His name is Joe and he is a drug addict -- a recovering drug addict, but, though just 18, a drug addict just the same.

To stay clean, which he has been for nearly 10 months now, he will attend a 12-step meeting like Narcotics Anonymous every day for the rest of his life. That old saw about taking life one day at a time has real meaning for him.

Joe's odyssey to sobriety has been long, twisting and fitful. A user of "everything," but mostly prescription drugs, since age 14, he entered one-on-one therapy when he was 16 and living at home in Pine.

"That didn't help," he said.

Neither did stints in Shuman Juvenile Detention Center (he got caught stealing money from school to buy drugs), a West Deer rehabilitation center called Ridgeview, and a private organization known as The Academy. He didn't do well during another brief time at home, either, flunking a urine test.

"I told my [probation officer] I had to go to rehab ..." Joe recalled. "I tried heroin like a week before. I know I would have [done that again]."

He entered Gateway Rehab's YES Program in Aliquippa and stayed four months. That move turned out to be the real beginning of a journey that will have no end.

"It was the first time I took it serious," Joe said. "I was 17. I turned 18 in there. And then I came here."

"Here" is Liberty Station, the state's first and only halfway house for male teenage drug and/or alcohol abusers. Located south of Pittsburgh in South Fayette, it opened Nov. 15 with accommodations for 24.

Joe stayed three months and one week, graduating April 23 to outpatient status then heading back home to Pine. He continued five-days-a-week therapy, which after a few weeks was reduced to three days, and then on June 9 he was discharged officially as an outpatient.

He proudly wears on his key chain two decorative disks: A white one marking his first full day of sobriety and a yellow one celebrating nine months clean.

Why did rehab finally work for Joe?

"I guess I just had a desire to stop using," he said. "I'd been away from home for a year. That [stinks]. I was sick of being away from home, and the internal consequences. I was away from my family and hurting people."

One does not like living in rehab centers and halfway houses, but a successful inpatient appreciates them. Joe says Liberty was better than the other places he tried.

"They teach you learning skills here, their application," he said. "If I hadn't come here it would have been big trouble.

"We go to work [Joe worked in a fast-food restaurant], and we go to 12-step meetings." After finishing his high school requirements, Joe also took a psychology course at Community College of Allegheny County. He was starting a sociology course in early June, and he said he was thinking about entering social work as a career. But while he's in school he's looking for "something easy like a gas station attendant, Giant Eagle bagger, landscaping or maybe a telemarketer."

The curriculum at Liberty Station includes small therapy groups, relapse therapy groups, community groups, specialty groups that cover such subjects as health and anger, spiritual groups and family groups twice a week.

And there are other lessons, for Liberty Station has no housekeepers, no cooks. When personnel talk about teaching life skills, they mean subjects even more basic than the high school courses provided residents online by the South Fayette School District.

"We tell them this is your house and you have to take care of it," said Jill S. Perry, director of Gateway's extended care division. The young men residents were cleaning during a recent tour.

"One of the reasons we opened Liberty Station was that younger patients haven't done as well in adult halfway houses," Ms. Perry added. "We could develop a program for young people who aren't ready for adult [facilities] but have a heavy-duty disease that needs to be addressed. ...

"We saw it as a need. We thought it was a necessary level of treatment."

Joe was the second "graduate" of Liberty Center. There have been two more since. That's without the halfway house ever reaching full capacity. "Eleven is our biggest population so far," Ms. Perry said. "Probably 14 have been here."

Does it work?

"For nine months it has," Ms. Perry said. "It certainly can work."