The doctor’s waiting room has hip-hop music, funky furniture and a blank wall primed for graffiti paint.
An “artists wanted” sign invites young patients, who’ve arrived at the inner-city clinic to kick drug and alcohol habits, to stay and check things out.
The inventive substance-abuse rehabilitation program is housed at Denver Health Medical Center and run by Dr. Chris Thurstone, a researcher whose specialty is teen addiction.
Most of the young people come not by choice, but on the order of courts or parents.
The main reason is marijuana use, although a few also are binge drinkers.
Before every one-hour visit, the teens are ushered back to Thur stone’s office to trade points – earned each time they show up for an appointment – for prizes.
Those who’ve made all 12 visits can walk away with a basketball, karaoke machine or boom box. Then the doctor offers them a juice from his fridge.
“They’re expecting a punishment, that someone is going to grind them down to rock bottom, call them an addict,” Thurstone said.
For the teens, the signal is clear: This is a different kind of drug-treatment program.
Research that Thurstone presented last month to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry shows the method is getting results.
Sixty-eight percent of the young people who participated in the program during the past year completed it.
That is a success rate far higher than the average 50 percent, according to a study in the journal Family Process.
Drug and alcohol use also dropped dramatically, according to Thurstone’s research, done in conjunction with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
The 69 teens who participated in the study smoked marijuana an average of 18 days a month before entering treatment. After three months, they reported using the drug just seven days out of 30, Thurstone said.
Drinking dropped from three or four days a month to less than one, he added.
Drug-addicted kids often get stuck in the revolving door between crime and court-ordered therapy, but Denver Health’s method seems to stick, said Denver County Court Judge Johnny Barajas.
“I’ve not seen many of their kids come back, which is what it’s all about,” he said.
Colorado has one of the nation’s highest rates of marijuana use, among teens and adults, according to federal estimates.
But treatment is scarce and almost never combined with mental-health care, Thurstone said.
He has conducted extensive research on the addictive properties of marijuana, the dominant drug of choice for 14- to 17-year-olds.
“Seventy-five percent of teens with addictions never get mental-health care,” Thurstone said. “This is a big public-health problem.”
Thurstone’s treatment regimen pairs one-on-one mental- health counseling with individualized addiction therapy, a far different approach than group drug therapy, the most common treatment setting for teens.
Doctors prescribe anti-depressants and other drugs to treat mental and behavioral problems, if necessary. But at the program’s core is positive reinforcement.
“Instead of punishing them, we find out what motivates them,” Thurstone said.
If a teen is depressed, feeling alone and smoking dope to ease the pain, finding an alternative activity that addresses the depression often will eliminate the addiction, he said.
So they are encouraged to focus on goals such as making the school basketball team or getting an after-school job. Also, patients express themselves through art, which is displayed throughout the clinic.
“Getting the kid to open up, treating them nice, it’s just a good approach to take,” Barajas said.
Staff writer Marsha Austin can be reached at 303-820-1242 or maustin@denverpost.com.
