‘Now there are 10 times that number’

In the world of sober living, Maine’s largest city has become a sort of mecca. People come from across the Northeast to sober houses tucked into Portland’s quiet neighborhoods and bustling downtown.

“Ten years ago, there were three or four recovery houses in the Portland area, and now there are 10 times that number,” said Springel, who volunteers for a group trying to self-regulate the industry and tracks sober homes in a personal effort to ensure each one stocks the overdose-reversing medication naloxone, branded Narcan.

“We’ve seen a period of rapid growth,” he said, “and along with that growth, we’ve seen the establishment of recovery residences of different kinds, including some that, frankly, are not operating at the highest standards.”

People come to sober homes around Portland from all over. But they usually make the trip after arriving at a personal rock bottom.

For Jesse Harvey, bottom was the concrete floor of a Massachusetts prison cell.

It was July 2015 and he recalled sitting alone in a cell at Bridgewater State Hospital swaddled in a suicide-prevention smock.

“Everything was concrete and everything was metal, and I was in this ridiculously itchy and scratchy turtle suit, and the guards would come by on regular intervals and look in the little window of the door to make sure I hadn’t killed myself yet,” Harvey said. “I just thought there must be more to life than this.”

Then 23, Harvey had been involuntarily committed to the Massachusetts Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center when a judge decided his drug use made him a risk to himself and others. It was his fifth commitment, he said.

Even sitting in a cell, Harvey recalled being skeptical of his counselor’s suggestion of sober housing. But after arrests, suicide attempts, a college expulsion and years of using and selling everything from pot to oxycodone, he was left with few options.

“Finally, after everyone else in my life told me that they wouldn’t take me back and that I’d be forced to live on the streets, I decided I’d go to this sober house in Portland, Maine,” he said.

In August 2015, he went to Skip Murphy’s.

For years after it opened in 2009, many saw the home as a model of sober living. But by the time Harvey arrived there, things had changed.

Named for its owner’s late grandfather, Skip Murphy’s began in a clapboard duplex on Deering Avenue. There, men dedicated to recovery paid $750 a month to live under a regimen of curfews, drug tests, recovery meetings and a 12-step program.

But as the home expanded to other locations, adding programming and raising prices — up to $2,500 per month in some cases — it ran into trouble. The owner relapsed and began selling things from the homes, including the van used to take residents to buy groceries and attend Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, according to public records and two former employees and residents with direct knowledge of the situation.

In 2016, he was arrested on drug charges in New Hampshire. The owner, who could not be reached for comment, eventually pleaded guilty to another misdemeanor drug possession in Maine, and Skip Murphy’s ultimately closed.

Men who lived at the house in its earlier days and worked there toward the end credit the owner with helping them to sobriety. But they also acknowledged his behavior became a problem.

Harvey said he had negative experiences during his five months there but wasn’t comfortable discussing the details publicly. “I’ll never know if I succeeded because of that or if I succeeded despite that,” he said.

After leaving Skip Murphy’s, Harvey thrived, getting a full-time job and an apartment, and later enrolling in a master’s degree program at the University of Southern Maine. By late 2016, he was looking to open his own sober home, and he wanted to learn from his experiences at Skip Murphy’s.

“I went through a process that I realized could be improved on,” he said. “I realized that just because my process was a mess doesn’t mean that this couldn’t be a public health intervention.”

Harvey decided to get involved with a then newly formed group, the Maine Association for Recovery Residences.

“You see this in every industry: There’s an association of social workers, an association of construction workers,” he said. “Why shouldn’t there be an association of sober house operators who are committed to doing more than the law requires of them? Because the law doesn’t really require anything of them.”

‘It’s buyer beware’

When Dr. Ron Springel went to inspect the yellow house in Portland this spring, he was doing it for MARR.

The nonprofit was formed in 2016 by a small group of Portland sober home owners who’d watched abuses crop up at homes in other states and wanted to ensure the same things didn’t happen here.

“I was reading about the atrocities in Florida,” Sarah Coupe, MARR’s president and the founder of the Grace House for Women, said of the moment she realized Maine homes needed oversight.

It’s a world that Springel knows well. Decades before the physician inspected sober homes, he lived in one.

In 1984, the young doctor landed in a house in rural Washington after he began to recognize his own behavior in the alcoholic patients he was treating. Thirty years later, after raising a family and having a successful career, Springel had back surgery and ended up back in sober living, this time in Portland.

“The prescriptions just sort of got away from me,” he said.

In the time between leaving the Washington recovery home and arriving at the one in Maine, Springel has seen the sober-living industry develop, change and then swiftly expand with the onset of the opioid crisis.

Maine is now one of 26 states with an affiliate of the National Alliance of Recovery Residences. The national group maintains standards that organizations like MARR use to inspect and accredit sober homes in an effort to ensure safe and ethical practices.

“Forever and ever and ever, the recovery housing field has really been treated as an orphan — not really part of medicine, not really part of housing,” said NARR president Dave Sheridan, who has long worked in sober living in California. “That’s how the whole industry grew for years.”

In this largely untamed frontier, there are few signs people can use to tell good homes from bad ones. And what people find when they arrive at a sober home in Maine varies widely.

A few houses are associated with detoxification or treatment centers, and a few have professional staff. But most are opened and run by people who found their way to recovery and want to help others down that path.

Monthly rent ranges from $400 to well into the thousands. A few homes run by religious groups are free. And houses at all price levels offer scholarships and discounts for those in need. Some provide single rooms, but many like the accountability of roommates.

Some sober homes are rundown, and others are lavish. One advertises a climbing wall, trips abroad, a batting cage and a spa with “float pods.”

Some provide little more than a bed. Others have carefully structured programs and offer help finding work and health care, managing finances, and getting to recovery meetings and support groups.

No sober home identified by the BDN allowed men and women to live together, and there are far fewer homes for women than for men.

At least one home is outfitted with sprinklers, but most seem to have the fire safety equipment required of a family residence.

“The quality of the programs has varied substantially from house to house,” said Bob Fowler, executive director of Milestone Recovery, which runs one of Maine’s two dedicated detox centers and plans to open a recovery residence. “They’ve become a tremendously important component in the system of care for people seeking recovery, and the next evolution is to find some opportunity for consistency and quality management of those programs.”

The only quality standard for Maine sober homes, MARR accreditation, is entirely voluntary, and some house operators shrug at its legitimacy.

“You have two or three people on the board who own sober houses, and they’re certifying their own homes,” said Ben Skillings, who runs several low-cost recovery homes around Portland and has helped others open residences. “It doesn’t pass my smell test.”

So far, the group has accredited 18 of the state’s 70-plus recovery homes.

“For now, it’s buyer beware,” Springel said.