Drug-Treatment Center Offers Parents Hope -- Nursery Allows Children To Stay Close To Addicts

Dustin, age 4, and Ashley, who turned 3 last week, are helping their mother recover from drugs.

Along with a dozen other preschool aged children, Dustin and Ashley live in the nursery at SeaDruNar's drug treatment center on Queen Anne Hill. Their mother, Laura Wiley, 35, a heroin addict for 23 years, has a room across the courtyard.

Thanks to the nursery, Wiley is able to be with her children much of the day. ``It's a whole new experience, getting to know your kids again - or for the first time,'' she said.

The children, with their happy faces and shining eyes, have become beacons for their mother, pointing the way to a new life. Yet without SeaDruNar's nursery, the only facility of its kind on the West Coast according to SeaDruNar staff, Wiley's children wouldn't be part of her life. They'd be in foster homes.

During the past few years on drugs, Wiley recalls, she would go out early to get her methadone - a drug provided for addicts to wean them from heroin. After that, she'd head back to the apartment to park Dustin and Ashley in front of the TV. Then Wiley said she would go out to steal so she could buy heroin, cheating on the methadone program.

Because she was constantly high, Wiley remembers very little of the children's lives. ``I missed so much,'' she said.

``My whole day was really wrapped up in using (heroin) and getting the money,'' she said. ``I don't know any way other than being high.''

When Wiley went to jail on a drug charge in June, Dustin and Ashley were sent to a foster home. They joined their mother in October, two months after Wiley had entered the court-ordered treatment program.

Wiley is one of 16 women and 12 men now in residence at SeaDruNar's Queen Anne Hill house. She'll be there in a tightly controlled program for six month before she's eligible to move to a similar house on Capitol Hill and take an outside job.

The mothers of the 13 children - ages one month through five years - now at the SeaDruNar nursery take turns on the two beds in the nursery, providing 24-hour care for the children. During the day, two child-care workers assist, and some of the children spend the day at preschool. Dustin goes to a Head Start program in the afternoon; Ashley goes to Childhaven, a care and treatment program for abused or neglected preschool children who have been referred by the state Child Protective Services.

Wiley's initiation to heroin came in New York at age 12 during a wild ``hippie'' period using marijuana, uppers, downers and LSD. Her teen years were spent, mostly high, in Los Angeles. With time in California prisons for drug-related felonies already behind her, she came to the Northwest in 1980 after divorcing her first husband.

Two children from that marriage have been in foster care since 1981. Ages 11 and 13, they are ``super fortunate'' to be in a wonderful family on the Eastside, said Wiley.

But wracked with guilt about losing the two older children, Wiley's resolve to change her life flows from her determination to hang onto Ashley and Dustin. She wants them to ``grow up in one neighborhood and go to one school,'' a chance Wiley says she didn't get because her family moved frequently following her father's advertising business jobs.

Wiley attended 16 different schools without ever graduating from high school.

Wiley says she can see a big difference in her children already, after only three months with her in SeaDruNar's stable environment. They're happier, calmer, she said.

Frequently, addicts come to SeaDruNar destitute. ``They've been into it (drugs) and lost just about everything,'' said Wiley. The children who join them have nothing, she said.

To help out, Wiley has taken the job of ``expediter'' at the Queen Anne treatment center, 200 W. Comstock St. That means she's on the phone for hours seeking donations of clothing and supplies for the nursery. Through her efforts, each child got a warm coat from the Forgotten Children's Fund and several toys from Toys for Tots at Christmas.

Of her previous efforts to kick her drug habit, Wiley said, ``I just plain wasn't ready to quit.''

This time she and her children have SeaDruNar, a program founded almost 21 years ago by Nan Busby, a recovering addict. With three locations - Georgetown, Capitol Hill and Queen Anne - plus a recycling business to provide work and raise money, SeaDruNar now serves about 100 recovering addicts at any one time. All the counselors and staff are former addicts, constant reminders that drugs can be beat, said Toni Taylor, director of treatment at the 29-bed Queen Anne house. Nine years ago, SeaDruNar ``saved my life,'' she said.

``I've got a whole new life starting now,'' said Wiley, who has always held a job of one kind or another despite her addiction.

During her stay on Queen Anne Hill, Wiley works two days a week at SeaDruNar's recycling center in the industrial area. After six months, when she moves on to the program's ``phase 2,'' she'll be able to take an outside job.

Wiley has worked as a cashier, secretary and cocktail waitress and once passed the test for real estate agents. She'd like to sell real estate but thinks her felony convictions will keep her from ever getting a license.

Once out of SeaDruNar, Wiley plans to settle on the Eastside, because she needs to stay away from ``95 percent'' of her Seattle friends, the ones who might bring back the deadening world of drugs.

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To donate

-- SeaDruNar's Queen Anne Hill treatment center needs clothing for men, women and children - especially children. Anyone wishing to make a donation may call Laura Wiley at 284-2010.