Cri-Help: Turning Fear and Loathing Into Sobriety and Redemption

Editor's Note: This is Part Two of a series profiling the drug treatment facility Cri-Help, which is located in North Hollywood.

Part One: Cri-Help: 41 Years on the Front Lines in the Battle Against Addiction

‘That Whole Hippie Thing… It Just Became About Drugs for Me’

Cri-Help was founded 41 years ago during a tough and turbulent time Hunter S. Thompson described as “the foul year of Our Lord, 1971.”

In his book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Thompson illustrated the dying 60s counter culture dream and its erosion into narcissistic drug addiction, writing that “you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

One of the young people caught in that breaking wave was Cri-Help’s Director of Client Services Marlene Nadel. Raised in a conservative Jewish family, she joined the counter culture movement as a teenager in the San Fernando Valley and was washed into a deep abyss of heroin addiction by the age of 22.

“I started using in high school and then afterwards I just went overboard. I was very innocent and naïve and I just got swept up in that whole hippie thing. I was on the back end, so it just became about drugs for me,” Nadel said.

Desperate to help her, her father pulled strings to get her into Cri-Help, a brand new drug treatment facility that in reality was nothing more than two houses in Sun Valley.

“They were just two houses, a house and a guest house, a little funky,” Nadel said. “You didn’t even have to wear shoes in those days. There was no treatment, really. It was more like a hippie commune.”

Nadel likes to show off a photo of herself sitting on the front porch of the original Cri-Help house in 1971, a beautiful and naïve  girl in jean shorts with long brown hair and a sweet smile. Staring at the photo would make any man yearn for the days of free love. But like many addicts, it is impossible to see the darkness and turmoil that was stirring inside her. Were it not for her father getting her into Cri-Help, Nadel said that young girl probably would have ended up dead.

Through the support at Cri-Help, Nadel not only found a reason to live, but she found a life, too, and this July will be 41 years since that photo was taken. She and some of the other clients didn’t necessarily all stay clean all of the time in the early days, but slowly an idea started to form and spread – an idea that they were on the right track.

“Sometimes we stayed clean and sometimes we didn’t, there was too much freedom. But there was this sense of, ‘This could work.’ Even if you had a hard time staying clean, you saw that there were some addicts staying clean and it gave you a sense of hope,” Nadel said.

Cri-Help was founded by Bill Beck, a former addict who wanted it to be a place addicts could get clean through group support and the 12 steps of Narcotics Anonymous. The idea of in-house drug treatment for addicts was a new one back then.

“In those days there was no detox. You could go to a psych hospital. Olive View had a psych ward where you could detox and they did have methadone. But really there wasn’t anything for addicts,” Nadel said.

‘I Still Didn’t Know If I Wanted to be Clean’

Beck died in 2007, and if he is the grandfather of Cri-Help, then Nadel and Jack Bernstein are its mother and father. Both were among the first ever treated at Cri-Help and have basically been a part of it ever since, although Nadel took a three-year break some 30 years ago.

Nadel and Bernstein were married back in the 70s and have a child and grandchild together. They divorced after a few years but remained friendly and close. Nadel left Cri-Help after the divorce, but within three years she was back working there, and has remained ever since. She credits him with inspiring and motivating her to get clean.

“Jack was in Cri-Help with me, and he really was the one that inspired me. I still didn’t know if I wanted to be clean, but I was having some fun in Cri-Help, too,” Nadel told me. “There was a lot going on. And I kinda liked him, and he was one of the few that was really doing it.”

Bernstein and Nadel were the only two that spoke at a recent cookout at Cri-Help celebrating its 41st anniversary. It’s rare and incredible to see a divorced couple working so closely together, and they managed to tease, make fun of and compliment each other during their speeches. After Bernstein spoke, where he expressed continued amazement that a “nickel and dime dope fiend” like he had been could one day be the CEO of an organization like Cri-Help, he introduced Nadel by saying, “And now Marlene will come up here and contradict everything I just said.”

At the cookout, Nadel recalled her first night at Cri-Help when, sick from heroin withdrawal, another female client gave her some pills to help her feel better. The pills were against the rules, and when Beck and Bernstein found out, she was called into the office. Bernstein, although only a client for a few weeks, had already been promoted to being part of the staff because in those days there was no staff. Beck let Bernstein decide if she was going to get kicked out. He let her stay.

“Jack came in with his buddy from New York. He didn’t want to be clean, but his buddy did, so he came to support his buddy. They both kicked heroin cold turkey in Cri-Help,” Nadel told me. “His buddy left, he ended up staying. His buddy ended up dying of an overdose.”

So did the woman who gave Nadel the pills.

‘There Was a Camaraderie’

Not long after meeting, Nadel and Bernsteins’s flirtation turned into a romantic relationship, but it was not meant to last, although their friendship and connection to Cri-Help was.  

“That was part of my attraction to Cri-Help was I found him very attractive and we had fun. I was young,” she said. “We did end up together and had a child and realized like they say in recovery you shouldn’t get involved right away. There’s so much going on internally that sometimes you mistake lust or the need to have somebody to love. And I loved Jack with all my heart and he is a man with such integrity and that’s why I believe Cri-Help has survived many hard times. He’s got a lot of class and that’s what I liked about him in the first place. He wasn’t really husband material and I wasn’t really wife material, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

In the early days, Cri-Help’s main source of funds came from clients selling raffle tickets in parking lots around the Valley.

“Sometimes we would pocket some of the money from the ticket sales before we came back – because we were dishonest addicts – but we’d turn in enough to keep the place running, and we all did it together,” Nadel remembered. “There was a camaraderie and sense that we knew this was important.”

Slowly but surely, Cri-Help grew. After a time it moved to its current location on Burbank Boulevard, and in the mid-90s, thanks to a $9 million donation, the current facility, the four-acre George T. Pfleger Center, was built.

The George T. Fleger Center is four stories high and contains 40 dorm-style rooms accommodating three people. It includes a large dining area/meeting room, recreation and entertainment rooms, classrooms, computer lab, literacy library, group therapy rooms, an exercise room and a circular meditation tower. There is also a large outdoor area that includes a basketball/volleyball court, patio and a running track. The center also houses a 15-bed detox unit overseen by a registered nurse and 24-hour staff supervision. Cri-Help also operates a facility in East L.A.

After four decades of helping addicts, Nadel said she and Bernstein and other long-time staff keep learning and getting better.

“What makes me sad now is that I’m in the last chapters. And it makes me really sad, because I love this place so much. I’m in my 60s now… I do plan on being here a while still, but if you span it over 40 years I know it’s not going to be another 40 and so I tell a lot stories to people. I just would hate to see the spirit of this—” Nadel said while tapping quickly on the picture of her from 1971 on the steps of Cri-Help, “—lost.”