Drug & Alcohol Rehab Center Shuts Down in Florida

Drug and alcohol rehab is essential for the thousands of addicts across the globe who want a new chance at life. Take Craig Butt, an addict who once had a life-altering choice to make: give up his addiction or face life behind bars. But it wasn't that simple. Butt was an addict with a craving for hard drugs since age 7, and he'd been in and out of rehabilitation facilities and prisons from Fort Lauderdale to Rikers Island in New York. "Cocaine was my God, and I served it well," he said. "I didn't know a God." A victim of five stabbings and two shootings by age 30, Butt was convinced that nothing could snap him out of the fog he was lost in.

A year at The Healing Place of Athens changed that. Today, Butt is sober. He owns two successful home repair and remodeling businesses in Watkinsville. He's a husband and a father. And he's a mentor to those who are walking the same path he traveled. Now, thanks to the drug and alcohol rehab center, the 12-year-old facility that's helped hundreds of men like Butt is facing its last days. Donations have dried up and volunteer services have dwindled. The facility's addiction treatment program is on hold. It's operating without an executive director. And the West Broad Street shelter itself slowly is falling apart.

"The place can't go down, no doubt about it," Butt said, choking back tears. "I got there in 2000, and I stayed there for a whole year. It saved my life. I'm where I am today because of that place." The Healing Place, in its better days, served as an overnight emergency shelter, a drug and alcohol rehab program and transitional housing for men. For now, it's struggling day-to-day to get by. The shelter survives on a yearly $30,000 state Department of Community Affairs grant and private donations. But its expenses run about $5,000 a month, and that's without an executive director's salary, said Dr. Tony Simpson, president of the facility.

"There's no place that I know of that does so much for so little," Simpson said. "It's unreal. Those men come in there and if they don't have money, we take them. They also get help with their drug and alcohol addictions. If they do have money, we take $5. You know what they get for that $5? They get a roof over their head, they get a place to lay down, they get a meal at night and a shelter. And then they can come back and do it over and over and over." The rehab facility doesn't qualify for a myriad of other grants, the doctor said, because it accepts and treats men with felony criminal records. Simpson sees that as an insult to the shelter's goal to give men who have no future a chance to change their lives.

About 60 percent of homeless men who stay at the shelter have been addicted to drugs or alcohol for more than 10 years, he said. Men who chose to participate in the shelter's recovery programs were offered counseling and mentors, attended weekly in-house AA meetings and learned skills necessary to survive on their own once they left the facility. The facility once touted a comprehensive approach to healing that guided men through a yearlong process of recovery. In that time, men would receive job-skills training, education and help to find outside recovery meetings. The men also were able to get help in finding outside crisis counseling and appropriate places to live. But today the facility can't offer much more than a safe place to stay and food. Hopefully another drug and alcohol rehab center is built, because this kind of care is absolutely necessary.