MISSION VIEJO : Prison AA Helped Open a New Door

It was a cold, bleak day in the exercise yard at Tehachapi State Prison, and the promise of hot coffee and free cigarettes lured Paul Lanphere indoors to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Behind penitentiary walls, Lanphere, 34, called a halt to a pattern of crime and alcohol abuse that had stretched back 20 years. But it wasn’t enough just to quit.

“I felt very strongly that I had to give something back,” he said recently, standing outside a classroom at Saddleback College, where he is studying to become a drug-abuse counselor. “I felt that I had to make others realize that drugs and alcohol is the wrong way to live your life.”

Recovering addicts with a passionate desire to give others another chance at life play a major role at Saddleback College’s drug counselor training program, one of the largest of its kind in the Western United States.

Since 1976, school officials estimate that more than 5,000 people have passed a rigorous training course that requires three semesters of class time and an additional 250 hours of volunteer field work. An added 4,000 hours of internship is required before a student becomes a fully certificated drug counselor.

The Saddleback study course has served as the model for at least 40 other schools throughout California, said Dick Wilson, who chairs the human services department and has led the program since its inception.

Although people from several walks of life enroll in the course, many former substance abusers take an active role in the program.

“I know from experience that somebody doing drugs is going to listen to someone who’s been there already,” said Lanphere, who is in his first semester at Saddleback. “I’ve been through it all--the denial, the anger--and I can help someone admit they have a problem. That’s the most important thing.”

Since substance abuse spins off a web of other problems, from gangs to child abuse, students take classes that deal with a host of societal ills. Other courses teach specific counseling methods such as positive affirmation--the process of using encouragement to teach addicts their own self-worth.

But possibly the most important sessions help the prospective counselors continue their own healing. In leadership classes, students sit face-to-face and try to help strip away their remaining layers of denial and continue a healing process that professionals say never ends.

“It’s not unlike a liberal arts degree, which is designed to teach someone how to live and make choices,” Wilson said. “We’re unique, though. We teach specific skills that are badly needed in our society.”

Gwen, 37, a recovering alcoholic who prefers her last name not be used, said she entered the program to help others, though in the process, she is also learning to help herself.

“This program has helped me look at my own issues,” she said. “It’s given me the ability to have contact with my higher power. As an alcoholic, I always felt I wasn’t good enough for God.”

“But this program helps me get my ego and pride out of the way,” she said. “And now I can let God use me as his tool to help other alcoholics.”