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Recovery houses offer path to sobriety

6 min read
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Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter

House manager Patrick Arena sits in the lounge at Murphy House in Washington.

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Patrick Arena sits in the lounge at the Murphy House in Washington.

The rules are strict for recovering addicts seeking a safe place for sober living at Murphy House in Washington.

Drugs and alcohol are obviously off-limits, but the men who live here also have mandatory chores, and they must attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – one a day for the first 90 days they take a bed in the house on Houston Street, said house manager Patrick Arena.

“The goal, I tell them, is to become a gentleman rather than a street person who will lie, cheat and steal,” said Arena, who himself walked away from cocaine and alcohol three decades ago.

Murphy House is among at least 15 recovery houses – also called three-quarter houses – that have been operating mostly under the radar in Washington since the first one opened in 2005.

That could change under a new state law signed Dec. 27 by Gov. Tom Wolf.

The legislation tasks the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs with creating a program for “licensure or certification” of recovery houses.

Under the framework outlined in the legislation, the houses would have to get approval before they could take residents based on referrals from state agencies or state-funded facilities. They also would have to be approved before receiving federal or state funds, or taking referrals for patients whose treatment is paid for with federal or state funds. The legislation also requires state and county courts to give “first consideration” to certified houses when making recommendations to people under the courts’ supervision.

Washington County District Attorney Gene Vittone said he suspects there is a demand for recovery houses in the county seat because nearly 39 percent of the overdoses in the county happen there.

Even without state oversight, the Murphy House has five pages of rules that must be acknowledged and signed by anyone who wants to live there. The owners or operators of the houses in Washington also voluntarily hold regular meetings to discuss any issues that might come up.

Erich Curnow, director of clinical and case management services at the Washington Drug & Alcohol Commission, said recovery houses “have to be run right. That’s the key.”

“There’s a fine line between a recovery house and a flophouse,” he said.

Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter

Patrick Arena sits in the lounge at the Murphy House in Washington. Arena, a recovering addict, is the house manager.

Most houses in Washington are being operated for the right reasons, and some of them have been owned and/or run by addicts in recovery, he said.

City code enforcement officer Ron McIntyre said he wasn’t aware of any recovery house that’s posed a problem for him.

“To my knowledge, they’re all run as well as can be expected,” McIntyre said.

He said the dwellings are “not necessarily something that all the neighbors want next door,” but fall under the protection of the federal Fair Housing Act.

“My understanding is that they’re permitted to go anywhere that any other single-family residence could go,” McIntyre added.

While the houses in Washington haven’t experienced a plethora of problems requiring code or health inspections, officials said that’s not the case in the Philadelphia area.

In June, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a lengthy exposé about many recovery houses in the city taking payments in exchange for corralling residents to treatment centers that received reimbursements of federal Medicaid and state funds.

State Rep. Tina Davis has received numerous complaints about them in her district in Bucks County, which isn’t far from Philadelphia and Trenton, N.J.

“There are fire code problems, things like that,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “There are people living in basements, garages.”

She pointed to Bristol Township, which reportedly has nearly 100 of the houses.

She said homeowners there worry about declining property values, as there are areas with a string of recovery houses on one street.

Davis was among the lawmakers who first pitched a law in the state House designed to certify recovery houses. She stepped aside when a version was introduced in the Senate last year.

Sen. Tom McGarrigle, a Republican whose eastern Pennsylvania district includes parts of Chester and Delaware counties, was the prime sponsor of that bill, which he said he introduced early last year following news reports relating to problems in recovery houses in that part of the state.

The law directs Drug and Alcohol to develop a policy for criminal background checks for operators and employees of recovery houses. It doesn’t further explain what that policy will look like.

“We don’t know where these homes are,” McGarrigle said. “We don’t know who’s operating them, and whether they have a criminal background.”

The legislation also requires the agency to develop a policy barring recovery house owners and operators from taking any payment from tenants or third parties “beyond specified rent established in writing at the time of residency.”

Drug and Alcohol spokeswoman Ali Fogarty said the agency has until June 2020 to write the new regulations. It’s unclear how many recovery houses operate statewide since “we don’t currently monitor them,” she said in an email.

“We estimate that as many as 500 (houses) could apply for licensure/certification,” she said.

Those houses will eventually be part of a registry on the agency’s website, according to the law.

During the 2016-17 fiscal year, single-county authorities – local entities that administer funds geared toward drug and alcohol addiction services – had contracts with 64 recovery houses statewide, Fogarty said. Those houses received a total of more than $7.7 million. About $4.3 million came from Drug and Alcohol funds. The rest – more than $3.4 million – was from other sources.

Fogarty said none of those houses were in Washington or Greene counties.

Curnow said the drug and alcohol commission – Washington’s single-county authority – has a memorandum of understanding “with a handful of houses that meet our criteria.”

A house has to be vetted, and its tenants must find jobs and continue with treatment. The commission also pays the first month’s rent for the people it refers to a recovery house.

Murphy House tenants pay $450 a month to live there. Fifty-six men have come through the house in the past 2 1/2 years. One resident overdosed after sneaking drugs into the house, and he was revived with the opioid antidote naloxone, Arena said.

“We actually have a good record,” Arena said.

Curnow said the houses in the city have become “a vital, valuable piece of the puzzle for people who are trying to put their lives back together.”

“It’s a labor of love, and it also can be a pain,” Curnow said. “The owners – they are not going to get rich.”

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