The Buzz Killer

Head up into Northwest Pasadena and you might stumble across two drug abuse treatment centers, with two sharply divergent styles. The Pasadena Recovery Center, located on Raymond Avenue, rose to prominence on the coattails of its most famous psychologist, Dr. Drew Pinsky, as “Dr. Drew” became a TV and radio celebrity on shows like the sex/love/drug-advice radio program “Loveline” and the self-explanatory VH1 train-wreck reality-show, “Celebrity Rehab.”

But walk one street over, and the IMPACT Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center takes an almost entirely different tack in salvaging the lives of its clients. Headed by Jim Stillwell, who has been associated with the facility since the day he became a client himself 36 years ago and eventually ascended the ladder there, IMPACT doesn’t present a glamorous, TV-ready image. In fact, Stillwell is proud to note that there’s nothing “Hollywood” about it at all.

“Sure, we’ve had James Caan up here, Heidi Fleiss, Rodney King,” Stillwell says, reeling off the few celebrity names that have leaked to the press over the years while assiduously preserving the anonymity of all other clientele. “Sure, Dr. Drew’s had Rodney King too, but nobody knew about it and we didn’t pay him to be here [a reference to the money rumored to be paid by VH1 to show participants]. The whole problem starts when celebrities think they’re not regular people. We force everyone to be treated the same. We know that they can come from a background where excess isn’t enough.

“Coming in, you know from day one no agent or publicist is coming here — and if they don’t listen, they’ll die. We don’t have a masseuse, or equine therapy,” he continues, throwing a bit of sarcasm towards the cushy treatment centers that abound in areas like Malibu. “They’ll go to that so they can create the illusion they did something significant. But all they did was take a couple massages, take a few laps and a meeting with a counselor each day and say they’re done. It doesn’t work like that.”

Just say no
Stillwell knows exactly what he’s talking about, having plunged into drug abuse as a teenager growing up around the San Fernando Valley. While he’s also earned a BA in organizational psychology after cleaning up, it’s his years of shooting heroin and later successfully battling Hepatitis C with Interferon treatments that gave him the street smarts and cred needed to head a facility that houses nearly 100 patients at a time for an average four-month stretch.

Those patients come from across the socioeconomic spectrum; from mansions in Beverly Hills to filthy sidewalks near Fifth and Main in downtown LA’s Skid Row.  Back when he first encountered IMPACT’s Pasadena location, it also had now-shuttered branches in the Valley and West LA. As treatment styles have changed over the decades, so too has IMPACT’s focus — creating more sober-living homes around the Los Angeles area to give its rehab graduates up to another year of structural support as they transition back to the pressures of everyday life, and building strong ties to the drug-court system that has helped addicts face heavy-duty probation rather than even heavier prison time.

Walking a visitor around the horseshoe-shaped complex, Stillwell notes that when he entered IMPACT, it had 16 clients and “four or five staff.” Today, they have 500 clients — 70 percent of them male — in the center and other program facilities, with an 85-person staff making sure things run as safely as possible while clients maintain a heavily active, well-enforced schedule from 7 a.m. wakeup, on through AA-style group meetings, individual counseling and intensive chores all the way into late afternoon.

“For initial treatment, we’re looking at 90 days or more. You’re not gonna teach a 28- year-old addict how to be clean in 30 days — that’d be like a chalk talk,” says Stillwell. “They’ve got to learn how to live what they’re learning — everybody’s assigned a job almost from the day they come in, unless they’re detoxing for four or five days. We have maintenance crews, kitchen work, landscaping, building furniture and remodeling crews.”

Having seen societal attitudes change and government funding increase across his four decades with IMPACT, Stillwell notes that the facility’s best years were under President Ronald Reagan, who aggressively funded treatment facilities like his. While he admits that many addicts and their professional counselors — himself included — laughed at Nancy Reagan’s seemingly simplistic “Just Say No” campaign at the time, he has come to respect it as a means of reaching impressionable young minds at a vitally important age.

“Of course it was ridiculous for a heroin addict to be able to live by ‘Just say no,’ but for a kid it’s perfect. We teach kids to say ‘no’ to so many other things like getting in cars or strangers, so why not drugs?” says Stillwell. “If you wait to reach them in junior high, it’s too late. Kids need to be taught to think independently of peer pressure from kindergarten on, when they get hit with messages about what’s the cool lunchbox to have, or even fashion at that age. It’s the advertising and pop culture industries that are poisoning us the most, pushing shallow things that everyone’s just gotta have. I was part of the problem myself, buying my daughter a million different Hello Kitty things before I came to my senses.”

Jonesin’ for cash
Stillwell notes that there have been some “milestones in treatment modalities” over the years, such as the addition of drug courts which “put you back in front of the judge so frequently you can’t forget the consequences” of failure. While California’s Proposition 36 in 2000 also helped increase drug-rehab funding to the tune of $120 million per year for five years, he says that within another month the funding from the proposition will dry up as the state deals with its massive budget crisis. He estimates that IMPACT will lose $300,000 to $400,000 (of its overall $6 million annual budget) as a result, and worries that the decrease in money will lead to an increase in deaths among street addicts.

“Over the last couple years, we’re down over a million, million-and-a-half dollars,” Stillwell said. “That equates to a wait list up to six months, and if you die in that time, what can you do? If you’re indigent, you can’t pay otherwise — you have to call every day and see if something opened up. It’s serious, and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.”

Nonetheless, Stillwell doesn’t put the blame on President Barack Obama, instead recalling that hopes were high for vastly higher funding and helpful legislation under President Bill Clinton, due to his being a generational peer of many of those staying in rehab there. 

“The fiscal year starts Oct. 1 and supposedly there’s a lot of money for drug courts, but we haven’t heard anything yet and it’s mid-September,” said Stillwell. “We’re at the bottom of the food chain. I would be better off if I opened a nonprofit pet cemetery and asked for funds. I’d generate more for a dog than a homeless, down-and-out female drug addict. It’s just not sexy, because no one wants to think about it. They’ll give a zillion dollars to General Motors though. That’s the fabric of our society.”

In fact, the Obama administration proposes just a modest $459 million increase to the $13.7 billion overall budget for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which coordinates the federal response to the drug problem. Under that spending plan, spending on drug interdiction and treatment combined would increase nearly $800 million over the year prior. Specifically, an additional $177 million in federal drug treatment spending would go toward prison-based substance abuse services, creating nearly 90 new drug courts and residential drug treatment programs.

Other important areas of spending — domestic law enforcement, international drug control programs and drug prevention — would shrink a combined $115 million.

The lexicon of the nation’s anti-drug strategies is changing under drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, the former Seattle police chief Obama tapped in March to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Observers see a shift in drug policy with Kerlikowske’s appointment as drug czar, a post that can take a strong role in shaping policy but doesn’t require confirmation by Congress.

Kerlikowske is urging an end to use of the term “war on drugs,” — “we’re not at war with people of this country,” he said recently — and is pressing to give treatment a broader role in the nation’s drug policy. He’s also advised against using federal resources to undermine state medical marijuana laws, even though federal policy does not recognize the medicinal capabilities of the herb.

All of that’s comforting to Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director of Drug Policy Alliance California, and drug policy advocacy groups working to reduce the emphasis on criminalization that has spanned prior administrations. “What the new drug czar says is certainly much better than what we heard in the previous years,” Dooley-Sammuli said.

But such talk has yet to translate into change in the federal government’s response toward drugs, she said. The federal stimulus package and Obama’s proposed budget put an unprecedented amount of money toward multiagency regional drug task forces that work exclusively to put drug offenders behind bars. And earlier this month, DEA agents in black balaclava masks raided more than a dozen San Diego County medical marijuana dispensaries, an action belying the drug czar’s comments on federal involvement in state medical marijuana affairs.

“That’s extremely concerning,” Dooley-Sammuli said.

Observers saw hope for drug policy reform in the dark clouds of California’s massive budget deficit; it appeared lawmakers would need to change sentencing policies for drug offenses both to cut costs and to meet court-ordered targets to greatly reduce the prison population. But the budget crisis brought only modest changes to sentencing policies that incarcerate drug possession offenders, which costs California taxpayers $1 billion each year, Dooley-Sammuli said. That’s on top of reductions to drug counseling funds under Proposition 36 and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s plan announced last week to cut $280 million in rehabilitation programs for prisoners and parolees.

“It’s ludicrous,” Dooley-Sammuli said.

One recent bright spot was California contributing toward drug treatment part of a $135 million federal grant that typically funds drug task forces and programs to improve the outcome of low-level drug offenders in the justice system, Dooley-Sammuli said.

Such a move should help keep drug users in need of treatment out of costly incarceration — exactly the kind of shift drug policy advocates want to see.

“We need more of that — but that unfortunately appears to be a fluke,” Dooley-Sammuli said.

One last chance
Stillwell, 62, has seen plenty of happy and sad stories in his time, his personal best being the fact that he met his wife of 34 years while working for the center, and another being the time a horde of nearly 40 motorcycle club members wheeled onto the grounds to make certain a member in need actually entered the programs. Defying Stillwell’s expectations, that client has been sober for 27 years and is now his No. 2 man in running the program.

But one sad story in particular stands out the most for him and reminds him regularly of the importance of his work.

“I remember a couple weeks before [‘Saturday Night Live’ star performer] Chris Farley passed away, he came here on a walking tour,” recalled Stillwell. “As we passed a meeting, both Jimmy Caan and Scott Weiland were here and they came out and gave him a hug and said you have to get in here, ‘it’s a good place’ kind of a pep talk. I don’t know what movie he was in, but Farley had to go to the Pasadena Library for a quick shot but said he was gonna get back in a couple days. By then, he was dead.

“I have a thousand stories like that — it’s the nature of the disease,” he continued. “As I go out to AA and NA meetings in the county, they’ll come up to me and talk about coming in, I’d say ‘give me a call.’ Once I had a mother with twins. One said he’d come up for treatment, the other said he wasn’t as bad as his brother. Then one passed away and she asked again for the other son a month later and I said ‘right now — make a call, have your clothes brought up.’ I know what people do — they say ‘I’ll be back,’ and then you use all the drugs you can because you know you’re not gonna do anymore. We all have another run in us. I know I have a good one, but I don’t know if I have another recovery, so I’ve decided for 36 years not to take that chance.”