GREGORY Anderson, 26, is a musician. He used to play the base guitar in the band SANE — Sounds Against Negative Expressions.

He, however, has not been performing recently.

But he believes that he is preparing himself for a big comeback.

He has a month left of his one-year rehabilitation at the Teen Challenge Jamaica Facility on Hopefield Avenue in Kingston.

Anderson is a crack cocaine addict. This is his third try at kicking the habit.

“I first went to the detoxification unit at UHWI (University Hospital of the West Indies) but it never really help me,” he says. “Then I went to Patricia House, which helped me more than detox… But still the very day I left there I went back on the crack.”

Like many crack cocaine addicts, Anderson spent time on the streets, but was encouraged by his parents and friends, he says, “to give rehab another chance.”

“I did not really want to but eventually I did,” Anderson says.

Anderson, the experts say, is among the lucky few from among Jamaica’s increasingly visible — and perhaps growing — population of drug addicts able to find residential treatment for their addiction.

The problem is that only five facilities exist in Jamaica and can accommodate only a small amount of their potential clients, officials say. A sixth, the Chemical Addiction Unit and Psychiatric Ward at the Cornwall Regional Hospital, was closed recently.

There is, in fact, no recent statistics on the number of drug addicts in Jamaica but a 1991 survey by the late Professor Carl Stone estimated that there were approximately 20,000 crack and cocaine users in the island, a drop of nearly 10 per cent on two years earlier.

In a decade since the Stone survey, however, the drug scene has changed dramatically in Jamaica, not least in the fact that the island has emerged as a major transshipment point for cocaine from Colombia headed for North America and Europe.

Moreover, law enforcement officials say, an increasing amount of the drug stays in Jamaica to be used by local addicts. In the early days, too, a high price made cocaine the drug of choice for well-to-do Jamaicans. Now, it’s cheap, and highly-addictive, variant, crack, is readily available to poorer Jamaicans.

“Drug addiction is a matter of growing concern as both a law enforcement and public health issue,” Peter Phillips, the island’s national security minister, conceded recently.

More users of drugs mean potentially more addicts to treat, but three years ago, the six residential facilities — the Assessment and Detoxification Centre and Ward 21 at the UHWI, Patricia House, Teen Challenge, the William Chamberlain Rehab Centre — combined dealt with only 430 cases. With the closure of the facility at the Cornwall Regional Hospital in Montego Bay, all the residential treatment centres are now in Kingston.

“Most hospitals offer detoxification, but treatment and rehabilitation is different,” explains Michael Tucker, the executive director of the National Council on Drug Abuse (NCDA), a government-supported agency that promotes anti-drug programmes.

“Many cases would need in-house treatment and many of these are not available especially outside of Kingston and St Andrew,” he adds.

According to Tucker, expanding the availability of rehabilitation facilities and putting in place a national program for the follow-up of recovering addicts are among the ideas in a five-year drug abuse prevention plan drafted by his organisation in 1997.

“We submitted a comprehensive plan to the European Union on strengthening the follow-up of addicts… but we have found it difficult to get international support for improving rehabilitation services here,” he says.

As it is, most of the rehabilitation facilities are private, run by non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Teen Challenge Jamaica, for instance, is associated with the with the Christian-based Teen Challenge International which is headquartered in the United States.

Its facility can accommodate 23 persons. It operates on the premise that Jesus Christ and a lifestyle following his teachings are fundamental to recovery from drug addiction.

“For someone to enter the programme they have to admit that they have a problem and know that they can’t do it on their own,” says Teen Challenge Jamaica’s director, Austin Richards, himself a former crack cocaine addict.

But evidence in a Christian environment, the drop-out rate for drug addicts in rehabilitation is high.

“As with any rehabilitation programme we have a lot of dropouts,” says Richards. “We do follow up for a year with those men who have finished the programme and at least 60 per cent of the men are still clean at the end of that period.”

Anthony Richards, 40, a former policeman who recently completed the programme at Teen Challenge and now works at the facility, has seen the problem of drug abuse from both sides of the fence. He laments the insufficiency of the treatment centres and understands the struggles of the addict to stay the course in rehabilitation.

“Sometimes when people drop out in the first few months, they come right back,” he says. “More than half of them return but sometimes we have to put them on a waiting list at that time. It depends on the circumstances under which they left.”

Richards attributes his own past desire for drugs, in part, to “questionable acts” he committed while on the police force.

“I am not blaming my job for my using drugs because that was the choice I made,” he says. “But the guilt from some of the questionable things that I did led me to drink. But God released me from that guilt while I was at Teen Challenge and now I am a Christian.”

While he was able to enter, says Richards — no relation to Austin Richards — insufficiency of space and ignorance of how to get help keeps many addicts out.

“Those who want treatment sometimes do not know where to get help,” he says. “I did not know myself but I went to a pastor and he referred me to Teen Challenge.”

Prior to getting into the Teen Challenge programme, Richards was on the waiting list for Patricia House, perhaps the best-known of the rehabilitation centres.

“While waiting my drug use got worse,” he says.

Patricia House can accommodate 24 ‘clients’. It has half that amount because, according to the centre’s head, Howard Gough, it, like Teen Challenge, is short staffed.

“We have three counsellors, one trainee and myself where we should have six counsellors, two trainees, a secretary and a deputy manager,” says Gough.

Gough, though, says that a recent decision to halve the six-month period for its programme, to three months, will allow it to handle between 75 and 80 clients a year, depending the drop-out rate.

Gough’s facility differs from the Teen Challenge centre in its approach to drug rehabilitation. While Teen Challenge provides a Christian underpinning to its programme, Patricia House is a psycho-social facility built on the philosophy that addiction is a secondary problem — second to the psychological problem of the individual.

So Gough, who has a masters degree in counselling psychology, spends a lot of time with his clients to determine the underlying problem which contributed to their addiction.

Gough stresses, that the matter of coming to terms, and being able to treat drug addiction, has positive spin-offs for the society, as well as the individual. For instance, someone who is drug free and off the streets is less likely to be involved in petty crime.

“Many of the clients spend on average about $50,000 monthly on crack/cocaine,” he explains. “Most of them support their habit by stealing and sometimes even prostitution, so just keeping them off the street for a bit saves the state and society some money.”

He adds: “That for me is success. Or when I see a mother whose blood pressure has come down because after going through the programme her son has finally kicked the habit.”

Keeping private drug rehab facilities like Patricia House, Teen Challenge Jamaica, and the others, open is not an easy, according to those who run them.

On average, its costs about $400,000 to keep an addict in a facility, costs which many of those who enter cannot afford. And there is no huge state subsidies for such programmes.

“We are not getting any funding from the government,” says Teen Challenge’s Austin Richards. “We have tried to get assistance but we have had no success.”

The organisation does its own fundraising and its volunteers are often on the street with money cans soliciting donations.

“We don’t charge anyone more than $500 for the 12 months here,” says Austin. “Even if someone does not have the $500 we will still take them. But to keep one person for the 12 months cost about $400,000. So you can see that we need to raise funds.”

Patricia House does get about half of its $9.5 million budget from the government but has to fund-raise for most of the rest. Its clients pay a $500 registration fee as well as contribute what they can to the programme.

But for all the government work that these facilities do, officials like the NCDA stress that drug rehabilitation is a continuous process that requires community support and the support of the people closely associated with the addict, evidenced by the high incidence of relapse by people with addictions.

The NCDA, therefore, would like to develop protocols and community support systems for treating with the problem. It hopes, also, to be able to deal with the problem of financing for drug rehabilitation facilities in an updated plan to deal with Jamaica’s drug problem.

But for folks like Gregory Anderson, the immediate struggle is to get better and to do new, productive things.

His plan is to form a new band to play gospel in the reggae genre.