Drug Treatment Center Breaks Ground on New Home

At just 18 years of age, Jaime Hernandez already had two baby daughters, a hatred of authority, a long criminal record and an unquenchable drug problem that he always figured would keep him shuttling between his gang and prison for the rest of his life.

That was until he met the folks at the Cri-Help Recovery House in North Hollywood, a nine-month residency program in which recovering addicts help straighten out the most incorrigible drug abusers and get them on the path toward drug-free lives.

Now after a month in the Cri-Help program, Hernandez says he finally sees hope--and a way out--for himself for the first time since he was a young troublemaker growing up on the streets of Pacoima.

And so on Sunday, Hernandez gathered with several hundred past and present Cri-Help “clients” to celebrate the program’s biggest undertaking ever: groundbreaking on a new, 120-bed treatment facility that will replace the ramshackle group of stucco buildings at the corner of Burbank Boulevard and Vineland Avenue.

“I’m lucky to be here,” said Hernandez, sitting in one of the simple barracks. “It’s real good for me; I’m young, and I want to get this thing off me while I have a chance.”

Cri-Help Inc., which also operates the Socorro Center in East Los Angeles, is a nonprofit group that has helped thousands of addicts since 1971. The new center was made possible through an $8-million gift from a foundation run by the parents of one former client, Tom Pfleger, who has been on the Cri-Help board of directors since completing the program in 1983.

The new center, nearly doubling the current 65-bed facility, will have dormitories for men and women, classrooms, offices, libraries, a meditation room, basketball courts and other recreational facilities and a series of aquariums.

“I went through this house, and it saved my life,” Pfleger told the assembled crowd Sunday. “This is to give back, and to continue a program of recovery that is all about helping people.”

Construction will start in January, and the 45,000-square-foot complex is expected to be completed in early 1995.

Hernandez acknowledged that the next eight months will be difficult and filled with work. But already the round-the-clock program has begun to rehabilitate him in ways prison never could. Up until last month, the soft-spoken youth said, he was a violent, swaggering gangster who lived with a gun in one hand and a beer in the other. It was the only life he wanted.

Then he met Ricky Lopez and other former addicts who work at the center.

“I’ve been talked to by a lot of people--parents, cops, principals,” he said, “and no one’s gotten my attention, except these people. They know where I’m coming from. They’ve been through it, they’ve gotten out of it, and now they’re showing me how to get out of the mess I was in.”

A former gang member himself, Lopez, 34, of North Hollywood, spent Sunday holding his young daughter and joking with friends. He said he was just like Hernandez when he went through the program in 1985, and that he’s been drug-free ever since.

“Sometimes the best teacher is someone who’s been through it,” he said. “In order for me to keep it, my sobriety and my sanity, I’ve got to give it to somebody else.”

Corey Feldman, an actor with a well-publicized drug problem, also was on hand Sunday. He said he and a friend, fellow actor Adam Rich, both went through the rigorous program of work, counseling and study recently after several arrests apiece.

“This is the kind of place for people who are sicker than others, who can’t go through a 30-day buff and shine program and kick the habit,” he said. “This is a place where you relearn how to live.”

Everyone is treated the same at the center, movie star or convict. There is work, classes modeled after the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step recovery program, reading and writing workshops, and discussions and counseling last into the evening.

Feldman recalls seeing some residents forced to dig deep trenches in a field at the complex as punishment for breaking rules--”the premise being that you’re digging your own grave,” he said. It was one of many constant--and effective--reminders that residents returning to drugs risk cutting their lives short.

“I believe God works through every person in this place,” he said. “Today, I’m two years clean and sober.”