The New York Times
ON MY MIND; A Good-News Column
By A. M. Rosenthal
Tuesday, March 7, 1989

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. - The teachers at the academy on the hill like to say it is the only drug-free high school in the country. It probably is, but it's more than that.

Phoenix Academy turns out some of the hardest-working students in the country. They work to get decent grades, then do the cooking and cleaning. All day, every day, they work even more to help themselves and each other build on years of pain and degradation to create fulfilling lives. 

Every one of the 250 young men and women - ranging in age from the mid-teens to early 20's - was a drug addict, severely afflicted. Almost all of them stole from their families or their neighborhoods; some traded their bodies for drug money. Many were drug pushers. They are surprised that anybody would think 11 or 12 is a young age to start pushing drugs on the streets.

The academy, about an hour by car from New York City, is part of Phoenix House, a New York-based organization that has been involved since 1967 in helping free drug abusers from the hard-time self-imprisonment of addiction.

Drug addiction can be halted temporarily through detoxification. Most addicts do that dozens of times. Then what? ''Clean,'' the addict returns to a street just as filthy as he left it, and with even more drugs in the supermarket of the sidewalk.

Phoenix House people, led by Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal - unhappily, no relation - are entirely aware of the social horrors beneath the drug epidemic. But while waiting and working for the day when the country does something about them, they devote their lives to turning young losers into young winners, instead of just clucking.

The idea behind Phoenix Academy and other therapeutic communities like it is that young addicts need and deserve total education - about academic subjects and about themselves and what the world will expect of them.

The students sign up for 18 months to two years. They put in a school day with teachers provided by New York City's Board of Education and do all the maintenance the school needs. Evenings are for grueling group discussions about themselves and each other, usually with a Phoenix House counselor.

Regulations about dress code, behavior, respect for each other and the faculty are laid down clearly and enforced with loss of privileges or extra work. Everything goes together and they have to buy the package: the schooling, work, self-examination, discipline, supervision.

The young students are among the most open and frank people I have met. They talk about themselves with a candor that only wearying months of introspection brings.

A young man of 20 said he made at least $300 a night pushing crack, spent it on clothes and jewelry at first, and then every penny on drugs. He gave money to girls - but never a dollar to his young wife, or the daughter she bore them.

All of the students understand what lies under the whole program. It is constant accountability to the school and their classmates in preparation for the accountability to themselves they will need to find jobs and stay drug-free.

Most of them were never accountable before - and some hate it enough to leave. All they have to do is sit on the ''splitters' bench'' for a while to think it over.

Youngsters who stay to the end have something in common. Somebody cared enough to push or drag them to the academy, and they had the strength to stay.

There is never really enough money coming from the combination of government grants, welfare payments and corporate donations that support Phoenix House, but there was enough for them.

Dr. Rosenthal says 70 percent make it - finish the program and stay clean.

The cost is about $45 a day for each student - one-fifth of what it costs to support an addict in a prison, about a tenth of the cost of a day in a hospital.

Driving back, I realized why I was feeling so happy. I had been among a bunch of young people I liked for their openness and respected for what they were achieving. We had been at ease with each other.

And I knew I had seen a program that worked against drugs - not perfectly, not for everybody, but it worked. I tried to think of why the Government doesn't invest more in expanding Phoenix House and about a dozen schools like it around the country, why corporations do not give more, and governors, mayors and senators do not go to Yorktown Heights so they can have a happy day, too. There must be good reasons but I have not figured them out yet.