Hospital in the River

Johnny is a husky youth of 20, but he was holding his mother's hand as they rode the ferry last week from The Bronx to North Brother Island in the East River. For Johnny, like most of the first half-dozen young addicts admitted to New York City's Riverside Hospital, was a mama's boy. From an underprivileged Harlem family, Johnny had taken to dope largely to prove that he was no sissy.

Experts differ widely and wildly over how many juvenile narcotic addicts there are, but there is no doubt that New York City has several hundred. Lashed by angry parents (TIME, May 7, 1951), the city has set up the nation's first fullscale, long-term treatment for the youngsters. The idea is to get them as far away as fast as possible from the atmosphere of criminal court buildings, jails and hospital wards overcrowded with time-hardened adult addicts.

Coed Sports. Riverside Hospital should be perfect for the purpose. Finished early in World War II as a TB hospital, it was never opened as such because it could not be staffed. Now it has been refurbished to treat 100 boys and 50 girls; mess halls, classes and sports will be run on a coed basis. Addicts may be committed voluntarily by their parents (most of the first admissions last week were of this type), or by the courts, including the city's special Narcotics Term Court recently set up for juveniles.

Medical superintendent at Riverside is Dr. Jerome L. Leon, a towering (6 ft. 2 in., 250 Ibs.) onetime C.C.N.Y. football tackle, who frankly admits that nobody knows whether the experiment is going to succeed or not. But everything foreseeable is being done to make it succeed. "In the first place," says Dr. Leon, "we take only the 'normal' addicts--that is, kids whose only antisocial behavior is addiction. Trying to cure that is hard enough, and we can't try to reform robbers, rapers and the like.

"The kids we're getting here all follow roughly the same pattern. They aren't wild-eyed ogres. They don't have sexual orgies (maybe marijuana jazzes them up, but heroin takes the sexual drive away, and 99% of our cases are going to be heroin addicts). Their I.Q.s put them in the dull-normal to normal class. Mostly they're quiet-spoken, reclusive children who are passive actors in the drama of life. We want to give these kids a feeling of human dignity that they never had before. We probably can't make them whole human beings, but we hope to give them a crutch stronger than heroin."

"Cold Turkey." After routine admission procedures (including a bath so that they can be searched for dope), the inmates are put in observation wards and taken off the drug. If they can be withdrawn from drugs at once ("cold turkey"), so much the better; if their withdrawal symptoms are too severe for that, they are tapered off. No ward has more than four beds. Each youngster will clean up his own room and do his personal laundry. Many hours a day are set aside for interviews with psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. There are first-class facilities for home economics and shop crafts, as well as for sports, movies and TV. After Labor Day, Riverside will open its own school, with a full-time staff for regular sessions (most of the inmates quit before finishing high school).

Inmates will be kept at Riverside for no more than six months, but after discharge, they will still report regularly to a guidance clinic until they have been under observation for three years. That, says Dr. Leon, ought to do more for teenage addicts than any other program has ever been able to do.

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