If a drug rehabilitation programme was set up for every drug user and alcoholic on the Island, 90 percent of it would be empty.

That was the assertion by US drug rehabilitation expert Mr. Logan Lewis at one of a series of seminars on the subject at Bermuda College this week.

Addicts, he said, rarely sought treatment on their own. Instead it was up to family, the community and the courts to force them into rehabilitation.

"Treatment is about change,'' Mr. Lewis said. "And human beings hate change.

The reason it is so difficult for drug users to go into treatment is because the consequences of their behaviour disappear when they get high. So when you talk about treatment, they think you are out of your mind.'' Drugs -- why do people get into them and how do they get out -- was the underlying theme at the meetings, sponsored by the National Drug Commission, The Bank of Bermuda and Bacardi International in conjunction with Action -- a group of religious and lay groups.

More than 40 people including a number of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts attended one forum. Even though the session started almost an hour late and the programme turned out to be heavily laced with gospel songs, religious testimony and anti-drugs skits by a Christian youth group, when three overseas experts on drug rehabilitation finally spoke, the audience listened with rapt attention.

Speakers, Mr. Lewis, Dr. Michael Smith and the Rev. Jim Daniels, two of them one-time drug addicts themselves, appeared to strike a chord with the audience which responded readily with suggestions and murmurs of agreement.

"Addiction means your whole life centres around drugs -- from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep,'' said Mr. Lewis, president of Apple Inc -- a 12-month residential drug rehabilitation programme in Long Island, New York and once an addict himself. "People use drugs because they do good things for them not because something terrible has happened in their lives.'' Drug use, he said, came from exposure. Low self-esteem and other behavioural problems came with the drugs.

But he disagreed with the startling statistic that 6,000 people in Bermuda were either addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Not all of them were addicted he claimed. Some were experimenting, others used drugs occasionally. Those people did not need help, he said.

And of those who were addicted, not all wanted treatment.

"If you set up a programme here for 6,000, 90 percent of it would be empty,'' he claimed.

His answer to kicking the habit? A long-term residential home where addicts spend a year before moving out on the condition they have a place to stay, a job, transport and $1,500 in savings. The agency follows them up for a year and keeps tabs on them for the next three. The success rate, Mr. Lewis claims is in the region of 85 percent.

Mr. Lewis says he provides a "therapeutic community'' where the recovering addict relearns a set of values from a community of helpers and other recovering addicts who act as role models and behaviour modifiers.

"The whole community is hip to what you've been doing,'' Mr. Lewis said.

"The whole community sets the standard for behaviour. They're not going to believe your excuses because they've already told them themselves.'' "In many cases it is not rehabilitation. Many of these kids never learnt any values in the first place. We have to set standards right from the very beginning.'' After 30 days the body is physically clean of the drug, he said. From that point on, the problem was dealing with the painful emotional problems that drugs were meant to mask in the first place.

Nine times out of ten, he said, a girl who started taking drugs aged 12, had suffered some form of physical or sexual abuse.