Drug Rehabilitation Programs

"Frasier" star Kelsey Grammer is checking himself into the Betty Ford Center for treatment of substance abuse--an action that will delay production of his Emmy Award-winning NBC series. It remains unclear what the production delay will mean for the program, which has won the Emmy as best comedy series three consecutive years and just began its fourth season. Two new episodes of "Frasier" have aired thus far, and the network indicated that two or three others have been completed.

The morning of her second day at Starpoint Surgery Center in Studio City, nurse Melony Currier was found in the parking lot, passed out in her car. Once roused, she was escorted to a drug-testing facility to provide a urine sample. In the restroom, she injected an anesthetic she had stolen from the surgery center, according to state records and a Starpoint official.

For 25 years, Richard Rowden's life was consumed with a craving for drugs. Unlike the street addict who steals to support a habit, Rowden, a veteran, says he simply asked a psychiatrist at the Veterans Hospital in Long Beach to write a prescription for his drug of choice: Valium. Rowden knew his addiction to prescription drugs was destroying him, but he believed there was no way out.

One early evening in Long Beach in the mid-1980s, back when he was in the throes of a wicked addiction to crack cocaine, former Pro Bowl linebacker Isiah Robertson says he found himself staring into the barrel of a shotgun.

Since the 1980s, California's penal system has been chiefly designed to punish, deter and avenge. As a result, the prison population has risen from 34,640, in 1982, to its current 161,291, of whom 38.6% are imprisoned for drug offenses. In last month's election, state voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, which will funnel drug users who are guilty of no other crime into rehabilitation programs rather than prison.

Just before dawn, shoveling cow manure in the milking barn, Ryan Medlin feels a world away from his wild life back in San Francisco. For the onetime homeless addict, that's a good thing. Last fall, Medlin was living out of his car, blowing his entire six-figure salary as a software engineer on crack and bourbon binges. At 33, he was so gaunt he was nearly skeletal. He walked slouched over, the nights scrunched up in his Suzuki hatchback playing havoc with the nerves in his right leg.

Daniel, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, recently spent about an hour at the Twelve-n-Twelve store in West Los Angeles looking for just the right gift to give a friend who has been sober for a year. "Being sober is a celebration," said Daniel, who stopped drinking six years ago. "Although I was alive before I got clean and sober, I wasn't really able to enjoy life."

The state on Monday joined local agencies in probing allegations of drug use at a Santa Ana alcohol-and-drug treatment center, where dozens of residents were ousted over the weekend. Officials at the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, which licenses residential treatment facilities, confirmed that an investigation was underway involving the treatment center, on North Cooper Street, operated by Cooper Fellowship Inc.

If Mimi Silbert were to run a classified ad for her new Los Angeles venture, it might read, "Wanted: A few bad men and women." Silbert is the head of San Francisco's acclaimed Delancey Street Foundation, an enterprise grounded in the principle that drug addicts and ex-convicts can turn their lives around if they want to. The foundation bought the defunct Midtown Hilton on Vermont Avenue near the Hollywood Freeway earlier this year and will reopen it today as Delancey Street Los Angeles.