A real welcome

Visitors usually notice the sign "Welcome Station" hung by the gate. With the grass in the front yard neatly trimmed and bordered by shrubs, the place reminds one of a well-kept bungalow in a metro subdivision.

This, however, is not a suburban home but a drug rehabilitation center within the sprawling National Center for Mental Health (ncmh) complex in Mandaluyong City. It is run by the Welcome-Palad Foundation Inc., founded by retired Col. Florentino Diño.

Lory Diño relates how he was guided in 1997 to the place where the foundation’s rehab center, which they also call Welcome Station, now stands.

Desperate for a way to save his son Victor from 13 years of constant drug use, Lory was about to buy a lot in Tagaytay to build a rehabilitation center. Driving to the ncmh complex to pick up the doctors to discuss the center, he made a wrong turn and saw the sign he believed was divine providence at work.

"It was an abandoned building. Dilapidated. The ceiling had caved in, but the structure was okay," says Lory, an architect.

The sign was all that remained of a previous drug rehab center established in 1991 by a team of medical workers from ncmh who participated in a seminar conducted by the director of the Canadian rehab center Le Portage. That center closed down in 1995, but no one took the sign down.

Four months after the new Welcome Station started operating, Victor was admitted for a year of rehabilitation. He was then on his fourth relapse after being repeatedly admitted to the National Bureau of Investigation (nbi) rehab center. "In the government, they undergo six months of rehab. Walang gagaling na tao kung six months lang," Lory says.

Victor, now 34, has successfully fended off the craving to use drugs.His brother Vincent, now 33, has also shaken off the drug habit.

Lory says Vincent stopped using drugs since he married, but Victor was a harder case. Victor’s current passion is participating in paintball games, but has also gone through racing cars and breeding dogs, particularly Great Danes. He had just returned from a paintball competition in Australia.

Victor explains there are two schools of thought in rehabilitating drug dependents. One school says that addiction is a disease, but Victor believes otherwise.

"We believe you can change your behavior. It’s a matter of channeling your energy. You can do a lot of other things to feel that high," he says.

Victor now runs the center as its director, while his mother, Mercedes, handles financial and administrative functions. Though he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of Welcome Station, Lory contributes about P1 million every year to sustain the center. What he earns selling airtime as an executive in Radio Veritas, he puts into the center.

"This has been my family’s apostolate work since the time we started," Lory says. "If you make this a business, the trainees will not get better." He adds that he gets one indigent "trainee," their term for the patients, treated for free each time the center has a paying trainee.

When it started in 1997, the center never held less than 50 trainees, mostly adolescents. Like other parents with drug-dependent children, Lory and Mercedes did not see Victor for the first six months of his stay.

The center is run like a household, with trainees listing the items they need. "That’s (the concept of) therapeutic community," Lory explains.

After Victor successfully underwent rehabilitation, Lory decided to go to Canada’s Le Portage to "reorient." He was accompanied by Victor and Dr. Romel Papa, the program director and psychiatrist of the NBI rehab center who is a consultant at Welcome Station. They went into Le Portage as "addicts" to experience the treatment program for themselves and adapt it to Filipinos. Lory says the Canadian program did not address the trainees’ spiritual needs and, at 18 months, was too long. The Diños compressed the program to one year with the help of Papa and other psychiatrists.

Values formation was put in the first part of the program and the religious aspect last. "Addicts don’t have values. They no longer know how to brush their teeth or take a bath. We start there," Lory explains.

The center’s location is also beneficial to the trainees, according to Lory. Since it is located in the ncmh complex, psychiatrists drop in every afternoon to help out.

Welcome Station’s treatment program is "very basic," explains Victor, with trainees relearning simple acts such as "saying thank you when someone does you a favor... exercising... eating the right food. For people like us, it’s difficult."

Practically all those involved in running the center day to day are former drug dependents, including the attending physician. Victor says this is important because former drug dependents like himself understand what the trainees are going through.

One of the ways by which Welcome Station drives its lessons home is through mediated confrontation, in which a trainee "takes note of another’s fumble. There’s a middleman. Even though it’s a simple fumble, it is noted here so they can be aware of it when they’re outside," Victor says. Fumbles can include removing one’s shoes at an inappropriate time or place, bickering, or neglecting to do assigned chores.

The center also treats alcoholics, although Victor prefers to have hospitals handle those cases. "The detoxification of alcoholics can be fatal if not handled properly," he says. "They (sometimes) have seizures and can die from them."

After several months inside the center, a trainee can be reintroduced to the outside world, but gradually. The sudden shift to an unstructured environment increases the chances of relapse. At Welcome Station, a trainee first visits his family for 12 hours, after which he returns to the center. This furlough gets longer until the trainee can already handle the unstructured environment.

"Once you graduate from Welcome Station, you’re still always welcome. If you feel like using (drugs), call us up or come here. You can stay for a week," Victor says.

Victor observes that most of the center’s trainees now range in age from 35 to 70 years, compared to the mostly adolescent population they had in 1997. This trend can be attributed to more young people being aware of the dangers of drug use. The "hardcore dependents," 35 years and above, are those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was no drug rehabilitation program to speak of, Victor says. "They just cleaned themselves up. The problem was still there. It just needed a spark" for them to return to using drugs, he adds.

Victor points out that the drugs they used before were mostly marijuana and syrups, "not like shabu or ecstasy, which are very addictive. I heard Valium (a sleeping pill) is on a roll again."

Victor–who has taken marijuana, cough syrup, heroin, LSD, and shabu during his 13 years as a drug dependent–considers each day he does not take drugs as a victory in itself. And now he is helping others experience that same victory, one day at a time.

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Contact Welcome Station at tel. 531-9001 local 382.