Going Undercover at Impact House

“There was this big, fat peckerwood dude claiming to be a hard-ass,” John Albert tells me, “so when the staff takes him to court, they find out his mom has been supporting him and his dope habit. So they shaved his head, put a pacifier in his mouth and made him wear a sign that said ‘Momma’s Boy.’ You couldn’t laugh, because it was against the rules, so people ran into buildings and you’d hear howling from within.” When I had mentioned this to Stilwell, he insisted those days are over, but several sources dispute that.

Stephen Levy-Mazin, a former resident (2001) and counselor (2003), recalls, “on Black Tuesday, all the counselors met and we discussed who we were throwing out. Then their names were called over the P.A. and they had to go to the porch. It was like a public shaming, and they had to sit there silently while the other residents looked on. Then someone gathered their stuff in a garbage bag, and we took them to the corner bus stop. It’s horrible.”

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More About

• Jim Stilwell
• Ronnie Dragna
• Pasadena
• Crime and Law
• Parole

The constant confrontations, coupled with the conditions here, are beginning to have an effect on me. I try to concentrate on the task at hand.

There is a sense of sensory deprivation here at Impact. Not isolation, as you are never alone, but deprivation. There are no newspapers, no television; no music is heard and sleep is interrupted or truncated. It is not accidental. Sometimes brains do need washing. Impact washes brains.

Based mostly on Narcotics Anonymous with a little Synanon thrown in, the private nonprofit has been treating the hard cases since 1969, when one of the original founders stole the name from the back of a Panorama City bus bench that read: Impact Advertising Company.

“WhenImpactopened, if you were an addict and you went to an N.A. meeting and you were on parole, you could catch a parole violation for going where addicts congregate,” explains Stilwell, a Vietnam vet who has been clean for 34 years. “So meetings were clandestine; you had to enter the backdoor. Parole agents would sit out front with binoculars.”

This Catch-22 led to a need for a place to go. A safe place. A place where it wasn’t so easy for the cops to pin you.

Enter Impact, which began in Panorama City and moved several times before settling on this shady 3.5-acre site in Pasadena on July 4, 1973.

“That’s when I came in. And then I left and then I came back in and then I got kicked out, and then I came back,” says Stilwell, chuckling. “I’ve been back for 34 years. I didn’t come in to be the director, I just didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

We’re in Stilwell’s dark, rustically furnished office, which overlooks Impact’s parking lot and main yard, and from which he reflexively keeps an eye trained on the comings and goings of his campus.

“Everybody, from me on down, has been through Impact, including our doctors,” he tells me. “We only hire graduates. This way, no one can say, ‘You don’t know what I’m going through.’”

Stilwell tells me how Impact was also instrumental in helping to launch the Los Angeles Drug Court program — one of the first of its kind in the United States — in the early ’90s. “The City Attorney’s Office basically culled the [drug-related, nonviolent] arrests for a specific area and [sent them] to a specific court. We would do an assessment and say this guy’s been clean, he wants it, let’s put him in a very structured outpatient program — but he gets to see the judge every week to 10 days. Then if he gets loaded, screw it, bring him into residential. It’s pretty tightly monitored.”

Today, drug courts are working in all 50 states and number nearly 2,000.

When I raise the subject of the luxury rehabs, Stilwell pauses before elaborating. “I’ve been to a lot of [A.A./N.A.] meetings, man,” he says finally, “and I have yet to be in a meeting where someone stood up and took a six-month chip and said, ‘Thank God for Promises.’ I’ve heard it said about Clare. I’ve heard it about Cri-Help. I’ve heard it about Impact. But you just don’t see that [in the luxury rehabs] because they’re 30-day, wash-and-dry, fluff-n-fold. It’s a chalk talk.”

As for those questionable success rates claimed by certain luxury rehabs, Stilwell adds, “Hey, aversion therapy used to claim a 100 percent success rate!”

Impact doesn’t claim any numerical success rate since it opened in 1969, yet “in that time we have treated 30,000 men and women for addiction,” explains Arlene Philpott, the gregarious director of development, herself a recoveringjunkie and Impact grad. “The majority of our clients come through with no resources. Through state, county and federal funding we are able to accept them for treatment. The truth is that by helping one addict, we impact the lives of at least 20 people.”