year ago, Penelope sat alone in her darkened bedroom, numbed out on drugs.
It was her junior year in high school. She’d quit the volleyball club after showing up high too many times. Her grades were mostly Cs and Ds. College seemed out of reach. And rehab? She tried that, for four months, but when she got out, she surrendered to the pressure to use again.
“I was just really unhappy unless I was high,” she recalls.
Today, Penelope (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is a student at a specialized school in New Jersey that teaches teens how to maintain long-term sobriety—viewing addiction not as a moral wrong, but as a health issue. It ditched old ways of thinking about drug abuse as an acute crisis in favor of a model that treats addiction as a chronic disease that necessitates a lifestyle change.
[For more of this story, written by Chris Peak, go to http://nationswell.com/lesniak...hool-drug-addiction/]
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