New Brunswick, New Jersey -- Ben flunked out of college because he drank too much. J. Pat flunked out twice, for the same reason. And college was the last thing on Melinda’s mind when she was shooting heroin five times a day in Philadelphia at the age of 15.
Today, those three recovering addicts, and 22 others, are enrolled at Rutgers University, living in what officials call “recovery housing.”
Quite a few universities offer special housing for students who want an environment free of drugs and alcohol. But Rutgers believes it is the only one with a dormitory specifically for recovering addicts. The University of Maryland at College Park had a similar program for a handful of students for three years, but it was suspended this year after it became too time-consuming for the housing staff, Maryland officials say.
Lisa Laitman, director of Rutgers’s assistance program for substance abusers, arrived at the university in 1983. In her first few years, at meetings where students would talk about their struggle to stay clean, “a repeated theme was the living situation,” she says. “They wanted to live on campus and be part of the campus community,” but they didn’t want to live in residence halls, where many social activities center on alcohol.
Most students think “college is a place to party,” says Ben, a junior. “The topic will always go to drinking.” He calls the recovery dorm an oasis. Like other students interviewed for this story, Ben did not want his last name used.
In 1988, with the support of the offices of student affairs and residence life at Rutgers, Ms. Laitman placed 16 addicted students in one dormitory.
The number of students in the program had climbed to 48 by 1991, and Rutgers was using space in three dormitories to house them. Since then, the number of students has hovered around 25. There are now two dorms: the original one, which is coed, and a house for seven women.
The recovery housing serves a wide range of students: Of this year’s residents, one has been sober for 12 years; others have been clean for less than two months.
When Ms. Laitman proposed the housing, she says, she met with some resistance from administrators “who felt it was not a good statement to make about the dorms.”
But the same year the program opened, one student died in an alcohol-related hazing incident, and two died in drunk-driving accidents, drawing attention and money to her office. (The students who died had had no contact with the substance-abuse counseling program.)
The location of the recovery housing is kept quiet, to preserve residents’ anonymity. Ms. Laitman would not give the address of the larger dormitory to a reporter, insisting instead on picking him up at a hotel herself and driving him there. The boxy, two-story hall sits among several identical buildings, not far from land managed by the agricultural school.
The apartment-style rooms look like those of most students: clothes, dishes, and books are scattered about. One thing is different: Everyone smokes. Even in Christie’s apartment, which she keeps very tidy, several ashtrays overflow. Smoke hovers in the air.
“We have bundles of energy that we used to channel into our addictions,” says Christie, a psychology major in her second year in the dormitory. All-night poker games are common. J. Pat says he sometimes feels the need to bang out a riff on his electric guitar in the middle of the night.
Students say the college environment seems designed to lure them back to drugs and alcohol. J. Pat, who is in a band, says he is offered free drinks when he plays at clubs. Ben occasionally risks the bars when he is with friends, and Christie, too, spends time with friends who drink. They are not allowed, however, to bring anyone who is drunk or stoned to their dormitory.
J. Pat says the urge to drink still surfaces but is no longer a “compulsion.” Ben says he tries to hang out as much as possible with other people who are in recovery. He makes a point of driving himself when he goes to parties, so that he can leave if he feels uncomfortable. Christie says her resolution not to drink is reinforced whenever she sees friends get drunk.
Most students attend 12-step programs off the campus, in New Brunswick, but these aren’t required. Unlike most other Rutgers underclassmen, freshmen and sophomores in recovery housing are permitted to have cars on the campus, in order to drive to the meetings. Last year, residents of the dormitory organized their own support group, but this year students have sought out their own groups.
Ms. Laitman, who has a master’s degree in counseling from Youngstown State University, interviews each student who signs up for the dorm. “We’re looking for people who want to stay sober, not those who want to appease their parents,” she says. “We don’t have strict guidelines, but we need to have some sort of assurance.”
On a handful of occasions over the past seven years, she has discovered how disruptive a relapse can be.
Last year, when some other students suspected that one resident was using drugs again, it was “like a bomb had gone off,” Christie says. Other students weren’t sure how to react when the suspect denied it. He is back in the dorm now, and off drugs. “It did bring us closer together,” Christie says, but she hasn’t gotten over the possible violation of trust.
Problems with relapses were what sank the recovery-housing program at the University of Maryland this year. Seven students were living in a dormitory called Serenity House, and two of them went back to their old habits, says Pat Mielke, the housing director at the university. The housing office found itself overwhelmed trying to help them.
“If we bring it back, it will be with a different management structure, with very strict guidelines about behavior,” Ms. Mielke says.
The students in Serenity House were among 650 that Richard A. Stevens, Jr., a “community director” at Maryland, was overseeing. He estimates, however, that he spent three to four hours a day on the seven students in recovery.
“We need someone who’s a drug-and-alcohol counselor,” he says. The University Health Center was responsible for seeing that the students attended 12-step meetings and remained sober, but “I ended up dealing with a lot of it, because I was available,” he says.
Maryland reserves 1,200 housing slots for students who promise not to use drugs or alcohol, but most students who choose that option have no interest in the substances.
Ms. Laitman has a four-person staff and a budget of $265,000 at Rutgers. Still, crises sometimes can strain the staff members -- and the students -- to their limits. One student cut herself in a suicide attempt several years ago.
Students say there isn’t much chance that anyone would drink in the dorm. “You can’t fool anyone here,” J. Pat says. But the hours away from it can pose a risk. Melinda spends weekends going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, playing cards with friends in recovery, and hanging out with her boyfriend, who is not in the program.
“Sometimes I feel separated, like I’m all alone,” says Ben, a philosophy and history major who moved into the dorm last year. “All I have to do is pick up the phone, or go home” -- to the dormitory.
“It’s a place to live with people I like, which is no different from any other dorm.”
