Preaching the Monkey Off Their Backs

When Toni walked into the old Georgian house on the edge of the slum-ridden Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, she was on the brink of hopelessness. At 31, she was not long out of jail, had no job, no money, and eight years of prostitution and drug addiction behind her. "I didn't know about this religion bit they had there," she said. "But man, I was ready to try anything." It is now four months later, and Toni appears to have beat off despair. Her eyes are bright, her health is back, and her manner downright pleas ant. "You know when I knew?" says she. "I knew when a pregnant girl said something nasty to me. I would have kicked her right in the belly before. But this time I just stood there -- and then I walked away."

Cold Turkey. Like hundreds of drug addicts before her, Toni owes her meta morphosis to Evangelist David Wilkerson, 33, a Pentecostal minister who went to New York in 1959 with $12.95 in his pocket, and now runs a rehabilitation program in New York with a budget of $200,000 -- "every dime prayed in." What brought Wilkerson from Philipsburg, Pa., was a drawing in LIFE that showed some teen-agers who had stabbed a polio victim to death in New York's Highbridge Park. Soon Wilkerson gravitated toward the city's 24,000 drug addicts, bringing with him a naively simple solution to their problems: "We don't believe in medical aids, and we don't believe in psychology," says he. "God is the only one who can cure you," he tells addicts.

Helped by 20 volunteer workers from Evangelical Bible colleges and a $30,000 mortgage, Wilkerson began his Teen Challenge Center four years ago in an old house on Brooklyn's Clinton Avenue. Through street services and word of mouth, he takes in about 40 junkies a month; more than half of them are Latin American, mainly Puerto Rican. He sets about trying to cure them by abruptly cutting off their drug supplies--a technique known as "cold turkey" that is scorned by most medical experts.

But Wilkerson's serving of cold turkey is unlike anybody else's. He never leaves an addict alone in the throes of withdrawal, helps them pray as they agonize through their first three days without a fix. "Once when I had to kick in jail," says Toni, "I vomited, I had diarrhea, I twitched all over, I couldn't eat and I couldn't sleep. When I kicked here, I ached some, but in two days I was eating three meals a day. How can you feel sick where everyone's always saying, 'How do you feel, honey? Can I rub your back for you?' "

Every Addict a Minister? Wilkerson concedes that half the addicts who come to him do not stay two weeks, but he also claims that 80% of those who stay are cured. Says he: "All their lives these kids have been looking for the big thrill--that's why they went on dope. I teach them that knowing God is the biggest thrill of all."

Teen Challenge Centers have sprung up in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto, and Wilkerson has a work farm for male addicts in Pennsylvania and a home for females in Rhinebeck, N.Y. His board of directors includes Tiffany Board Chairman Walter Hoving, Combined Insurance Co. of America President W. Clement Stone. Wilkerson has his critics, among them some of the most eminent narcotics specialists in the U.S. "Sure, he'll cure a few who are motivated by a religious fervor," says Dr. Robert Baird of New York's Haven Clinic. "But what's he going to do--turn every addict in the country into a minister?" Used to such judgments of his work, Wilkerson bridles only at clerical critics. "The church," says he, "has done less to cure drug addicts than anybody else. These kids are tired of 'bless-me clubs'; they want a church that's alive and active, not cold and dead."

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