Alcohol Rehab Center’s Filthy Conditions Described

Pedro Lopez woke from a four-day bender and needed another drink. He reached for the door and pushed it open, only then realizing that he was in the back seat of a car speeding down the Hollywood Freeway.

His daughter, 17, held him back, and pulled the car door shut. His wife kept driving.

She was on her way to the one place she believed her husband could be cured of the binge drinking that once again threatened to destroy their family. After a few minutes, Rosa Lopez pulled into a storefront rehab center near downtown called Vida Nueva, or New Life. Here, sleeping in a cramped room with cockroaches, rats, and 60 other people, Pedro Lopez would once again try to conquer the habit that had conquered him for most of his life.

Lopez, who spent eight weeks at Vida Nueva Alcoholicos Anonimos, offered a detailed account of life in the facility where a man died last year, allegedly after being tied up and force-fed alcohol in an “aversion therapy” program meant to kill his urge to drink.

In addition to that death, Los Angeles police are investigating at least seven others at similar unlicensed rehab facilities, including those of three men at Grupo Liberacion y Fortaleza in North Hollywood where a man was found dead last month. And health department officials last week sent an advisory to county courts warning them not to allow defendants to serve alcohol or drug rehabilitation sentences at any of several dozen facilities that may be engaging in aversion therapy.

County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Mike Antonovich plan to ask for an update from law enforcement and health officials at today’s meeting of the county Board of Supervisors.

“These are obviously horrendous allegations,” said Joel Bellman, Yaroslavsky’s press deputy. “We want to air this thing out.”

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Representatives of Vida Nueva were unavailable to comment. But LAPD Sgt. Mike Coffey said Lopez’s description matched those of others who had gone through the program at Grupo Liberacion y Fortaleza in North Hollywood.

Justo “Gus” Galan, who attended Liberacion y Fortaleza to fulfill a court-imposed obligation after a drunk driving conviction, said he met Lopez at a meeting at the Lankershim Boulevard facility last year and that Lopez told him that he had spent time at Vida Nueva.

Lopez, 48, said he arrived at Vida Nueva on April 16, 1997.

He said he was essentially a prisoner at the rehab center, but that he was never tied up because he never tried to escape. He was given alcohol about every four hours during the first few days to ease him through “the shakes” of withdrawal, he said. But he was never forced to drink.

Others were not so fortunate, he said.

On his first day, Lopez said he was taken to a room containing about 20 mattresses. Three people were assigned to each of the beds, which were soiled with urine and vomit and never washed in the more than 60 days he spent in the facility, Lopez said.

As he walked into the room, one man was vomiting blood, he said. Another was convulsing and mumbling gibberish. Some men ran over to the man with the shakes and rubbed freshly chopped onions in his face--a commonly used technique to bring sufferers back from the depths of the delirium tremens, Lopez said.

“Then they asked me, ‘You want a drink?’ ” Lopez recalled. “I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

He said he was given a shot of vodka. Two hours later, nervous and vomiting, Lopez said he asked for another. Again, he was given a shot. But this time he first had to eat a bowl of soup, a spicy broth with tomatoes, onions, and eggs.

For the next three days, he said, he was given a drink every four hours, but only after consuming a bowl of soup.

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After the initial three days of treatment, Lopez said, patients are told to extend their arms forward and hold them flat and steady, palms down, in front of one or more of the group leaders.

If their hands tremble, they are sent back to the mattress room for at least another day. If not, they are given a shot of alcohol and allowed to take a shower.

Lopez said his hands were steady, thus beginning his move into the second phase of recovery--three days in the mattress room, this time with no alcohol.

Also off-limits were coffee, soda, cigarettes, sugar and water. The only thing he was allowed to drink was tea.

After the second three days, he was allowed to begin attending meetings in the evening. He could smoke and have a cup of coffee. Anything but booze. Lopez said he stayed for another two months, recovering “little by little.”

While harrowing, Lopez said his experience did not compare with that of others he watched go through the program.

There were those who tried to escape. Their hands were bound and tied to their waists with constraints made of old clothing, he said. If they tried to run again, they were bound at the feet.

Those who broke the rules, such as disturbing one of the dozen or so women who were staying at the facility, were forced to sit upright in a chair for 72 hours, he said.

In the two months Lopez was there, he said, two people became so ill that they were rushed to the hospital. Both died, he said.

Lopez, a native of Mexico, said he has been a binge drinker from the time he was a teenager, going up to a year at a time without a drink, then indulging with abandon for a week or more at a time.

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Once, in 1986, a priest began giving him last rites when he wound up in a downtown hospital.

“I almost died every time that I drank,” he said.

Lopez now works as a mechanic in Sun Valley. He said he has not had a drink since he left Vida Nueva on June 18, 1997.

Whatever pain he suffered in the process of drying out was worth it, he said. “Right now, you offer me a beer . . . I don’t want a beer,” he said. “I don’t need one.”