Halfway Legal - Part 1 | Drug Treatment Center Finder

Imagine this – you have just been flown from New Jersey to Delray Beach directly after a frenzied two days of packing, crying goodbye, and shooting, snorting, or swallowing every bit of drug you could get your clammy hands on. You undergo a week or so of detox – vomiting in the trashcan pushed up to the edge of your rigid twin bed, sweating profusely, and choking down pills the faceless technicians assure will prevent you from dying a horrible death. Immediately following detox, still not able to keep down much more than water, you are shipped off to a treatment center where you are expected to live for anywhere from 1 to 3 months – until the staff of licensed professionals deems you are stable enough to begin the slow transition back into reality.

At this point, you are feeling better than you have felt in years. You are clear-headed, able to breath, and astonishingly slightly optimistic. You no longer wake up dope sick, dreading the day ahead and what novel, distressing lengths you’ll go to in order to get your next fix. You pack up your trash bags with the t-shirts and sweats you’ve acquired along the way, and head off to one of the innumerable halfway houses Delray discreetly retains. What little money you’ve managed to save in addition to a generous contribution from your proud parents is immediately transferred to the hands of the landlord, who requires a hefty deposit incase anything should go drastically wrong.

Things go well for the first couple of weeks – you attend IOP as suggested, find a sponsor, and begin working the steps. You get a humbling job at Dunkin Donuts, serving black coffee to other ‘successful’ members of the early-sobriety society. Even though you sometimes experience physical cravings, you are careful to avoid people and situations that may trigger your disease, knowing you will be drug tested at least twice per week.

One evening, the overnight technicians call you into their office. They explain that you have tested positive for opiates, and need to be packed and gone within the next hour. You desperately try to rationalize with the stoic specialists, insisting you did not use and it must be a false positive (which, in fact, it is). However, the “no tolerance” policy must be strictly adhered to, no exceptions, and within an hour and a half you are sitting on the curb beside your garbage bags, wondering what in God’s name you’ll do next. Your parents surely won’t believe you, and you have no money to your name seeing as you just paid rent the day prior. Hope has been shattered, and with little left in life aside from the too-big t-shirts stuffed in your plastic bags, you set out to find the nearest trap house.

Unfortunately, the majority of halfway houses constantly popping up throughout Delray Beach serve as nothing more than extra sources of income for money-hungry landlords unfamiliar with the true devastation caused by addiction. While many recovered addicts swear by what has since become known as the Florida Model of carefully-phased recovery, it is important to be weary when choosing a halfway house in the Delray area. More often than not, a halfway house will overlook the immediate danger a vulnerable, newly sober addict is put it when left with nowhere to go and no one to call for assistance after being quite literally kicked to the curb for breaking a house rule. The following article will examine some recent statistics and events in attempts to make choosing a halfway house a less risky process overall.