COLUMN ONE : Sobriety Capital of America : Drug and alcohol clinics flourish in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. From lawmakers to artists, ex-addicts find a haven in a community that has its own dry bars, softball leagues and high school.

To the uninitiated, the weathered saloon doors leading into the Dry Gulch cantina might as well be a doorway to biker hell. But they open into a world where private struggles for redemption exert an uncommon sway.

Past a leviathan row of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, bikers with matted beards and arms the width of cordwood hunker over a bar piled high with street hog badges, decals and shirts. As cigarette smoke curls in the dimly lit room and Z. Z. Top’s brain-fried anthem, “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers,” pounds from a jukebox, owner Greg Miller, a member of the Dry Riders cycle club, takes his swigs from a bottle of lime mineral water.

“It’s all I drink,” he said.

It is all anyone drinks at the Dry Gulch, a “dry bar” that serves only sodas and juices to a grizzled clientele of recovering addicts and alcoholic bikers. “Just because we sit on bar stools, man,” said Miller, an ex-drinker who sports a black scorpion tattoo on one arm and a pale spider on the other, “doesn’t mean we’re drunks.”

Appearances deceive at the Dry Gulch as they deceive throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul, where the nation’s most extensive system of detoxification centers, substance abuse clinics, halfway houses and recovery clubs has spawned an influential culture of sobriety. At least 60 recovery care facilities are based in the Twin Cities, more clinics per population--640,000--than in any other American city.

The battle to stay clean is no less stigmatizing here than elsewhere in the nation.

But in a region where access to treatment is a virtual right and success stories abound, former addicts emerging from recovery find themselves embraced by a self-sustaining society that extends far beyond the usual 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The 13th step, a stale local joke goes, is moving to Minnesota.

“You can’t go very far in this town without running into someone who’s either been in recovery, is related to someone in recovery or works in the recovery industry,” said Dr. Stephen Firestone, 42, a general practitioner who once led the harrowing life of a strung-out Greenwich Village heroin user.

There is little anonymity in a recovery community that patronizes dry bars and coffeehouses, supports its own high school, newspaper and softball leagues, socializes at all-sober weddings and at New Year’s bashes attended by more than 7,000 clear-eyed celebrants. There are rock bands for cleaned-up head-bangers, a theater troupe for abstinent aesthetes and, for the temperate country club set, dry golf tournaments.

“It’s practically chic to be in recovery here,” said Barbara Carlson, a popular radio talk show host and an ex-wife of Gov. Arne Carlson. “It’s like getting into Woodhill (an exclusive local country club). If you haven’t had an intervention, you just haven’t lived.”

Carlson, who took the cure and relives it regularly on her show, becomes breathless reciting the names of corporate officers, legislators and news anchors--all acquaintances who have come through recovery. Some still cling to their confidentiality, but many have gone public, secure that in their Minnesota circles, at least, they are in good company.

“The level of acceptance and understanding here is more than I’ve seen in Washington or anywhere,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, a suburban Republican who overcame years of blackouts and binge drinking. “There are networks in every profession, every congregation. It makes it a lot easier to be candid.”

A former Minnesota state senator who was once arrested after a drunken brawl in a South Dakota coffee shop, Ramstad joins a weekly caucus with five recovering congressional colleagues. A hard-liner on crime issues, Ramstad worked against many in his own party to save $380 million in government funding for sobriety prison programs during last year’s fight over the crime bill.

“People don’t understand the importance of recovery as much in Congress as they do in the Minnesota Legislature,” he said.

But the battle over social service funding looms even in the state Capitol here, where clinic officials expect a push this year to limit access to recovery programs, a move that will test their political clout.

Lobbyists at the Hazelden Foundation and St. Mary’s Chemical Dependency Services, two of the state’s oldest and most influential clinics, are bracing for deep cuts they fear would discourage indigent alcoholics and addicts from seeking help. Recovery experts say Minnesota is the nation’s test case--if public funding is slashed here, it likely will dry up everywhere.

“We’re nervous about what’s ahead,” said Jay L. Hauge, executive director of St. Mary’s clinic. “The emphasis on managed care has already forced us to move our recovery patients away from hospitalization into outpatient treatment. The more state funding we lose, the less diverse a population we can serve.”

If the cuts come, dozens of clinics may fail. But the oldest and largest will thrive by luring affluent addicts who finance their own cures and often gratefully give money for new wings and improvements.

The proliferation of clinics here is not because of some extraordinary rate of public drunkenness or addiction. For decades, the wealthy have flown in from both coasts to dry out discreetly under the “Minnesota Model,” the chemical dependency treatment pioneered in the 1950s by Hazelden and other local clinics. That method is now the nation’s most widely accepted cure treating addiction as a systemic psychological disorder countered only with aggressive counseling and group motivational meetings.

Under the Minnesota model, addicts typically undergo 28 days of inpatient treatment followed by re-entry into society through a halfway house and, finally, a lifelong program of therapy and maintenance, such as the 12-step method offered by Alcoholics Anonymous. Hazelden’s early success led other major hospitals, such as St. Mary’s, to start up rehabilitation programs in the 1960s and persuaded the state legislature to require insurers to cover chemical dependency programs--a 1973 move that set off a boom in the recovery industry.

The industry grew as many former addicts used their intimacy with its methods to become addiction counselors, opening smaller clinics and halfway houses. Although some facilities have run into strong neighborhood opposition, many have managed to open quietly, taking care not to cling together in “recovery ghettos” and operating unobtrusively in hospital and health care settings.

“The not-in-my-backyard syndrome happens here, but there’s a level of sophistication about recovery that you don’t find elsewhere,” said Bob Olander, director of Chemical Health Services for Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis. “A traditional alcohol recovery center usually has a pretty easy time. It’s tougher for a halfway house. And it’s never easy for anything to do with drug addiction.”

When people arrive at Hazelden, often still reeling from last-fling cocaine binges and drinking sessions, they come to a pristine lakeside setting designed to distance them from the chaotic urban world of addiction. There are sparely furnished lodges for 128 new patients, a “renewal center” for the newly sober who fear backsliding, a spa and sauna, a cavernous study and guest quarters for relatives.

“The shock from the first few days of being sober is intense enough, but getting used to the overwhelming quiet here is the real adjustment. When you’re down and out in New York’s craziness, like I was, coming here is like stepping onto the surface of the moon,” said Saul Selby, 43, a supervising counselor in the men’s recovery units.

Lately, the tide of young and prosperous addicts washing up here from New York and Los Angeles has left an undertow of settlers, enriching the Twin Cities’ creative ferment.

“It’s the way this city recruits talent,” said David Carr, editor of the alternative Twin Cities Reader and a recovered cocaine addict. “My best writers are in recovery.”

Often urged to work in menial waitress and clerical jobs as they emerge from halfway houses in order to regain their self-esteem, many emigres stay on “because we’re too scared to go back home,” said Stephen Firestone. “New York is still the greatest city in the world, but I’d be dead in a day if I went back.”

Some of the newly sober have vaulted into the business world, starting up restaurants, nightclubs and art galleries. They often can be found sipping coffee at Day by Day, a St. Paul coffeehouse named after one of Hazelden’s dreamy New Age meditation manuals. Their cars are easily spotted, pasted with AA bumper stickers: “Easy Does It” and “One day at a time.”

One of the most controversial new businesses is Rogue, a Minneapolis nightclub-of-the-moment where wee-hour ravers writhe past gurgling fountains, and video screens pulse with images of Charles Manson and Wile E. Coyote. In one darkened anteroom, sober scenesters hobnob just a few feet away from a well-stocked bar.

“I’m always running into people I knew from my drinking days,” said Richard Halonen, a recovering art dealer who frequents the club. “You may quit drinking, but you don’t quit living.”

Owner Nick Beavers, 31, a Manhattan refugee and former junkie who admits he still has “wrestling matches with my addiction,” has no moral qualms about selling alcohol--a practice others abhor (“It’s playing with fire,” scoffed one recovery counselor).

“This community is filled with judgmental people--moralists, Bible thumpers,” Beavers said. “What they forget is that we’ve gone way beyond your traditional, old-school AA meeting in this city. Anything’s possible if you put your mind to it--even working in a place surrounded by temptation.”

Other innovators prefer to keep far from urban evils. Landscape painter James Wilcox Dimmers, 48, holes up in a studio above a general store in Marine, a secluded suburban town an hour east of St. Paul, but only a few minutes by car from Hazelden.

“If I get weak, I have friends I can call,” said Dimmers, who picked up the phone recently after he began obsessing about the joys of champagne. “If they’re not home, I can go to the phone book, close my eyes and point.”

There are 120 addiction clinics and therapists in the Yellow Pages--not only local listings but also facilities scattered throughout the state. And even those do not include the dozens of support groups that succor everyone from overeaters to sex addicts to people frightened by their own emotions.

Even addicted teen-agers have Sobriety High, an accredited secondary school run out of an anonymous industrial park office complex in Edina, a Minneapolis suburb. It is the only school in the country that exclusively accepts teen-agers who have undergone treatment.

“We kept seeing kids come out of recovery only to go back to their old schools and fall right back in with the drug and drinking crowds,” said Judi Hanson, the school’s program director. “They needed a place where they could learn without all the stresses that teen-agers go through.”

At Sobriety High, students wearing torn jeans and leather jackets sprawl on donated couches inside a tiny commons. They are unimpressed by their own scarred tales of dependency. During a lunch break, a green-haired boy strummed a guitar, oblivious to an emotional scene played out between two girls a few feet away.

“There’s no pressure here to use,” said Joanna, 16, who is recovering from excessive marijuana and LSD abuse. “When I was in high school, I was constantly around people who smoked and stuff. This is the only place I feel free.”

Because of its intimate size--there are 44 students--and its reliance on private fund-raising, Sobriety High fields no sports teams or chess clubs. Its first prom was held in February at a Holiday Inn. Students donned tuxedos and frilly dresses for a dance that guaranteed sobriety. “It was still cool,” allowed Janel, 16, a former heroin user.

Each day, students take a full roster of classes and a mandated hourlong therapy meeting similar to the AA model. Their personal histories often bleed into class discussions. During a recent assignment on architecture, students described dream houses filled with big-screen TVs, stables and Barbie museums, then worried about how they would keep out dopers.

“At my house, there would be no using anything,” said Tina, 16. “Anyone who did would be kicked out. And I would search them before they came in.”

The school has graduated 24 students since it opened in 1989. A few have gone to college, Hanson said, but most are satisfied to win diplomas and find a menial job “at a record store or a little cafe” without slipping back into old habits.

Hanson’s office phone rings several times a week with calls from parents from other states who are “at wit’s end about what to do with their kids.” She listens to their stories, sympathizes, but all she can do is offer a slot on Sobriety High’s waiting list.

“They ask me how they can start up a school like ours,” Hanson said. “I try to be encouraging, answer all their questions. But, in truth, it just won’t happen overnight. The recovery culture we have here isn’t something you can transplant. It’s ours and it’s a wonderful thing.”