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PAUL OJANEN: My name is Paul Ojanen, and I should tell you a few things about myself. I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict, and I was in treatment six times before I turned 21. I spent five birthdays and Christmases locked in jail or in treatment.

I've sniffed gas, and I've drunk beer. I've dropped acid, snorted coke, and shot crystal meth. I've been sober for 18 years. I worked in two halfway houses in Duluth. I've got a college degree. I have a 12-year-old daughter, and she's the love of my life. Thank God she's never seen me drunk.

I know you've heard a lot about meth and crack in all the headlines, but here's what I've seen with my own eyes. Alcohol still destroys more people. Let's go for a walk.

We're right smack in the middle of downtown Duluth. This is First Street. First street is everything from housing, apartment houses, single-room occupancy, to businesses. There's everything here. This is where all the shelters are. It doesn't look like a bowery, but this is what you would call the bowery. You will see people walking up and down the street who are intoxicated. And this is the only place where there's services for street people is down here.

Right next to Lake Superior Liquor. That's Cecilia

SPEAKER 1: Oh, my God. You again.

PAUL OJANEN: Been a year. What you guys up to?

SPEAKER 1: Nothing good.

SPEAKER 2: A couple dollars.

PAUL OJANEN: A couple of dollars for what? What if I give you $1, hey, for old times?

SPEAKER 2: Better than nothing. Old times.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, thanks.

PAUL OJANEN: Yeah, I'll see you.

SPEAKER 1: Nice see you again.

PAUL OJANEN: You take care.

SPEAKER 2: I will.

PAUL OJANEN: That was Cecilia. And the other one was Robert and Sam. I don't know the exact history of their lives, but they just-- they probably been drinking since their teens. In six years of working down here, I never saw them sober. And they were the people that you would kick out of your entryways.

They might be so intoxicated that they would come into your lobby, pull down their pants, and urinate. But they would be so out of it, that they weren't doing it consciously. They were just doing it.

This is the Cozy Bar. You can see it's already open. They're already serving. What is it? 9:30? 9:30 AM.

And you got whites. You got Blacks. You got Indians. You got everybody in there.

Some of those people, they have the shakes. If they don't drink, they're going to go through DTs later in the day. They might ingest four beers for breakfast just to keep them from getting the shakes.

My uncle had them. And he would talk about one time that there were small dogs coming out of the wall at him and trying to bite him. And these were-- look, these were the withdrawal hallucinations.

We're at First Avenue East and First Street in Duluth. And I used to run that building right there. That's an apartment building.

Hey.

SPEAKER 3: Hey.

PAUL OJANEN: Hey, Anne.

SPEAKER 3: I kind of missed you around here for a long time. But now, we haven't seen you for so long.

PAUL OJANEN: We're in the Frances Skinner building. And Frances was an old housing activist from years ago. And the building is named for her because this was one of the buildings that was redone for low-income people.

I was a live-in manager at the Skinner apartments for five years. Most of the residents are good tenants. Some of them work a couple part-time jobs. They can't afford to live anywhere else. Some of them live on assistance, and they have to get by on a few hundred dollars a month.

About 35 people live in the Skinner apartments. When I was the manager, maybe 1/3 of them at any time were chronic alcoholics. And before this visit, I hadn't been back for two years. Up on the second floor, I stopped in front of an apartment. It was the middle of the morning, but I could hear drunk voices through the door as I stood in the hall.

In this apartment, one of our tenants said, someone's got to do something, or you're going to have a dead man up there. About two or three weeks later, the police came and asked me to open the door for this man's family who called. He had two children and an ex-wife.

He had just been released from treatment six weeks before. I went in with the police, and the police for 20 minutes tried to talk with him. He was laying on the couch on his left side. There was a half empty bottle of vodka sitting next to the couch, but he was lucid.

And they repeatedly asked, do you want help? People are worried about you. Your kids love you. And he said, no, no, I'm all right. Sure you don't want to go to detox? No.

I came back one day, and one of my fellow-- my co-workers was standing outside looking up at the window. And I looked up and saw these flies in the window and went upstairs. And they were zipping up the body bag. And the smell was ungodly. It was a weekend in August. And it was probably 85, 90 degrees down here.

And we had to haul out the couch. And the coach in the same position that he would have been laying in when I saw him not but a couple of weeks before was completely and utterly soaked in blood-- the entire end of the couch. And this man was 38 years old, and he died from what medically is called esophageal varices.

And the veins in your esophagus are close to the surface. The alcohol wears the surface away. And if you keep it up, eventually, you start bleeding. And sometimes, they can stop. And other times, they can't and you die. And this is what had happened to this man.

We would draw straws whenever a situation would happen like that on who would walk in first. And I drew it a couple of times. And I lasted longer than most down here.

And every time I see a commercial about alcohol or-- and how sexy It is and how wonderful it is and how much fun it is, what it reminds me of is something completely different. So I don't like it, you know? I don't think of it as fun, and I don't-- I don't relate it to anything like that. I just relate it to a whole lot of disease and death.

We're in the alley. You see everything here. You see all the malt liquor bottles, all the garbage, the paper bag probably from that bottle. What do we have here?

Hey, Milwaukee special reserve premium beer. That's what you call a 40-- a 40 ouncer, 40 ounce malt liquor. Wino favorite. The malt liquor is stronger, and it's cheap. So it works good for what you're doing. Central Hillside United Ministry-- CHUM. Day drop-in center, emergency shelter, coffeehouse.

It's a gray nasty day, but dozens of people are standing on the sidewalk having a smoke outside the shelter. Most of them are men, but there's a woman leaning against the wall with her eyes about half open. I know her. Her name is Wendy.

I ask if she'll talk into the microphone. At first, she says, I'll have to give her enough money to buy a 40. Then she says, OK, she'll talk.

Where are you from originally?

SPEAKER 4: Red Lake.

PAUL OJANEN: How'd you end up down here?

SPEAKER 4: I got kicked out of my house in Red Lake.

PAUL OJANEN: Why?

SPEAKER 4: Because of alcohol.

PAUL OJANEN: How old are you?

SPEAKER 4: I'm 22.

PAUL OJANEN: How long you been down here?

SPEAKER 4: Off and on for six years.

PAUL OJANEN: What do you do in the day?

SPEAKER 4: Nothing.

PAUL OJANEN: Oh. We're going to walk some more. I'll see you.

It's funny because she was down here. And I knew how young she was all those years. She's just a little girl still when she's 16, you know, to me.

And if you feel for her because I've seen more than one when they're that young. And they're walking these streets, and you just go, this isn't-- she might get gang raped. She probably has been. And it's not because a crack, not because of meth. What does she want? She wanted a 40. And that's what you see every day, you know? And that's why I hate alcohol as much as I hate anything else.

OK, less than a block away, this is the dichotomy that-- when you walk around, you've got that going on, which is essentially part of the third world. And right next to that, someone who's probably a couple years older than her, you know, what kind of car is she driving? It looks like a Ford Focus. Operating a cell phone.

Wendy might not ever own a car or a cell phone. She might never get sober. Most chronic alcoholics don't, but some do.

This is a halfway house in Duluth. It looks like a big old family home in a neighborhood. Inside, six guys are sitting on couches in the living room waiting for an afternoon meeting. About a dozen men live here at a time. It's a bridge between treatment and living on their own. I spent six months here when I first got sober. I met my friend Scott Carey here.

These days, Scott and I go wilderness canoeing together. Back then, we were both fresh out of treatment. Scott was addicted to alcohol, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

SPEAKER 5: I didn't find this out until a few years ago. But my-- I guess it was kind of hushed up. My grandfather died while in treatment. He got into a fight with another client there over a bottle.

My father left when I was three years old, and I never saw the man sober. I just lost a brother 2 and 1/2 years ago. He was a year younger than me, and he died from an overdose. He was 40 years old.

And then his son just died last spring. And I have numerous other relatives that continue in their use. It's devastated my family really. I've decided that I'm not going to go that route, at least not today. On August 10 of 2004, God willing, I'll be sober as long as I used. So that's kind of a landmark for me-- 17 years, so.

PAUL OJANEN: Scott's worked here at the halfway house for 14 years. Now, he's the lead counselor. He hates alcohol as much as I do.

SPEAKER 5: You know, there's all kinds of talk about methamphetamine right now and cocaine and OxyContin. And those are still problems, but the biggest one that I see is the problem with alcohol. I don't know of a family that isn't touched by it. I don't know of a person that doesn't have a relative or have a friend whose life's been destroyed by their use of alcohol.

PAUL OJANEN: It's hard to get a reliable count of addicts. But here's an estimate from the Minnesota Department of Human Services. According to a DHS survey, more people have problems with alcohol than with any other drug. In fact, in Minnesota, nine times more people are hooked on alcohol than on all other drugs combined.

Out in the hallway, Scott and I looked at some pictures. Each year, the guys at the halfway house take a canoe trip. And each year, a collage of snapshots from the trip goes up on the wall. The guys in the photographs are smiling and clowning around and full of life. But most of the pictures include at least one man who's now dead.

SPEAKER 5: This one really stands out more than all the others. Out of the 12 clients that are in this picture, to the best of my knowledge, six of them have died. This man got out of the house and got himself a bottle of vodka, went to his apartment. He blew out a vein in his esophagus and bled to death.

Another man here, he just he just drank himself to death. I don't know how else to describe it. He just drank until his body gave up. I believe that one's a suicide. I know that one was a suicide.

This man here was shot to death by his girlfriend. It was a drunken and abusive relationship. And this one here was another suicide. And so, you know, it is a hard job. It's an extremely hard job. You're going to lose people.

If I have 12 men and one survives, that's a plus because, otherwise, they would all be dead or they would all die. It might take two years. It might take six months. It might take 20 years, 30, but it's going to eventually kill them.

PAUL OJANEN: Scott likes these men. He says, without booze, almost every one of them is a good guy. But Scott knows most people don't see it that way.

SPEAKER 5: They see the guy laying in the alley down on First Street here in Duluth who's wet his pants, and he's passed out. And they make a moral judgment on that-- that he's h willed or something like that. It has nothing to do with that.

That was not his plan. He never had plans for doing that. He never had plans for living that way. That's where he ended up though.

PAUL OJANEN: Scott and I don't know why we're alive. We've talked about it with other friends who were recovered addicts. Some of them went through treatment 10 or 15 times. Finally, something clicked.

We all agree on this-- if we hadn't gone through treatment, we wouldn't be sober, and we probably wouldn't even be living. But what about the guy who goes through treatment 20 times and still can't get sober? What do we do about him?

We don't send diabetics out in the street to fend for themselves. We don't tell people with terminal cancer that we won't waste any more medical care on them. Maybe we have to think about offering street alcoholics what amounts to hospice care. They're slowly killing themselves, but they're human beings, and they deserve a warm, clean place to live out their days.

SPEAKER 6: Paul Ojanen has worked in two halfway houses in Duluth. He's been sober for 18 years. Our story, Alcoholic Central, was produced by Chris Julin of Minnesota Public Radio.

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