Octagon House program is overseen by the Community Mental Health Center. It makes use of the controversia! drug methadone, which though alsö" physically and psychologically addictive, is substituted in decreasing doseages for heroin. "Our goal is to produce people who are totally drug-free," says Dick Gilmore, the hip administrator of the program and a former addict himself ("Morphine was my preference"). "Methadone is only a tooi to achieve that end." Group therapy sessions are equally important in the Octagon House program. While a junkie is undergoing methadone treatment to kick the dependence his body has developed, the therapy and counseling are applied to the dependence his mind has developed. Gilmore points out that the program is oriented toward effecting a behavioral change by teaching the addict to structure his life around something other than drugs. Possibly indicative of the program's success, e i g h t of Octagon House's 12 counselors are themselves "graduates" of the clinic who have kicked their habits. "Those who have stayed clean and shown some ability to help in the program have been taken on as staff," states Gilmore. "It's not automatic, ho wever." "I'm not going to be unrealistic and say that all the people in the program are not using drugs. Some still are. But 1 believe that use has been decreased through methadone and therapy," he contends. While methadone is addictive - mearïing the addict must first kick heroin and then the "mets" (and some claim the latter task is more difficult than the first) - it is considerably less expensive. - According to Gilmore, the addict who needs $50 of heroin each day to "keep straight" (avoid sickness) can get by on a comparable amount of methadone at a cost of 10 cents. "This keeps him from ha ving to steal to support his habit," says Gilmore. "It gives him a chance to think and concentrate on his problem rather than be out on the street hustling." Octagon House's clientèle is surprising in a racial sense - at least for those persons who have the erroneous and stereotyped idea that heroin problems are confined to the black community. As of the end of last year, 47.7 per cent of the program's 218 applicants (160 admitted, with 127 of those active participants) were white. Males represented 166 of the applicants and females 52. The majority of the total - 62.2 per cent - was from 18 to 23 years oíd. The median age for all races was 21. Further, 45.9 per cent of the applicants resided in Ann Arbor, compared to 27.1 per cent from Ypsilanti and 17 per cent from Willow Run. The applicants, regardless of sex or race, were generally single. More than half were unemployed. The median length of heroin use for both men and women was two years.