• Treatment is crucial, yet funds slow to a trickle
• A family's love changes one woman's life
• Alternative program employs practicality
• 'Low-risk drinking' can prevent a small problem from getting out of hand
• Problem escalates among women; elderly learn to reach out for help
• 1997 deaths related to alcohol
• Team of reporters, editors, photographer produced series
• Series summary: Maine pays dearly as families are ruined by alcohol abuse

Erin O'Brien decorates a ceiling tile for the Kittery Youth Center. The space on the ceiling tiles has been sold to area businesses, families, groups and individuals to raise money and to serve as a visible sign of support by the Kittery community for its youth. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

KITTERY - If there's any question about the support that the people of Kittery have given their new youth center, all you have to do is step through the door and look up.

Like a colorful patchwork quilt, brightly painted tiles cover the 11,000-square-foot ceiling with messages like ''In Loving Memory of Louie'' - a memorial to a distraught little girl's deceased cat. Each tile was purchased by a local business, community group or Kittery resident, then decorated by a kid.

It's just one of the many ways this coastal community has put its money, time and heart into the fight against alcohol abuse.

Look around this spacious youth center - an abandoned grocery store - and it's almost impossible to find something that hasn't been donated or built with volunteer labor from the community, all the way down to the electricity and plumbing.

The kids chip in their time, too. Most come because they want to, but some because they have to - because a school principal or judge has ordered them to work off their transgressions with sweat or a paint brush.

But there are no preachy slogans here, and few direct references to alcohol or drugs. There's just this subtle, underlying message: Give kids positive outlets for their emotions and energy, support them when they're troubled, get the community involved in their lives, and maybe they won't be tempted to drink or do drugs when the pressures of life become hard to handle.

''There's good in every one of them,'' Priscilla Guy says of the kids who hang out here after school and every Saturday. ''It's just harder to find in some.''

Spurred to action by her own experience

She is one of the driving forces behind the Kittery Chemical and Drug Awareness Program (K-Cap), an organization started by a handful of Kittery residents in 1983 that has blossomed into a communitywide effort that includes the youth center.

Priscilla Guy explains the workings of the Kittery Youth Center to one of their newest volunteers, Jennifer Rockwell, a teacher at the Frisbee School in Kittery. Guy is one of the driving forces behind the Kittery Chemical and Drug Awareness Program, a communitywide effort that includes the youth center. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Prevention programs like these have gained new importance over the past few years as the demographics of drinking have taken a downward turn. Research has shown that if you can delay a child's first use of alcohol, the child is less likely to have problems with drinking later in life.

But the age at which Maine kids are having their first drink is getting younger. Of special concern to state substance abuse specialists are the transition years between elementary and middle school, middle school and high school, and high school and college. The number of kids who drink typically skyrockets during these periods.

Priscilla Guy's son, Leo, was in one of those important transition years when he took his first sip of alcohol. Over the following decade, alcohol and drugs would stop his heart twice, and break his mother's heart a million times.

The story of how Leo Guy and his mother fought their way out of his alcoholism illustrates how far prevention efforts have come in Maine.

Leo Guy had his first swallow of beer sometime between the eighth and ninth grades. He considered himself a late starter; most of his friends had begun experimenting a couple of years earlier. By the middle of his freshman year, he was hanging out with older kids under a big bushy tree behind the high school.

Every Friday morning, a pony keg of beer would mysteriously appear under the tree. The kids would sneak off and drink from it all day, and when the school day was over they'd take it to somebody's house and polish it off.

After a while, the beer lost some of its thrill andLeo started experimenting with harder stuff.

''This kid said that he had been stealing Scotch whiskey from his Dad a little at a time, and he had a Skippy jar filled with - it must have been 18 or 20 ounces - full of scotch,'' he recalls. ''And I said 'Bring it in, I'll drink it.'

''So he brought it in, and I guzzled the whole thing all at once, like in two minutes before school one day,'' he says. ''I ended up getting suspended for that. And I got really, really drunk.''

Priscilla Guy was horrified, and tried to find help. But counselors told her she was being overprotective. Her friends told her don't worry, he's just being a typical boy. Her priest - Leo had been an altar boy - laughed and said he's drinking scotch, at least the kid's got good taste.

But Priscilla couldn't stop worrying.

''Why would a 15-year-old drink a whole peanut butter jar of scotch at seven o'clock in the morning?'' she wondered. ''That to me was scary, and I could not understand it. I guess if he had been at a party and he had experimented, I wouldn't have been so alarmed.''

An alcoholic has been described as ''an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.'' Guy says that description fit him to T. He wanted to do well in life, but felt less capable than other people.

He discovered that drinking was something he was good at, and his new friends didn't judge him for it. He felt like he was a part of something, that he finally belonged.

Leo felt bad about the scotch incident, so for the next two or three months he was on his best behavior. He made the honor roll, he did all of his chores.

''That would reinforce to me that I was being overprotective,'' Priscilla Guy says. ''I am crazy. There's nothing wrong with this kid.''

A fifth in 10 minutes

Leo was still a freshman in high school. The Guy family had a time sharing condominium at Evergreen Valley, and they decided to take a short vacation. Leo brought along a friend, and each of them found an adult to buy them a bottle of booze; his friend got vodka, Leo got Southern Comfort.

Leo didn't even know what Southern Comfort was. But the boys took their bottles into the game room of the ski lodge and started drinking.

Leo downed the fifth of Southern Comfort in about 10 minutes.

An Evergreen Valley employee saw what Leo had done and called an ambulance. The girl was concerned because she had once been at a party where a kid was passed out in a chair. Everyone was laughing at him, marveling at how drunk he was. But it turned out the boy was dead.

On the way to the hospital in Bridgton, Leo's heart stopped. Doctors brought him back, pumped his stomach and gave him a charcoal flush.

All Leo recalls about the incident is waking up in the car on the way back to the condo the next day. ''I just remember thinking, 'Man, I'm probably going to get in trouble for this,' '' he says.

Priscilla kept increasing her son's restrictions, kept the punishments coming. Eventually Leo moved out of his parents' house and stopped going to school for a while. He lived with an older couple in Kittery in an house where there was regular partying.

All his life, Leo's parents had kept their doors unlocked. During his senior year, they started locking them to keep him out.

''I used to break in and steal food and drop off my laundry,'' Leo recalls. ''And the bad part about it was my mom was enabling me so much she was doing the laundry and putting it in my drawers.''

Buying booze illegally brought Leo into a circle of other illegal drugs. Soon he was shooting cocaine and heroin on almost a daily basis. Once in a while, when nothing else was available, he'd drink a concoction of Sterno and orange juice.

Leo was about 21 years old and living with his parents again when he overdosed the second time, this time on cocaine. Again, he was lucky: His folks were home and heard the crash as he passed out.

He was rushed to York Hospital, where a substance-abuse counselor recommended that Leo go to Mercy Hospital's inpatient facility. Priscilla was relieved; it was the first time someone told her she wasn't imagining things.

Leo had heard there was a six-month waiting period to get into Mercy's program, so he agreed to go. He remembers sitting ''in front of 20 doctors, and they all grilled me.'' They told him they wanted to admit him, that they could find a bed for him right away.

Leo told them he had no clothes or other personal belongings with him, thinking that would get him off the hook. But when he turned around, there was his mother, holding a suitcase she had packed for him in advance.

Leo stayed, but it wasn't because he wanted to quit drinking and doing drugs.

''It was just to get everybody off my back and cool things down,'' he says. ''But there I learned about 12-step programs and AA. And even though I wasn't ready to quit then, the seed was planted.''

While Leo was going through the 28-day program, Priscilla discovered the support groups the hospital had for parents of alcoholics, ''and boy, was I ready to listen.''

Then she went home and started the first parental support group within a 50-mile radius. She wanted to tell others what she had learned: that their kids' alcohol abuse ''was not a moral issue, your kid is not a bad kid, your kid has a disease. Punishment is not the answer.''

Time to quit

He was still living in California when he finally decided it was time to quit.

''I knew eventually that I'd have to go back to AA to get my life together,'' he says. ''And, as many of us say, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I just couldn't do it anymore. So I went to a noon AA meeting. I just sat down, and I was ready to do whatever they told me to stay sober.''

Leo Guy, now 33, owns a furniture liquidation business in Portsmouth, N.H. He and his wife have a 2-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son.

He's been sober for 10 years, but the legacy of his drinking life is still touching teen-agers in Kittery today.

Guidance counselors call him sometimes when they have a kid they know is headed for trouble. He talks to classes, telling students that alcoholism is a quiet, cunning, baffling disease that will sneak up on you.

Most of them are curious and ask a lot of questions. The quiet ones, he knows, are the ones who are probably already using. He discreetly slips them his phone number and tells them to call later if they want to talk.

For her part, Priscilla Guy is still trying to share what she's learned and save some other mother's child from hurting himself. She's even been known to pick a kid up at school and drive him to an AA meeting herself.

But perhaps the most lasting impact has come through the Guys' involvement with K-Cap.

K-Cap first came into existence in 1983, with help from the Maine Office of Substance Abuse, and started the community's first major drug-and-alcohol awareness programs.

''I wanted to see things changed,'' Priscilla Guy says. ''I wanted to be a help to parents, to be there and let them know they're not alone. And for the youth, to give them help and support even though they have experimented. I wanted them to learn that it still isn't too late to change.''

Taking positive approach

In the past it's been hard to convince anyone that spending money on prevention programs does any good because there was little research to show what works and what doesn't. But today we know more.

Research has shown, for example, that programs that try to scare kids away from alcohol don't work. In fact, emphasizing the dangers of alcohol abuse may have just the opposite effect, attracting kids who are risk-takers to drinking.

Studies also have shown that DARE, typically taught in the fifth and sixth grades by police officers, has virtually no impact on alcohol use when it's the only program kids are exposed to.

Today, Maine's prevention programs are based on a concept called resiliency. These programs try to reduce risk factors that make kids vulnerable to alcohol abuse, but also look at the factors that protect them from trouble and try to build on them.

They focus on and nurture the positive qualities that have helped countless victims of war, poverty and child abuse bounce back from trauma - things like the ability to develop caring, empathetic relationships, the power to communicate well and skill at problem-solving.

Resilient kids also have strong bonds with at least some of the adults in their lives, and they are able to connect to the community in meaningful ways.

The concept of resiliency supports the notion that it takes more than just throwing money at the problem of alcohol abuse to deal with it effectively.

''People have to buy into (prevention programs) on a local level, and it has to be something that the communities see as critical,'' says Lynn Duby, director of the Maine Office of Substance Abuse.

Kittery sets example

And, if the community's response to the new youth center is any indication, that somewhat saccharin saying is indeed true.

Young people need only look up at the ceiling of the Kittery Youth Center to see their community support. Sponsors ''buy'' a ceiling tile, which is then decorated. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

The center is filled with the evidence: The local Pic 'n Pay donated the snack bar with the white countertop and blue stools. In a back corner room, teachers give up their free time to tutor math. The movies shown on the TV in the main hall are donated by Peoples' Video down the street - but not before the owner of the store screens them first.

It all started five years ago, when the volunteers at K-Cap got a grant from the Office of Substance Abuse to do a survey to learn more about their community and its potential for substance-abuse problems.

What they found was disturbing. Forty-five percent of students at Robert W. Traip Academy, the local high school, said that someone in their family had a severe alcohol or drug problem.

They also discovered their kids were drinking at younger ages. While most of the high school students said they had had their first drink between the ages of 10 and 15, more than half of the students at the Frank C. Frisbee School, the middle school, said they'd had their first drink between the ages of 7 and 12.

A dozen Kittery residents, including Priscilla Guy, went on a Bethel retreat to be trained by a staff member from the Office of Substance Abuse. The staff helped the group pinpoint the community's risk factors and come up with a plan for dealing with each one of them.

The group asked Leo Guy to coordinate the project, called ''Kittery: A Community that Cares.''

The main thing that became apparent through all the research and surveys was that the kids of Kittery needed a place to hang out, a place unfettered by the school rules or town policy.

After trying a local recreation center first, in August 1996 they approached the owner of an abandoned supermarket located halfway between the middle school and the high school. She agreed to let the youth center have it for free until March 1998, to see if the program will work.

Then everyone pitched in. Students came by after school to help. Sailors worked on renovating the ''confidentiality room,'' the room where youth AA and Al-Ateen meetings are held. An old walk-in freezer was transformed into a computer room, and someone donated Internet service.

The center officially opened in May. Right away, artists volunteered to teach art classes to the kids, and helped them to paint a mural outside commemorating the town's 350th anniversary.

Two boys play chess at Kittery's youth center, where kids come to work out, do homework, play games and hang out. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Inside the center's main hall, there's workout equipment, a snack bar, a lounge area for sitting and talking, a pool table, a pingpong table and a TV.

On one afternoon when there was no school, the center was bustling with noisy boys and girls, mostly middle-school kids. Barbara Moulton was dropping off her grandson, Joshua Barnaby, who's 8. She says he begs to come here.

''I think it's really needed because of the latchkey kids,'' Moulton says. ''The parents are working and these kids come home and there's nobody to talk to. They can come here and do their homework, there are computers, things to play with, other kids.''

So far the youth center doesn't seem to be cool enough for teen-agers, who hang out at the door and peer inside but won't come in. Dick Dennis, the center's executive director, hopes to change that by offering more movies and dances for that age group, as well as fixing up the workout area.

Alternative to punishment

Local schools have begun sending kids to K-Cap and the youth center in lieu of suspension. A high school boy who went to a school dance drunk, for example, had to come to the center to do 30 hours of community service.

When kids come in for community service, they're given a choice of three projects to work on so it's less a harsh punishment than a gentle correction.

''Some of them come in crying, they're so ashamed that they have to come do this,'' Priscilla Guy says. ''We tell them that there's nothing wrong with it, it's not a punishment. They just made a bad choice, and now they're going to rectify it.''

District Court Judge Jon Levy and other York County judges sometimes send first-time offenders to K-Cap and the youth center. It's usually a kid who has a possession of alcohol charge coupled with a criminal mischief or criminal trespass charge, he said.

Levy says he doesn't expect that every child's life will be turned around by contact with K-Cap, but he does think that such programs send a positive message to kids, making them feel more wanted and connected to the community.

''It's a tool I really welcome, and I would like to see more programs like it,'' he says.

Budget cutbacks have made it unlikely that other communities will be able to get the same jump-start that K-Cap got when its staff received its initial training from state prevention specialists.

Of course, Priscilla Guy will tell you, money just gets the ball rolling. In Kittery, it took the whole village to reach out to its children.

At the Kittery Youth Center, there's always a wish list in the window. This summer, they asked for fans, and that very night a man stopped by with two fans and a plastic tub filled with art supplies.

Priscilla asked him for his name and he refused, saying, ''I just want you all to know I care.'' Her eyes grow moist, remembering.

''It's the most beautiful experience in my life,'' she says.