Ambush on Path to Recovery

It was late in the evening when Michael Key landed on skid row in downtown Los Angeles. He had just been booted from a South Los Angeles drug program for getting high and was on his way to a detox center on Crocker Street when he passed a tent pitched on a grimy sidewalk where several people were doing drugs.

Key was invited in and, after a couple of hits of marijuana laced with crack cocaine, rehab seemed less urgent. He spent the night craving more dope.

“I was literally at my wits’ end,” Key recalled. “You talk in terms of hitting bottom, but addicts like to say that every bottom has a trap door.”

Key managed to get clean eventually. But his long battle to kick his habit while living on skid row is depressingly familiar to recovery experts, who know that the concentration of their own programs has sown the seeds of temptation on every corner.

Skid row has the city’s biggest concentration of drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, with space for more than 1,400 resident clients. But more drug arrests are made in the 50 square blocks of this squalid patch than anywhere else in the city. It is a mecca for dealers from all over the region, many of them gang members who set up temporary abode in nearby hotels and establish drug-selling turf.

They go to skid row because the area has a reputation as a place where anything goes and because of the ready-made market. Nearly 10,000 people live on the streets or in emergency shelters, hotels and efficiency apartments on skid row, and as many as 40% are estimated to be substance abusers.

Skid row pushers and their customers form a combustible mix, spawning a cycle of lawlessness and desperation that no one quite knows how to stop.

It is a drug bazaar of temptations that addicts who are financially better off can avoid by going to rehab centers in less challenging surroundings.

“With all of the narcotics sales in skid row, it strikes me as nearly impossible to get clean. The expression I hear is that the wolves are not at the door, they’re in the living room,” said Los Angeles Police Capt. Andy Smith, who commands the Central Division downtown.

City officials want services more evenly dispersed throughout the county, but no communities have stepped forward to serve as sites for rehab centers.

With the support of police and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, state Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), who represents the skid row area, is working on legislation that would increase penalties for drug sales within 1,000 feet of a treatment facility or homeless shelter.

The legislation would designate skid row as a recovery zone, forbid people who are on probation for selling drugs from being there and prohibit hospitals and outside police agencies from “dumping” people in the area.

“What I was struck by when I went downtown was the profound indifference” to the drug dealing, Cedillo said. The place where it’s most urgent to have successful drug programs is “the place where drug use is most permissive.”

Some people in recovery criticize the service providers themselves for allowing the drug trade to thrive just outside their doors. The providers, meanwhile, experience the frustration of seeing the same people rotate through their programs.

“For program staff, they see this almost impossible-looking situation daily, and it can have an overwhelming effect. It seems like we’re working harder and harder every day, but it doesn’t look like the problem is decreasing,” said Conrad Watson, 68, executive director of the Salvation Army’s residential recovery centers on East 5th Street.

Twenty-two years ago, Watson was sleeping in a fleabag hotel room at San Julian Place and Wall Street, drinking himself to death, when he entered the program. So he understands first-hand the hurdles addicts there face.

Most are hampered by mental illness, poor physical health and a history of family dysfunction. They rarely receive the most up-to-date treatment regimens. Skid row drug programs, for the most part, employ few in-house addiction specialists, psychologists or clinical social workers, and few are licensed by the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.

“If you take 10 people in their first six months of recovery and put them in skid row or in an environment relatively free of drugs, you’re going to have more relapse with the skid row group,” said Richard A. Rawson, associate director of UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs.

Key, who now lives in a one-room apartment just a few blocks from where the drug tent once stood, pointed along 5th Street to an area notorious for marijuana sales. It’s within shouting distance of the Central Division police station. The sales pitch for one high-grade type was quick and crude: “Chronic, chronic,” the sellers growled, displaying their wares.

In the short block from his apartment to 5th and Wall streets, half a dozen drug peddlers approached him, hawking heroin and dope, the name users call crack cocaine. Key, with a spiritual resolve that has kept him clean for four years, didn’t bite. But the sellers found plenty of customers with less fortitude.

Key is a tall man of medium build, a New York accent still clinging to his speech. He got high on cocaine and other drugs for 42 of his 56 years, he said. He is an ex-felon and a disbarred attorney who once had a well-paying practice. He would race from the courthouse to get a fix and finally found himself scorning his home in Rancho Cucamonga for the urine-stained sidewalks.

“I was surprised so much was tolerated, but you get used to it,” said Key, who now works for the Community Action Network, a downtown social advocacy group.

On one recent night he headed to a detox center run by the Volunteers of America at 5th and Crocker to take part in a support group, one of about 10 such meetings he attends each month.

Amid the cardboard shanties, bedrolls and tents, the sidewalks were alive. Across from the Los Angeles Mission, a girl, maybe 6, explored a small battery-operated keyboard and a man sitting beside her played the clarinet. In the gutters were tiny plastic bags emptied of drugs -- and syringes, some with pinpoints of blood still visible.

Key attended City College of New York and New York Law School. He was a public defender in Los Angeles, and when he was working, he didn’t get high every day. But more often than not, he said, he would race from the courthouse to buy drugs and sit smoking dope in his car.

“Part of my job was to advise clients of what would happen if they didn’t stop messing with dope,” he said. “I felt like the biggest hypocrite.”

He also worked as a private attorney, but he said he took to stealing from friends and loved ones so he could buy drugs. He went to prison and lost his license in 2002.

The day after the night in the drug tent, Key went to the detox center and landed one of the last beds available. Though now clean, he has been through at least 20 recovery programs. Sometimes, dealers would offer a free rock of cocaine -- because if he succumbed, he’d be hooked and again provide them a steady source of income.

At a community center he frequents, Key shared recollections with Leslie Croom, 50, who was once so crazed with an addiction to heroin and crack that she walked from North Hollywood to skid row to get a cheap fix.

She was homeless on skid row off and on for 10 years, while raising five children. There were harrowing times when she was sick and hungry and other times when food was plentiful, delivered by church and community groups.

Croom was eventually arrested for possessing drugs and given a choice: treatment or prison. She chose the former and spent only one night in a skid row program before realizing she was bound to fail.

“I couldn’t do it in this community, because it was too accessible. All I had to do was walk out the door,” she said. Croom eventually found a residential program in Hawthorne, and went on to earn a drug and alcohol counseling certificate as well as a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

She is now a community organizer for the United Coalition East Prevention Project, a skid row group that is working to clean up bars, liquor stores and hotels that are magnets for drug dealing and other crime. But working on skid row, she said, she keeps running into ghosts.

At 5th and Crocker, 100 yards from the detox center Key attended, is the Central Division’s busiest drug-dealing corner, with 180 arrests in the last year, Capt. Smith said. His nine-member narcotics team made 6,000 drug arrests downtown last year -- 20% of the city’s total -- and almost all were in skid row.

Counselors offer some practical advice for avoiding temptation: Catch the bus “and leap over the madness” or walk a roundabout way to the rehab facility, avoiding troublesome streets.

Key credits his recovery to religious faith and to finally heeding the lessons of Alcoholics Anonymous’ “Big Book,” which, through its 12-step program, deals with underlying emotional and mental conditions and counsels belief in a higher power to help overcome addiction.

Key entered a treatment program at the Weingart Center, a skid row social services facility, where he also received support from a childhood friend, a recovering addict on the staff. Key stayed in a downtown sober-living facility and now lives at the Ballington Plaza, a rent-subsidized building on Wall Street where he collects stylish suits bought on frequent visits to the Goodwill store.

But even now the lure flickers. Recently, Key said, he has found himself walking to an all-night food stand, ostensibly to get a bite to eat but carrying wads of bills.

“I talked to people who are further along in their recovery and asked them, ‘Why am I taking all that money?’ They said that I had been setting myself up and that when the opportunity came, I would convince myself that, just this one time, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

Rawson offers a clinical explanation: “It’s not a matter of weakness, but something we call Pavlovian learning. People living in an environment saturated with drugs have a constant obsession, a conditioned response that is extremely powerful. Addiction in skid row is always stimulated and alive.”

Rawson is completing work on a five-year project to evaluate the success of nearly 500 residential and outpatient rehab programs receiving public funds in Los Angeles County.

“We need some sort of Marshall Plan to go in and provide housing, medical addiction expertise, family therapy, intervention programs, all of the treatments that work quite well now,” he said. “Service providers in skid row barely get to doing addiction treatment and are more focused on making sure people don’t die in the street that night.”

On a recent evening, Key and a friend dropped by Gladys Park, where people were huddled under heat lamps, waiting for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to begin. One woman had a blanket wrapped around her head and appeared to be floating on a pharmaceutical cloud. Some were there only for the warming coffee.

But, Key said, you never know when a word, a challenge or a supportive pat on the back might click and lead to sobriety. Even then, many struggle with low incomes, bad credit, criminal records, a history of evictions and inadequate affordable stock, making it hard to escape.

So Key said he intends to stay, to serve as a model of success for those still struggling to achieve that goal.

He attends Atherton Baptist Church in Hawthorne and meets with the Other Bar, made up of other recovering attorneys. His hope is that one day, with enough penance paid, he will regain his license.

“I want to be a part of this place’s revitalization,” Key said. “I don’t see people here as the dregs of society. People may have taken a left turn, but there are so many with talent and the potential to do better.”