COMING CLEAN : The recovering...

LYNN WILLIAMS, her thin, young body racked with pain, was still in the throes of heroin withdrawal when she stumbled through the doorway of the Pasadena drug recovery house last fall. The bizarre scene that confronted her might have been another one of her drug-induced hallucinations: In the shady courtyard of the sprawling stucco complex, a work crew raked leaves where there were none. A man walked by wearing a muzzle. A woman carried a Narcotics Anonymous book in handcuffed hands.

Those extraordinary disciplinary measures are everyday occurrences at the residential drug recovery program, where addicts are asked to abandon not only drugs but also their will. Let me out of here, Williams thought, panicking. But she had nowhere to go.

At 23, Williams had reached the end of the road. What had started out as a pleasant escape from the pain of a troubled childhood in the San Fernando Valley had turned into a nightmare from which she could not awaken. She hated living in abandoned buildings, stealing and breaking into people’s homes, sleeping with men she didn’t know. All for a fix. She wanted to die.

Once settled in her new environment, Williams knew she had to stop running, acknowledging that this time she would “have to change completely.” Despite her heavy eye makeup and her chain-smoking, she looked as vulnerable as a small child, with long, silky blond hair. “I don’t know how to live,” she said, her voice cracking.

Williams wanted to learn, but she knew it wouldn’t be easy. Every day, she saw addicts drop out of the recovery program only to return to the streets. She knew what awaited her there, and it terrified her. Nearly every week brought word of dropouts who had landed in jail, died of an overdose or been shot in drug deals.

She had used drugs since she was 11, starting with alcohol and marijuana--her parents’ drugs of choice. “I grew up thinking it was OK,” she recalled. When her parents divorced, her mother gave up her career as a professional jazz dancer to raise her three children. And she never let them forget it.

The counselors assured Williams there was another way. It would entail hard work and require discipline, honesty and self-esteem, qualities she didn’t know she had. It would take months of self-analysis and the courage to examine emotions buried long ago. Yes, they could help her change her life. There was only one condition: Williams would have to turn herself over to them. It would require a leap of faith in a “higher power”--be it God, a higher consciousness or whatever name she chose to give it.

She wasn’t sure she could meet this challenge. Without drugs’ anesthesia, the pain and remorse were overwhelming. “When emotions sneak up on you,” Williams said, shaking her head, “you feel like you’re going to die.”

THE IMPACT ALCOHOL and Drug Recovery Program operates out of a motel-like building, one of several unassuming structures that house drug programs and convalescent hospitals at the northern end of Fair Oaks Avenue. On clear days, the San Gabriel Mountains seem deceptively close enough to touch. Just a few blocks south, drug dealers beckon on the streets that surround the King’s Village public housing project.

Impact is one of about two dozen private, nonprofit drug recovery houses in Los Angeles County. Established in 1971, it is among the oldest of these long-term residential programs and is funded largely through government grants. Nearly 25% of the facility’s 130 slots are set aside for state and federal parolees referred to the program through the courts. The county pays for another third of the slots to accommodate indigent addicts. A quarter of the slots are paid for by private health insurance or by residents’ families. The average four- to six-month stay, including a few months of outpatient care, runs about $15,000 per resident. The program’s clinical staff of about 60 includes administrators, medical personnel and 15 caseworkers--the vast majority of whom have all kicked drug habits of their own.

Battle-scarred addicts arrive by the thousands every day at facilities like Impact across the country. Most don’t last past the first few weeks of these intensive, months-long treatment programs, thought by experts to offer the best chance at recovery. Some drop out; others are expelled, usually because they are deemed not serious enough about getting better. An encouraging note, counselors say, is that more than a third of those who leave prematurely return months, sometimes years, later to give recovery another try.

“Once you get into the mainstream of the drug recovery subculture, you cannot deny--ever again--that there isn’t another way to go. That seed gets planted,” said James Stillwell, Impact’s director. Silver-haired, smooth-talking and energetic, the administrator has been clean for 17 years and still attends meetings of Narcotics Anonymous.

The odds that Williams would stay and ultimately quit drugs were overwhelmingly against her. Only about one out of five of those who land at Impact makes it through the program, one of the toughest and most respected in Southern California. Even for those who complete the grueling residential program, there are no guarantees. Most addicts have long histories of failed attempts at getting--and staying--clean.

Once at Impact, addicts who have spent most of their lives trying to forget must delve into the darkest corners of their souls and expose their secrets--incest, betrayal, prostitution, even murder--to the world. Ultimately, they must strip away the self-loathing and guilt and learn to embrace themselves, to find the courage to change. They must give up the lying, cheating, manipulation and self-deception that typically ensnare addicts’ lives. They must trust drug counselors to show them the way. Based on the “12 Step” philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoot, Narcotics Anonymous, the program aims to instill addicts with a new purpose and provide them a new foundation for rebuilding their lives.

When Williams showed up, there was already a broad spectrum of addicts at the recovery house: a Beverly Hills “little rich girl” who ended up turning $50 tricks in Hollywood for her pimp; a middle-aged $75,000-a-year mechanic who, after losing it all--his family, his job, his yacht and his dreams--climbed atop the Gerald Desmond Bridge in Long Beach and stared at the churning ocean water below; a mild-mannered Mexican-American house painter who, having betrayed family and friends, hid behind the inviolable mask of a street-wise Chicano.

There was also a Korean immigrant who had convinced himself that he didn’t have a drug problem, just a run of bad luck--even after he was arrested for selling crack cocaine to an undercover agent at the post office where he worked. Soon after arriving, Williams befriended a striking brunette whose life read like something out of a bad B movie: witchcraft practitioner, teen-age runaway, topless dancer, biker moll and cat burglar with a 20-year prison sentence hanging over her head.

Newcomers were expected to start by focusing on their reasons for being there. For the first 45 days, they were cut off from most contact with the outside world and kept busy with menial chores. At this stage, some were still dealing with denial about the severity of their drug problem. As they peeled away layers of self-deceit, they were allowed to visit home and go out on weekends. Dramatic turnarounds were common at this stage, as residents embraced the program’s philosophy and glimpsed a life without drugs. Some, however, continued to stumble, unable to surrender their will.

During the second half of their stay, residents began working at outside jobs. The real tests began as they continued outpatient treatment at the conclusion of the live-in portion of the program: Some folded under the emotional pressures of disintegrating marriages or the day-to-day grind of rebuilding their lives.

Through all this, the members of Williams’ group would experience miraculous turnarounds--only to be sidetracked at the next turn by old character flaws. Inevitably, some would fall back on drugs. But even then, most would continue the ever-tenuous struggle to liberate themselves. This is a chronicle of their six months at Impact.

THE FIRST WEEKS at Impact can be the toughest. Everything--from the strict discipline to the endless rounds of therapy sessions--is geared to helping addicts recognize that they have a problem not only with drugs but also, more fundamentally, with living. The transition from the streets to such a narrowly focused world can be especially jarring.

Even after the violent spasms of withdrawal that tormented Williams’ body began to subside, the craziness of Impact did not. Williams saw other residents forced to wear wool mittens as punishment for stealing even a comb or a vial of lipstick. Those who “held their mud”--refused to snitch on a fellow addict who had broken a house rule--had to carry large jars of mud for the day. Anyone balking at the regimen had to wear a sign around the neck; “Am I being held hostage?” one read.

“Some of our tactics may seem pretty harsh,” Stillwell said. “But when you’re up against a life-and-death struggle, you don’t play games. We call a spade a spade from day one. We dump reality on them. We don’t allow them to wriggle out with a bunch of talk. We know all about that. We’ve been there ourselves.”

For weeks, Williams battled the urge to flee. She longed for drugs’ oblivion. Maybe this time heroin would be a kinder master. But slowly the program began making sense. “All your old rules, right or wrong, go out the window,” she said. The counselors “really break down your ego, your addict values, your false pride.”

Obediently, Williams got up and went to bed when she was told to. She scrubbed toilets, dusted where there was no dust, washed spotless windows and swept imaginary leaves in the courtyard just as she had seen others do. Discipline had always been missing in her life. Now, she learned to appreciate it.

She also attended daily counseling sessions and group meetings during which addicts told life stories not unlike her own. It demanded brutal honesty. Would she, cold sober, have the courage to withstand the pain of her past?

Standing before a women’s counseling group, Williams swept her long, straight hair aside and, in her small voice, talked about the large drawing she held up for them. The assignment, like many at Impact, was aimed at helping the women dredge up suppressed--and often painful--bits of their past.

Williams’ drawing depicted two small children cowering from a masked intruder and their mother’s angry face and accusing finger. Williams explained that when she was 9 years old, a family friend had sneaked into her bedroom almost every night for a year and raped her in front of her younger brother. “My parents didn’t believe me,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. As she spoke, she unconsciously folded her drawing over and over until it was a tiny square of paper. At the group therapist’s prompting, Williams lit it with a match. Transfixed by the small flame, she smiled for the first time. It was as if the terrible memory itself had gone up in smoke, freeing her from its grip.

Counselors say that the recovery process is especially difficult for women. Perhaps, they say, it is because women have a harder time coming to terms with histories that often include sexual abuse as well as with the greater stigma society attaches to drug abuse among women. And women tend to be more dependent than men and to place others’ welfare above their own. Those who are mothers also often carry the guilt of neglecting or abusing their children. Many harbor an unwavering desire--no matter how unrealistic--to be with their families.

Twenty-six-year-old Suzan Kidd, another member of the group, thought longingly and often about her three young children. Kidd had borne children because she wanted someone to love her unconditionally, but the terrible anger she carried inside spoiled that dream, too. When she was younger, she erupted in fits of violence against her family, once breaking her mother’s ribs. Later, she turned her rage on her own children.

As a child, Kidd was sexually abused by her stepfather and later rescued by her grandparents, who brought her back to Southern California to live with them. Her grandmother’s wish, Kidd said, “was that I grow up to be an independent lady, get a good education, get married and have children--the same things I want for my children.”

But at 13, Kidd began running away from her grandparents’ home and experimenting with drugs. Alcohol and pot gave way to cocaine, speed, PCP and heroin. Drugs helped her forget the sexual abuse. But they also led her into a seedy world of crime and violence, cheap bars and biker gangs, where excitement became as addictive as drugs. Kidd, a tall, natural beauty with thick brown hair that cascades past her shoulders, radiates a certain innocence. But her self-image couldn’t have been more different. When she walked on the street, she said, she saw a different reflection in other people’s eyes: prostitute, junkie, ex-con. Kidd, who specialized in breaking into post offices to steal checks and credit cards, served 10 months of a 16-month prison term for forgery related to the burglaries and still faces a 20-year term that was knocked down to probation when she signed up for Impact.

More than anything else, Kidd told everyone, she wanted to be a good mother. Under the program rules, she visited her children at her grandmother’s home only occasionally.

Kidd’s desire to be with them would be a stumbling block in her treatment. Outside issues, such as children and relationships, are a common distraction that counselors advise recovering addicts to lay aside. First they must put their own lives in order.

LIKE KIDD, Karen Allen of Beverly Hills arrived on Impact’s doorstep via the courts. The judge had reduced her four-year prison term for drug violations to probation. Most of Impact’s residents arrive the same way: pressured by the judicial system, relatives or a spouse. What is crucial to their success, however, is that they make recovery a personal commitment--that they do it for themselves and no one else.

For Allen, a 27-year-old veteran of many drug treatment programs, this was a particularly difficult thing to do. She had always lived for the approval of others, particularly that of men. At Impact, she and other residents were frequently asked to write essays about forgiveness and independence, topics that would help them recognize and conquer their low self-esteem.

One of Allen’s assignments was to write a letter to her former pimp--the man she had once thought she was in love with. Whether she ever mailed the letter did not matter.

“Dear Tony,” it began. “What we had was real sick. . . .” The letter, written in large, childlike block letters, recalled that Allen had wanted to bear this man’s child. It also recalled how he beat her when she returned home empty-handed after working the streets and how his infidelity drove her into a suicidal depression.

Carefully folding the piece of paper, Allen said that despite the searing anger she had begun to feel toward him, she still prayed that “he’s not dead somewhere” and that he finds help with his addiction. “Deep down, he was a good person,” she said. “He was just screwed up because of his (drug) disease, like me.”

Allen began learning to like herself. It happened only after many failed attempts at coming clean. Instead of heading for college, as her parents had planned, the Beverly Hills High School graduate floated in and out of some of the country’s more exclusive drug recovery centers, where she hobnobbed with rock stars and professional football players. She was tossed out of one program for fraternizing with the men, which is strictly forbidden at most facilities. In addition, Allen went through four methadone maintenance centers and several detoxification treatments at hospitals.

Before Impact, Allen saw no real reason to quit. “I went to get my parents off my back,” she said. “It was like a big joke to me.” She’d been drinking and using pot since she was 12. By 15, she was snorting cocaine. A few years later, she shot up heroin for the first time with her older brother, who ended up in a drug recovery program as well but eventually managed to follow in their physician father’s footsteps.

Drugs distanced Allen from the unhappy, overweight child she had been while growing up amid the “beautiful people.” Then the bouts of bulimia and the car accidents linked to her drug abuse began. And, to satisfy her habit, Allen started stealing from her parents and their friends.

Once, for about a year and a half, she stayed clean in Minnesota. Fooling herself that this time she would be able to control drugs, she returned to Los Angeles two years ago and fell off the wagon. Before long, the child born to privilege was out working the streets for her pimp.

Six months later, Allen finally called home for help. When her mother came to pick her up, she didn’t recognize her daughter, a gaunt, ashen woman with a bruised body, chipped teeth and black eyes. Doctors said Allen had so neglected her health and abused drugs that she might not live.

Once she settled in at Impact, it didn’t take Allen long to shed her rich-girl front--designer clothes, expensive shampoos, snobbish airs--and begin opening up. The difference between this time and all her previous attempts was that Allen had just fallen harder and lower than ever before. And, she figured, this really might be her last chance.

JOHN MITCHELL can still picture the murky water as it looked from his perch on the Gerald Desmond Bridge in Long Beach. At the tail end of his last four-day run with crack, the master mechanic had nothing left but the 20 cents in his pocket. Suicide seemed the best way out. As his trembling hands locked onto a chain-link fence, the painful memories of his failed marriages and broken dreams came rushing back. But he could not jump.

Shortly thereafter, he sought help at Impact. There, the self-reliant 48-year-old cried openly for the first time as he faced his guilt, especially over the slaying of one of his daughters in a bad drug deal a year and a half earlier. Though he was not directly involved, he couldn’t forget that she had come to him for help after several years on the street. He shared his drugs with her instead. Besides the guilt, he acknowledged the feelings of sexual inadequacy that led to an unending cycle of drug use with prostitutes and the breakup of his three marriages.

But more than midway through the program, Mitchell hit a wall. It happens all the time. Addicts arrive eager to learn. They do all that is asked of them, then suddenly plateau, afraid to take the next step. For many, the most frightening step of all is abandoning the addict’s self-destructive tendencies, the only way of life they’ve known. But counselors insist that it is essential that they start anew. To accomplish it, the program often resorts to a “super session”--an ambush by counselors who confront recalcitrant residents.

Mitchell had withdrawn from group sessions and resisted advice from his counselors. He also began making veiled threats about leaving the program. But his heart sank when he walked into the counseling office. There were half a dozen counselors and administrators, including Stillwell. Mitchell was sure he was about to be expelled.

The counselors played good-cop-bad-cop, cajoling, accusing, pressing Mitchell’s back to the wall. They said he wasn’t cooperating with the program. “You’ve got to trust us; you’ve got to let us get close,” one counselor said. Another told Mitchell that he couldn’t pick and choose the parts of the program he wanted to follow. His commitment had to be unconditional.

Mitchell may have been an eager student of the Narcotics Anonymous principles, the counselors said, but he had failed to start living them. He hadn’t abandoned his addict ways or placed his faith in a higher power. “Your resistance is why you’re an addict,” they said. “Your lack of surrender puts you in jeopardy.”

Confused and defensive, Mitchell claimed ignorance: “You’re probably right, but I don’t understand it. I feel I haven’t tried to resist in any way.” If he had decided to leave the program, as they accused him of threatening to do, he would be gone, he said, knowing they could see through his lies. “I’m being as cooperative as I can.”

It wasn’t good enough, they shot back. “You’re using what you’ve used all your life--your head and your mouth. Your brain doesn’t recover you; your heart does!” Stillwell then posed a challenge: “Right now is the moment you’re going to turn your will and life over to us, even if you don’t understand what we are doing.”

Mitchell didn’t hesitate. “I’ll do it,” he said. But, inside, he was scared. He had never trusted anyone in his whole life. He was a master at manipulating others and was used to getting his own way. Yes, he wanted to learn a different way of living, but if he left things up to a higher power, things might not turn out the way he wanted.

Not that he had done such a great job on his own. While he distinguished himself as a high school swimmer, making the U.S. water polo team and competing in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, he had to turn down college scholarships when his girlfriend became pregnant. Mitchell, who had already begun drinking heavily, apprenticed as a diesel-truck mechanic and began raising a family.

Though his weekend binges came to include drugs as well, he held good jobs and took pride in being a good provider. While his work allowed him the luxury of buying drugs with his earnings without resorting to crime, Mitchell said, he wasn’t above stealing from co-workers and employers. Along the way, his first two marriages soured.

In recent years, as his abuse of rock cocaine and heroin made it progressively harder for him to keep a job, his life unraveled before him. His third marriage disintegrated, and then there was his daughter’s death. Mitchell also lost the 36-foot yacht moored at Huntington Harbor that had been his home and the embodiment of a dream to one day sail around the world. To pay for his last binge before arriving at Impact, he sold his truck and his work tools.

“Drugs kicked my ass,” said a beaten-down Mitchell. “They won hands down.” Impact, Mitchell believed, was his last hope. And he wasn’t going to let his habitual self-deception and stubborn self-reliance stand in the way.

The day after the super session, Mitchell began to express his new resolve in an essay about “How John controls his life and why.”

“I’m too much of a coward to let go,” he admitted. “Just because I’ve lost everything doesn’t mean I’m willing to turn loose of the control. It’s real, real hard for me. I don’t know how I will do it. I just will.”

THE PRESSURE from counselors at Impact never lets up. Residents find that every move is watched, every transgression is noted, any sign of backsliding is checked. They have nowhere to hide.

It was under such scrutiny that Frank Castillo found himself making the all-important leap of faith. His surrender came like a sudden downpour in the middle of a drought. It was the kind of miracle that drug counselors say makes their job worthwhile.

At first, Castillo dallied. Since this was his third go-around at Impact, counselors had expected faster results. After all, the 32-year-old house painter was telling everybody that he wanted desperately to stay clean. But he did little more than parrot the “living-life-on-life’s-terms” dogma the program preaches.

Though Castillo believed he was satisfying the program’s basic requirements, he was missing the point. His case was discussed at the weekly daylong staff meeting during which counselors assess each resident’s performance. (Residents refer to the meetings as “Black Tuesdays.”) The consensus on Castillo was that he was not delivering.

So Castillo’s counselor issued the ultimatum: He either straightened up his act, or he shipped out. Impact had a three-month waiting list and no time to waste on someone unwilling to give 100%.

“What the hell do these people want!” an angry Castillo wanted to know after being confronted. He was doing his best. Did they really expect him to stand before a roomful of near strangers and share his innermost feelings? I’ve never done that in my life, not even with my own family! Castillo thought. It was too much to ask of a man, especially one who had spent much of his life hiding behind a veneer of machismo.

He exploded again the next morning at a house meeting. “Give me one lion to tame at a time, not 10!” he shouted. Before he knew it, Castillo was not only venting his frustration but also spilling his guts. Something--maybe the anger--clicked, and the controlled, you-can’t-get-to-me attitude melted away. Castillo realized his counselors were right. He had been hiding, even from himself. Castillo knew then that he would go to any length to stay clean, even if it meant baring his soul in front of 80 people. “I’ll do it,” Castillo said firmly.

When he was a young boy, Castillo’s parents moved to the predominantly Anglo middle-class community of Sierra Madre to get away from East Los Angeles’ poverty and gangs. But Castillo felt he didn’t belong there--nor among the cholo gang-bangers at the predominantly Latino high school in Pasadena to which he was bussed. Still, to Castillo, the gangbangers were role models of “the Mexican I thought I should be.” His identity problems seemed to ease in the drug haze that enveloped him at 15. He spent weekends partying and honed the tough-guy exterior he used against a world full of rejection.

Though an early marriage ended in divorce, and he hardly knew his children, Castillo was convinced that he did not have a drug problem. PCP, pot, acid and speed were mild seducers compared with crack, which Castillo encountered about four years ago. The coke that he injected showered him with ecstasy beyond sexual orgasm.

To pay for his $500-a-day habit, Castillo, who by then had lost his house-painting business, began stealing from employers, then neighbors and finally his own brothers, whose professional success he greatly admired. His second wife, who had resorted to welfare to feed their two small children, had had enough. Finally, when she threatened to leave him, Castillo sought help one more time.

Now Castillo could admit to himself that he had been devastated by his first divorce; that his arrogance stemmed from claiming his brothers’ accomplishments as his own; that his disciplinarian father cared for him after all. The relief accompanying these and so many other released emotions was amazing. He seemed suddenly exuberant, self-confident, at peace with himself. And now he willingly shared his experience with newer residents.

“I feel great about myself. Anything is possible,” Castillo said. “It’s a feeling I want to hang on to.”

MOVING DAY for Suzan Kidd arrived full of expectation on a clear January morning. It seemed light-years away from those mornings when she awakened dreading the new day, when her daylong mission would be finding drugs. Over the previous six months, she had rewritten her life’s script. Sobriety seemed an exciting, if frightening, challenge.

Having completed the most rigorous part of the program, she and some of the others began leaving Impact to start the slow process of rebuilding their lives on the outside. Most rented homes nearby while they continued outpatient treatment. By now, their odds for recovery had improved considerably. About two-thirds of those who make it past the first three months of the program survive to the end.

Kidd had recently gone for a job interview at a religious bookstore. When the store manager asked about her previous experience, she burst into tears. She had no high school diploma, no work experience, no references. When he asked why, she told him the truth. Still, she got the job.

On that January day, Kidd opened her first checking account with savings from the new job. She spent a few hours window-shopping at a nearby mall, feeling like an “upstanding person.” When Karen Allen drove her to do some last-minute errands, they passed a police car and instinctively felt a twinge in their stomachs. Then, realizing they no longer had anything to fear, they laughed.

Kidd was a whirl of activity, walking in circles as she packed her clothes. She sat on the edge of her bunk to gather her thoughts in the cramped quarters she shared with three others. “It’s almost like I don’t want to leave. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of recovery,” she said. “Now I’m really facing life by myself. It’s really scary.”

Actually, Kidd wouldn’t be going far--just moving into the home of another recovering addict. She still ached to be with her children, but counselors had warned her that she would be overwhelmed if she tried to resume caring for them right now. Although her counselors had their doubts about her, they knew there was little more they could do. She would attend weekly group sessions at a nearby clinic as well as Narcotics Anonymous meetings most nights. As part of the N.A. network, she had found a “sponsor” among more experienced recovering addicts. She learned that N.A. must become her guidepost for the rest of her life.

As Kidd walked out of Impact for what everybody hoped would be the last time, well-wishers showered her with hugs and encouragement. “You’re going to do just fine. I know you are,” said a friend, fighting to hold back tears.

THE EXCITEMENT of rejoining the outside world doesn’t always last long. The problems graduates leave behind--and which they used drugs to avoid--await them there. But now they must deal with them sober.

Jai Sim, the 30-year-old immigrant who faced his drug problem in the program, had been eager to return to his family’s failing Long Beach grocery store to try to it. Within a few weeks after leaving Impact, however, he was feeling miserable. Overwhelmed by the demands of the store and a stressful separation, Sim was disgusted that he seemed no better able to cope with life than before. “I thought I was supposed to be better,” said the bespectacled and shy man.

At the slightest provocation, however, his thoughts returned to “using.” For instance, after an argument with his mother over his marital problems, he had stomped out of the store and thought seriously about connecting with his favorite crack dealers. Nevertheless, Sim acknowledged that Impact’s lessons had served him well. That afternoon, instead of giving in to the temptation, he calmed himself down with a cigarette and “shared” his frustrations later that evening with fellow recovering addicts at an N.A. meeting.

This was a monumental change for Sim, who had always kept a tight lid on his personal problems. When he arrived at Impact, he didn’t feel he belonged. His “little felony” for selling crack at the post office, he convinced himself, was nothing compared to the stories that he heard from others. They were hard-core heroin junkies and criminals. He was nothing of the kind.

Indeed, Sim’s whole life in the United States has been a struggle to reconcile the stoicism of his Asian upbringing with the realities of his new homeland. At 19, soon after his family immigrated here, he enlisted in the Army. He wore the same uniform as everyone else but felt like an outsider. So, giving in to peer pressure, he started smoking hashish with the guys. The loneliness left him. To feed his habit, he started selling a little on the side. He was caught, court-martialed and ended his hitch with several months in a stockade.

When he returned home, Sim couldn’t find a job and began hanging out at Koreatown bars. But even among his own he felt alone. He got married, the marriage soured and his drug use escalated. By then, he was smoking crack every day, even during lunch breaks at the job he finally found at the post office.

At Impact, Sim wept in front of others as he told how he had married and divorced a black woman but kept their son a secret from his grandfather. His parents had never accepted his wife, and his grandfather died without knowing about the child. Crying in public, he said, is something Koreans just don’t do. But it had broken his emotional logjam. He accepted that he is a fragile as every other addict.

As an outpatient, Sim continued to rely on the support of fellow addicts at nightly N.A. meetings and at weekly group therapy sessions. Sim told his support group that he still gets pressure from his estranged wife, his probation officer, his parents, his business. But he was thinking about organizing a Narcotics Anonymous chapter in Koreatown. Too often, Sim said, Asian recovering addicts receive little support from families who refuse to acknowledge such problems. To this day, Sim has not explained to his parents any details of his addiction or treatment.

The others who listened in the smoke-filled meeting room agreed that the novelty of escaping day-to-day regimentation at Impact quickly wore off. Suzan Kidd also felt the world closing in around her. She had not yet found a car to buy, the bus ride to work was driving her nuts and she felt overwhelmed by her new job. She was irritable and impatient. “I still don’t know if I like being responsible for myself. I find it real hard,” she droned in a monotone. “How am I ever going to be able to raise three kids when I can’t even get a room of my own or a car?”

“We’re all facing life on life’s terms,” the group counselor said. “It’s not always going to be easy. But you have to keep remembering it is better than it was. Be happy with what you have today. Remember this is a lifelong process.”

ON GOOD Friday, Frank Castillo lost the battle. Loneliness hit him like a ton of bricks. He desperately missed his wife. He had gone back to work as a house painter and, as an outpatient, was renting a place with a few Impact graduates. But the program’s demands were beginning to chafe like a leash around his neck. And his wife couldn’t decide whether she wanted him back or not.

The old hopelessness began closing in on him and sent Castillo tailspinning into despair. Almost instinctively, he found himself driving along Fair Oaks, not far from Impact but much closer to the spot where the drug dealers congregate. Someone offered him some crack and he took a hit. Castillo spent the rest of the night bartering what little he had--a stereo, TV, radio and the tools his wife had bought him as a gift--in exchange for another rock, as the solid and most addictive form of cocaine is also known. He and an acquaintance spent the whole night and much of the next day in his pickup on their bender.

Castillo’s relapse hit his old friends from Impact hard, but it didn’t really surprise them. They are all too familiar with the razor-thin line that separates using from staying clean. What surprised them was how quickly Castillo recovered. As soon as he came down from his lost weekend, Castillo drove straight to Impact. While he knew he was automatically expelled from the program, he also knew he could find someone there to talk to.

Castillo resumed attending N.A. meetings and vowed that he would never again allow his life to collapse around him. “I will not live that kind of hell anymore,” he said, angrily stamping out another in a long chain of cigarettes as he talked openly about suicide. “I’ll just get a real boost (overdose) and finish it.”

At times, he sounded like a spoiled child. He had put up with the loneliness of his wife’s absence for six months, he said, and that was long enough. “I don’t know how to deal without my honey, and I really don’t want to,” he said. “I want what I want when I want it!”

Then, in a more reflective mood, tapping at his head, Castillo said, “This thing . . . is out to get me. That’s the disease of addiction. It won’t accept pain. It only wants to feel good.”

Still, Castillo’s counselors were not ready to give up, saying his resolve seemed stronger than ever. They advised Castillo to steel himself for the next test which, they assured him, would come--over and over again. The counselor told Castillo that his priorities had become confused: His wife had become more important to him than his recovery.

Moreover, like Jai Sim and Suzan Kidd, Castillo had returned home to live with his parents, a move their former counselors did not consider positive. Castillo “really needs to break away, establish himself, grow up,” his former counselor said. But it’s not unusual, he added, for graduates to run back home upon re-entering a hostile world where the difficult task of rebuilding their lives awaits them. Castillo has managed to stay off drugs since his lost weekend. Nevertheless, his counselor said he cannot be sure whether Castillo will make it. “He’s still very much a little boy,” the counselor said.

A FEW DAYS after Castillo’s drug relapse, Impact counselors heard that Sim also might be in trouble. Under terms of his probation, he was required to undergo periodic drug tests. The latest one came back “dirty.” He hadn’t used, he insisted to the unsympathetic lab technician who had heard such denials all too often. Later that evening, Sim went with his troubles to the small group gathered for the weekly N.A. meeting in Koreatown. Sim had gotten the group off the ground about a month earlier. From the dozen recovering addicts there, Sim received words of encouragement and hugs. They believed him.

Fortunately for Sim, further analysis eventually determined that the traces of morphine that turned up in his urine sample were from a new medication prescribed for a stomach ailment. He breathed a sigh of relief. Although it seemed to Sim that life continued to throw him curve balls, he kept going to the weekly Koreatown N.A. meetings. “It gives me hope,” he said. For once in his life, he did not feel alone. But counselors at Impact worried that he was focusing too much attention on the group he had started while neglecting to attend any others. Missing nightly sessions, considered critical for outpatients, was not a good sign.

In April, Suzan Kidd moved back to her grandmother’s home to be with her children. Although she had completed the program, Impact counselors were concerned. Not only did they consider it an evasion of personal responsibility, but they also knew she wasn’t ready to care for her children. On the phone, she sounded dispirited and distant, her counselors said. They could feel her slipping away.

She had lost touch with her N.A. sponsor and had begun weaving the addict’s familiar web of deception, her counselors said. She told everybody her probation officer had ordered her to move when, in fact, it had been her choice. One counselor was not optimistic: “Sometimes people relapse before they get loaded. She may not be loaded now, but she’s heading in that direction.” By early May, Kidd’s phone had been disconnected.

To everyone’s surprise, John Mitchell, who dropped out of the program just a few days before he was scheduled to begin outpatient treatment, stayed clean for a while. In his mind, he had received what he wanted from the program and was ready to continue on his own. He had moved in with his surviving daughter and, against the advice of Impact counselors, had gone to work as a truck driver. Although there was no lack of opportunity to use drugs at the truck stops he frequented, he said, he had the courage to resist.

Mitchell also said he remained involved in Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. But counselors were skeptical, citing Mitchell’s tendency toward self-deception. And last month, he disappeared. His daughter said he left for work one day and never came back.

Lynn Williams was said to be living in Venice and was seen regularly at N.A. meetings. Those who saw her said she sounded excited about her new life. She was working as a house painter and planning on returning to school to study art, a lifelong dream.

But she had decided to quit sharing her innermost life with a reporter. “I’m tired of being a junkie and of people relating to me as a dope fiend,” she said. “I want to put that (Lynn) to rest. I’ll always have ex-junkies around me because I need their support. But I want to have a normal life and some day be around normal people who don’t necessarily know all about my past.” Counselors understood her attitude but considered it another form of denial, one of their biggest enemies.

Karen Allen graduated from the program and stayed on as a full-time counselor-trainee. But it wasn’t long before she stumbled. Not surprisingly, it was over sex, not drugs. It involved nothing more than a kiss. She and another male counselor crossed Impact’s strict line between friendship and fraternization. As the more senior staffer, the man was immediately fired. Karen was allowed to stay but was ordered to resume therapy and delve further into her need for male attention. “I’ve depended on men my whole life to make me feel good,” she said, sounding contrite. “I hope I can change.”

Like the others, Allen knows she has only begun on the long road to recovery. Impact provided her a road map and some tools. The rest is up to her. “I don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” she said. “All I can say is that I can stay clean for today and make it through another day.”