Special schools help teens stay clean

INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana - When Logan Snyder got hooked on pills after a prescription to treat pain from a kidney stone, she joined the millions already swept up in the nation's grim wave of addiction to opioid painkillers.

She was just 14.

Youth is a drawback when it comes to kicking drugs. Only half of US treatment centers accept teenagers and even fewer offer teen-focused groups or programs. After treatment, adolescents find little structured support. They're outnumbered by adults at self-help meetings. Sober youth drop-in centers are rare. Returning to school means resisting offers to get high with old friends.

But Snyder is lucky: Her slide ended when her father got her into a residential drug treatment program. Now 17 and clean, she credits her continued success to Hope Academy in Indianapolis, a tuition-free recovery school where she's enrolled as a junior.

"I am with people all day who are similar to me," she says. "We're here to hold each other accountable."

The opioid epidemic, which researchers say is the worst addiction crisis in US history, has mostly ensnared adults, especially those in their 20s, 30s and 40s. But teens have not been spared: Each day, 1,100 start misusing pain pills. Opioids killed 521 teens in 2015, federal data show.

Researchers say young recovering addicts do better at places like Hope, special schools that use peer communities to support sobriety. There are only about three dozen such schools in the US, but interest is growing among educators and health officials because of the opioid epidemic.

"I get a phone call every day from somebody who wants to start a recovery high school," says Rachelle Gardner, an addiction counselor who helped found Hope in 2006 as a charter school through the mayor's office. "It's horrible to watch young people die. And who wants that to be our legacy?"

Snyder's hardest days are when she wakes up and skips her inner pep talk. Also hard are days when family problems close in, and days when she sees others escaping through drugs and wants to join them. Days when she can't imagine how she's going to solve her problems. Days when she feels alone.

Her new friends pull her back from the edge. They remind her that she doesn't want others to feel around her the way she feels around an addicted family member.

"That helps me to want to get better," she says.