Successes

AARC is unlike any program in Canada. Our program is long-term (averaging about one year) and is based on a solid foundation of research augmented by clinical expertise. It is open to all, regardless of income level. AARC works because it blends dedication and compassion with no-nonsense, uncompromising, honest confrontation. As families move through the program, teens and their parents are expected to help others new to the program.

Success at AARC is a graduate who is clean and sober, back in school or working and reunited with their family.

Since AARC began in 1992 we have treated over 400 teens, their parents and their siblings.

Dr. Michael Quinn Patton, former President of the American Evaluation Society, was the principal author of an outcome evaluation of AARC that was completed in 2003 and presented to the American Society of Addiction Medicine in Dallas, Texas in 2005.

The research design utilized by this study was adopted by the American Evaluation Association as the standard by which to evaluate community-based addiction treatment programs.

Dr. Patton is one of the most acclaimed researchers in North America. He is the only recipient of both the Alva and Gunner Myrdal Award from the Evaluation Research Society for "outstanding contributions to evaluation use and practice" and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for lifetime contributions to evaluation theory from the American Evaluation Association. The Society for Applied Sociology honored him with the 2001 Lester F. Ward Award for Outstanding Contributions to Applied Sociology. He is the author of five evaluation books including a new, 4th edition of "Utilization-Focused Evaluation" (Sage, 2008) and "Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods" (2002, 3rd edition). Previous editions of these books have been used in over 300 universities worldwide.

For Wade Cory, it started with a glass of vodka, swiped from a bottle hidden away in his best friend's kitchen. "I started drinking when I was in Grade 6 or 7," says Cory, now 21. "It was pretty social at the beginning and then around Grade 9, I found marijuana. That was my favorite drug of all time, and started using that. It started out just on weekends and at parties."

High school life was good. His marks were fine and he was captain of the football team. But then his grades started to slip, he failed Grade 10 Science and everything started to revolve around his "obsession" with drugs and alcohol. "Ever since Grade 10 when I really started using weed, and then I went on to (magic) mushrooms and stuff like that, and Dexedrine, like prescription pills - it was just I thought about that more than anything else I'd ever thought about. I really loved sports, I really loved school, I loved friends, but all that became secondary to marijuana and drinking."

Cory stole his parents' vehicle on a school day and went joy riding with friends. He got a speeding ticket, a suspension from school and was in and out of treatment programs for the next while.

"I was fully in chaos in my life and I never thought that drugs and alcohol was the problem," he said. "I always thought something else was the problem: my parents were too controlling or the teacher was wrong."

A "six-day bender" that involved prescription pills, booze and marijuana brought everything to a head. He broke into his parents' house, nabbing items that he pawned off for money.

But on his next trip home, his parents weren't there, he had nowhere to go, no friends left, no drugs, no money, no job, he said.

"I came home and there were bars on the window, keeping me out."

Later, his mother managed to get him to a hospital.

"Emergency said I shouldn't be alive just because of how many drugs I had in my system," he said. "They put me in the psych ward and that's where I stayed for a week." "That's where it came to me: 'What am I doing with my life?"' Now that he's had his "moment of clarity" and intensive treatment at the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre, he said parents need to realize that drug addicts and alcoholics "can lie pretty good."

"I fought my parents tooth and nail that it wasn't alcohol and drugs, and it was everything else. I lied to them. I would do anything to keep my drugs and alcohol around me, even if it was ruining my life."

Cory, meanwhile, has finished school, plays hockey with his fellow graduates at the recovery centre, goes on vacations with other "sober" friends and hasn't had a drink or taken drugs in four years.

"I know there's a solution out there, and I think a lot of people have no idea, absolutely no idea what's going on in a kid's mind when he's a drug addict," he said. "It's pretty much unbelievable how much my life has done a 180, and just totally went the other way, I think, around family. What it's made me be able to do is just be a normal person in society, no better or less than anybody else, but I can be part of the society now."